Do you remember Sam Insol, the billionaire utility tycoon from Chicago?

Do you remember how his empire collapsed and how he lost two or three billion dollars?

How the newspapers at the time called it the biggest business failure in the history of the world.

You may remember the battle that the United States government had to extradite Insol from Greece.

But chances are you don't remember that Insol had been in the electric business as long as there had been an electric business.

That he had started as Thomas Edison's private secretary in 1881.

That he, more than any other man, was responsible for

founding the business of centralized electric supply, that he organized the Edison General Electric Company now known as GE and that he worked out a model of nationwide product distribution that virtually all other American industry copied that he practiced and

practiced and popularized mass production and selling at the lowest

possible cost long before these ideas were attributed to Henry Ford.

That he was the first to successfully apply on a large scale

the concepts of the load and diversity factors

on which all utility rates are based today. that he brought into effect the natural monopoly

principle of utility companies, that he helped create the open-end mortgage that's used in

financing expansion of many businesses outside of the electric industry today, that he was the father of effective government regulation of public utilities and the creator of rural electrification, that he pioneered successful welfare programs years before most of business, labor, or government took any significant steps in that direction.

That he helped develop the idea and techniques of modern public relations and he was the crucial link between

PT Barnum and Madison Avenue and that he devised methods of marketing

securities that made possible gigantic modern corporations. Next to Thomas Edison, Sam Insul, is the name that you should remember as the most important

and perhaps the most notorious person in the electricity business.

That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk about today. in the

That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk about today which is InSull the rise and fall of a billionaire utility tycoon and it was written by Forrest McDonald. This is a very old book. It was first published in 1962. And what the book

lays out is that Insol was not just a company builder, but he was actually an industry builder. So you can think of what Rockefeller was to oil,

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