The 10 Most Important People in American Power History

Insull arrived in America in 1881 as Thomas Edison's personal secretary. By 1892 he was running Chicago Edison, a company that was losing money. On a Christmas trip to Brighton, England in 1894 he noticed shop lights burning all night and learned the local utility billed on demand, not flat rates. By 1897 he was offering Chicagoans two-tier pricing, and bills dropped sharply.

His real insight was load factor: big central stations only pay off if they run all day, so he chased large industrial customers and electric railways to fill the curve. He merged his companies into Commonwealth Edison in 1907 and argued for state regulation in exchange for exclusive franchises. That deal, the regulated monopoly, is still how most of America's utilities work.

Then it fell apart. His holding companies controlled about $500 million of assets on roughly $27 million of equity, and the Depression wiped out some 600,000 shareholders. He fled to France and Greece, was extradited in 1934, and was acquitted on all counts. In 1938 he collapsed in the Concorde metro station in Paris with 30 francs on him. His collapse helped produce the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935.

The son of a Greek immigrant who ran a shoeshine shop in Galveston, Mitchell graduated top of his class in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M in 1940. His company, Mitchell Energy & Development, grew into a Fortune 500 firm and took part in roughly 10,000 wells, including more than 1,000 wildcats.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, while most of the industry thought he was wasting money, his team kept experimenting with hydraulic fracturing in the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth until they found a technique that made the gas economic. The rest of the industry copied it, paired it with horizontal drilling, and the US shale boom followed. Mitchell Energy was later acquired by Devon Energy.

He also built The Woodlands, the master-planned community north of Houston, and gave away hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it to sustainability science.

Almost nobody outside the industry knows his name, yet every power trader in PJM or ERCOT works inside his framework. At MIT's Energy Laboratory in the early 1980s, Schweppe studied how electricity could be priced hour by hour to reflect its true cost, including a 1982 spot pricing study for Southern California Edison and PG&E.

His most radical idea was about transmission: instead of trying to price wires directly, calculate the price of energy at every node on the grid. The difference between two nodes is the price of moving power between them. That is locational marginal pricing.

He and his co-authors Michael Caramanis, Richard Tabors, and Roger Bohn laid out the full framework in Spot Pricing of Electricity (Kluwer, 1988). Within a decade regulators were debating locational pricing, and today nodal markets run across most of the US.

Rickover came to the US as a six-year-old fleeing pogroms in Russian-occupied Poland and grew up in Chicago. After the war he pushed, against much of the Navy, for nuclear-powered submarines. The result was USS Nautilus, commissioned in 1954.

He then oversaw the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the world's first commercial pressurized water reactor, which began delivering power in 1957. The pressurized water reactor design he championed became the dominant reactor type in the US commercial fleet.

Famously difficult and obsessed with quality, he served 63 years on active duty, the longest of any US military officer, and personally interviewed thousands of nuclear officers. The Navy's reactor program under his standards has never had a reactor accident.

A mechanical engineer and disciple of Frederick Taylor's scientific management, Cooke spent the 1920s arguing that private utilities were ignoring the countryside. In the mid-1930s only about one in ten American farms had electricity.

Franklin Roosevelt made him the first administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration, which he ran from May 1935 to March 1937. The REA financed distribution lines in areas investor-owned utilities would not serve, and farmers organized member-owned electric cooperatives to borrow the money and build them.

Those co-ops still exist. Texas is home to Pedernales Electric Cooperative, the largest electric co-op in the country, founded in the late 1930s with the help of a young Lyndon Johnson.

Born in Split on the Dalmatian coast, Lucas trained as an engineer, served in the Austrian navy, and settled in the US, where he became an expert on salt domes. Local believer Pattillo Higgins had long insisted there was oil under a low hill near Beaumont called Spindletop. Lucas took the bet.

On January 10, 1901, the well blew in, spraying oil more than a hundred feet into the air for days before it could be capped. Nothing like it had been seen before. Spindletop set off the Texas oil rush and helped give birth to companies that became Gulf Oil and Texaco.

A young utility lawyer from Wisconsin's regulatory commission, Lilienthal was appointed one of the three founding directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. He fought the private utilities in court and in public, and later chaired the TVA, turning it into a symbol of what government-built power could do for a poor region.

In 1946 President Truman named him the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, putting him in charge of the nation's nuclear program as it moved from weapons toward civilian power.

Steinmetz fled Germany in 1889 after his socialist writing drew police attention, arrived in New York nearly penniless, and ended up as General Electric's most famous engineer. Small, with a curved spine, and rarely without a cigar, he became one of the best-known scientists in America.

His big contribution was mathematical: he showed engineers how to use complex numbers to analyze alternating current circuits, turning AC design from guesswork into something they could calculate. He also worked out the laws of magnetic losses in transformers and, late in life, built a machine that generated artificial lightning to study how it hit power lines.

Lay created Enron in 1985 from the merger of Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. As gas and then power markets deregulated, Enron reinvented itself as a trading house, making markets in natural gas and electricity and launching the EnronOnline trading platform in 1999. For a few years it was the model every utility executive was told to copy.

It was also built on aggressive accounting and hidden debt. Enron went bankrupt in December 2001, at the time the largest bankruptcy in US history. Lay was convicted of fraud in May 2006 and died that July before sentencing, which led a court to vacate his conviction.

A former railroad conductor with no drilling experience, Drake was hired by investors in 1857 to find oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania. Locals mocked the project as "Drake's Folly." His key trick was driving iron pipe down through the loose ground to stop the hole collapsing.

In August 1859 the well struck oil at about 69 feet, the first commercial oil well in the United States. Drake never patented his method, lost his money in speculation, and spent his later years in poverty until Pennsylvania voted him a small pension.