Robert M. Solow - 'We'd better watch out' New York Times Book Review, 12 July 1987
Robert Gordon - The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Oxford: Princeton University Press) 2016 p546-7
Paul A. David - The Computer and the dynamo: An historical perspective American Economic Review, May 1990
Paul A. David and Mark Thomas - The economic future in historical perspective OUP/British Academy, February 2006
Erik Brynjolfsoon and Lorin M. Hitt - Beyond Computation: Information technology, organizational transformation and business performance Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000
That's funny. I need to change regularly the audio connection from the computer to the stereo. It always ends making an annoying noise. I guess I could buy the parts and a soldering iron and making a decent one myself...
That book has Edison's business plan numbers for the first power station, Pearl St. in NYC. Overoptimistic payback calculations and all. The margins were quite high. Gas lighting was expensive and electric light was much cheaper to provide, so Edison could and did mark it up a lot. Electric lighting was very profitable, which sped deployment. Initial sales were slow, though. The bottleneck was marketing, not the technology.
[1] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674423640
Diesel-electric locomotives mostly used DC motors in the 20th century. 3-phase AC synchronous motors with elaborate semiconductor control systems are now used in most new locomotives, but that's only in the last 20 years.[2] There are still thousands of DC-motor locomotives running on US rails.
High-speed elevators were DC for most of the 20th century.
Speed control of DC motors was, for a long time, easier than speed control for AC motors. The reverse is now true, because power semiconductors are so good.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=-thQAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA308 [2] http://www.republiclocomotive.com/ac-traction-vs-dc-traction...
Early motors had serious limitations. DC motors wouldn't maintain constant speed as the load varied, had major brush wear problems, and tended to require frequent brush adjustment. Sprague, and the unknown person who invented carbon brushes, fixed that. AC motors wouldn't start under load. Tesla, Scott, and Steinmetz fixed that. Insulating materials were not very good. They were either flammable and subject to aging (varnished cambric, wood, paper) or not oil-tolerant and subject to aging (natural rubber). This limited the power density to less than 10% of what ordinary modern motors achieve.
The materials problem was particularly difficult. We're used to having quite good materials available for almost all purposes - insulators which can handle high temperatures and aren't brittle, wire that isn't brittle, low-cost ball bearings that run for years without oiling, all with consistent, repeatable properties from batch to batch. That was not the case up to WWII at all.
They did have asbestos, though. General Electric Deltabeston Wire. [1] "Will not age or crack." This was a high-end product around 1920.
[1] http://www.ebay.com/itm/1936-GENERAL-ELECTRIC-DELTABESTON-MA...