Andrew Carnegie, the undisputed "man of steel," and Henry Clay Frick, the king of coke, forge one of the most powerful partnerships in our nation's history. Together they become the reigning champions of a multi-million dollar steel industry during America's Gilded Age. From their headquarters in Pittsburgh, Carnegie and Frick outwit their adversaries, steam roll the competition, and rule their enormous workforce with an iron fist. The lawless, cutthroat labor environment of the late 1800s stirs up unrest with the country's strongest industrial trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, culminating in a seminal showdown along the banks of the Monongahela River that causes the unwinding of Frick and Carnegie's partnership and defines America's labor movement for generations.
John D. Rockefeller, king of Standard Oil, and Thomas A. Scott, the visionary behind the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, work with and against each other to control America's young oil industry. Refiners need the railroads and the railroads need the refiners, but neither one trusts the other. They strike secret deals, fix prices, purchase supply lines, and eliminate the competition. When one encroaches on the other's turf, it sparks one of the bloodiest battles in American labor history. After the dust settles, one man reigns supreme and corporate America will never be the same.
In the emerging industry of electricity there is no bigger prize than powering the world. The two leading minds of their time, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, go to battle over how power should be transmitted across the globe. By the very nature of their inventions—Edison's long lasting bulb and Tesla's alternating current motor—each stakes out an opposite position on electric current. What begins as a working relationship between the two men turns into a million-dollar "War of the Currents" in which the grand prize is the right to power the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Before the winning bid is read, there will be a broken promise, a powerful alliance, and a bizarre public relations campaign with deadly consequences.
At the end of the Civil War, Cornelius Vanderbilt has built a formidable railroad empire centered in New York City but needs one more line to complete his portfolio: the Erie Railroad. Despite being one of the biggest companies in America, the Erie has a reputation of being unstable thanks in large part to its treasurer Daniel Drew, who shamelessly manipulated the company stock to line his pockets. This is not the first time these two titans have fought, but Drew has invariably lost out to Vanderbilt's huge wealth and friends in high places. This time, Drew has a secret weapon in two of the smartest operators on Wall Street. They were recently elected onto the Erie's board of directors and are hatching a cunning plan to stop Vanderbilt from his hostile takeover of the company and make a killing in the process.
In the late 1890s when William Randolph Hearst challenges the king of newspaper publishing Joseph Pulitzer in a high stakes circulation war they change publishing forever stopping at nothing to gain the upper hand.
The battle for copper pits two of Montana's larger-than-life titans, Marcus Daley and William Clark, against each other in a clash over the resource that will power America's new age of electricity. In their quest to mine "the richest hill on earth," a bitter rivalry grows, driven by greed, riddled with scandal, and capped off by corruption so great that it fuels the passage of an amendment to the United State Constitution. Daley and Clark are responsible for developing a billion dollar industry, expanding railroads, and wiring a modern world.
