Philip Schewe, chief science writer for the American Institute of Physics, says he was writing a book about the forces of nature, but it became too sprawling. "I decided I needed to write a more focused, more practical book," he said. At that point, Schewe was preparing to write about how electricity came to be an applied technology. "The backdrop was to be the massive blackout in the Northeast in November 1965 — then the largest electrical failure in history. That became the topic of my book."