Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

by Michael Daly

  Then, just as everything seemed in place, one of New York’s most prominent and expensive attorneys filed suit on behalf of the indigent Kemmler, contending that death by electricity violated the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The attorney, W. Bourke Cockran, had supposedly been spurred to action after his wife read of the dog experiments.

  As the story went, the wife exclaimed, “Just think how terrible it would be if they would treat our dog like that.” Cockran was purported to have responded, “The law providing for execution by electricity is unconstitutional. I’ll beat it if I can.”

  In truth, Cockran was in the pay of Westinghouse, and considerable pay at that, reportedly as much as $100,000. Both Edison and Brown were witnesses at the ensuing hearing. Brown insisted he had no financial relationship with Edison and no “actual knowledge” of any ill feelings between the illustrious inventor and Westinghouse.

  Edison was called to the stand for what one newspaper headline termed “Testimony of the Wizard.” Edison wore black broadcloth that was said to give him a clerical air. He began by dragging his chair across the room.

  “And put his best ear toward the big lawyer’s mouth,” the New York Times reported.

  Cockran posed his questions at a volume that reporters felt sure could be heard by passersby in the street. He asked Edison about his great rival.

  “I do not dislike Mr. Westinghouse,” Edison said.

  Cockran also asked about Brown. Edison stated that Brown had been a stranger to him when he showed up at the lab one day.

  “Did he come up there and ask you to let him have your laboratory for the purpose of killing dogs?” Cockran asked.

  “He wanted to try some experiments,” Edison replied.

  “Are you in the habit of giving your laboratory to everybody that asks you?”

  “Yes, sometimes I let them experiment there.”

  “Might I entertain the hope that I might be allowed myself to go there?”

  “Yes sir; you can come any time. I will be glad to see you.”

  “Mr. Brown evidently commended himself to your approval during these experiments?”

  “He seemed to be a pretty nice kind of fellow, and it was no trouble to me and I let him do it.”

  “Do you know where he got his dogs from?”

  “No, I think he bought them from somewhere.”

  Edison was apparently unconcerned that somebody might produce the note he wrote to Bergh of the ASPCA seeking to secure dogs.

  “Have you ever given any jobs of any kind to Mr. Brown?” Cockran asked.

  “No, sir.”

  A month later, a reporter from the New York Sun obtained a stack of letters stolen from Brown’s office. The purloined trove revealed a long-standing business relationship between Edison and Brown. Here was no everyday humbug, which was always perpetrated with at least half a wink. But the blame was placed almost entirely on the upstart, not the Wizard.

  Edison was further removed from the scandal by being in Paris, at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, which marked the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. He and his wife, Mina, dined with Gustave Eiffel in the penthouse apartment the French engineer had incorporated into the new tower that bore his name. The composer/songwriter Charles Gounod was also present and played his “Ave Maria” on the grand piano that had been hoisted up to this aerie at what was being called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

  Back down at street level, the great American inventor was hailed as a hero, greeted everywhere with shouts of “Viva Edison!” A Paris newspaper declared “Edison est un roi,” a king befitting the revolution, enthroned not by aristocratic lineage but by his own brilliance. Edison outshone even his countryman Buffalo Bill, who was there with his Wild West Show.

  At a special performance, Buffalo Bill accorded the Edisons the honor of riding in the Deadwood stagecoach during a simulated attack by “wild Indians.” Annie Oakley was there to demonstrate marksmanship that prompted the king of Suriname to offer 100,000 francs to buy her from herself. But it was Edison himself who was the greatest attraction and drew the loudest cheers, seeming to affirm the supremacy of the Wizard’s very real inventions over anything a showman might conjure.

  Even so, Edison shared one quality with great showmen such as Buffalo Bill as well as Forepaugh and Barnum. Edison recognized it in the man whose statue was atop the 144-foot column opposite his hotel in the Place Vendôme. Edison immediately named him when the explorer Henry Stanley asked which historical personage’s voice he would most want to hear on the phonograph, which had become another of his inventions in 1877.

  “Napoleon’s,” Edison said.

  “No, no,” Stanley said. “I should like to hear the voice of our Savior.”

  “Oh! Well,” Edison replied, by his private secretary’s account, fumbling for a moment before exclaiming, “You know—I like a hustler!”

  Many of the hundreds of French inventors who sought out Edison were working on flying machines, and he said he had dabbled in this area but could only say that “gasbags” would not be the solution. He said he had also been working on what he called “television,” theorizing that it might be possible to transmit images through the air.

  “But not over long distances,” he said. “The rotundity of the earth makes it impossible.”

  Before he departed for home, Edison received a telegram from the Cataract Construction Company, a new firm that was seeking to harness the power of Niagara Falls. The resulting electricity would be far more than would be needed for the immediate vicinity, but the city of Buffalo was twenty-four miles away.

  “HAS POWER TRANSMISSION REACHED SUCH A DEVELOPMENT THAT IN YOUR JUDGEMENT SCHEME IS PRACTICABLE?” the Cataract telegram inquired.

  Edison replied, “NO DIFFICULTY TRANSFERRING UNLIMITED POWER. WILL ASSIST.”

  In his effort to get the rest of the world to ignore his continuing inability to transmit direct current economically more than a few blocks, Edison had seemingly come to ignore it himself. He may have actually convinced himself that a current that had difficulty extending beyond an immediate neighborhood could outperform one that was easily capable of traveling many miles. Or perhaps he had simply been unable to admit that the Wizard’s power as expressed by direct current could be so limited. He thought as grandly as the imperial hustler whose figure was perched atop the column outside his Paris hotel.

  “When I was on shipboard coming over, I used to sit on deck by the hour and watch the waves,” he told an interviewer in France. “It made me positively savage to think of all that power going to waste. But we’ll chain it up one of these days along with Niagara Falls and the winds—that will be the electric millennium.”

  Edison’s struggle to become the Napoleon of that millennium had suffered a setback with the scandal over Brown’s papers, but he now saw an opportunity to advance his fortunes with the terrible misfortune of a thirty-two-year-old Western Union lineman. The lineman was named John E. F. Feeks and he had clambered up a telegraph pole at the corner of Chambers Street and Center Street in Manhattan on an October afternoon. Feeks then set to cutting away disused wires on a pole that was supposed to serve only fire and police alarms as well as telegraphs. He chanced to brush against a wire that had apparently come in contact somewhere along its length with a line from an arc light system charged with a high enough voltage of alternating current to be deadly. Feeks shuddered and began to fall, but his throat and face were caught in the wires and he dangled over the street as blue flames shot out of his mouth and nostrils and sparks exploded from the soles of his feet. Blood began dripping down to the pavement, forming a pool as the number of gawkers grew to the thousands. More citizens filled the surrounding windows, craning toward this horrifying but mesmerizing sight just behind City Hall and a block from the newspaper offices of Park Row.


  Fellow linemen fearful of suffering a similar fate needed an eternal half hour to lower Feeks to the sidewalk. The crowd squeezed in for a closer look and had to be driven back by cops, who joined firemen in carrying the body away. A saloonkeeper nailed a tin box bearing the words “Remember the Victim” to the fateful pole and passersby ranging from shopgirls to laborers to businessmen to a prominent judge deposited a total of $1,873.50 for Feeks’s widow and young child. The mayor ordered an immediate shutdown of the arc light system, which had by then largely replaced illuminating gas in the streets. Much of the city was plunged into darkness with no street lighting at all, prompting the New York Times headline: “Like a City in Mourning.”

  There were questions about the city’s dawdling in running the lines underground as had already been mandated by the electrical control board.

  “Wires are not being placed underground with a speed sufficient to insure the safety of the lives of the people of the city,” the mayor declared.

  But however much sympathy the populace felt for Feeks’s grief-stricken family, and however much concern there was regarding the danger of the wires overhead, the ruling public passion was for the lights to go back on. The desire was too strong for there to be a widespread clamoring to outlaw alternating current, as Edison no doubt hoped. He nonetheless sought to incite such a prohibition with an article in the North American Review titled “The Dangers of Electric Lighting.” Edison was no longer seeking to employ a proxy. He was putting the full and mighty authority of the great Wizard to the test as he called for an outright ban of alternating currents.

  “They are as unnecessary as they are dangerous,” he declared.

  Edison described his animal experiments as a necessary effort to prevent tragedies such as befell Feeks.

  “I have taken life—not human life—in the belief and full consciousness that the end justified the means. . . . I have myself seen a large healthy dog killed instantly by the alternating current.”

  Edison said the lineman’s horrific demise now presented a challenge.

  “If the martyrdom of this poor victim results in the application of stringent measures for the protection of life in the future, if the lesson taught is appreciated to the full extent of its fatal meaning, the sacrifice will not have been made in vain.”

  Edison correctly predicted that electricity was presently used “to a very limited extent as compared with its inevitable future use.” But he went on to suggest that this also meant that “the opportunities for repetitions of the accident referred to above will be practically unlimited” unless the “facts” as set forth by his experiments were acted upon. He also said, in opposition to scientific fact, that running the lines underground would only increase the danger.

  “There is no known insulation which will confine these high-tension currents for more than a limited period,” he said, adding, “As the earth is approached the danger is multiplied,” and declaring, “Safety will not be secured by burying these wires.”

  With this supposedly inevitable failure of the insulation, “a single wire carrying a current at high pressure would be a constant menace” where “other wires conducting harmless currents are liable to be rendered as deadly in effect as the former.” Household electrical appliances would “be rendered at any moment dangerous to life.”

  Having predicted a household turned to a house of horrors, he went on to say, “I have no intention, and I am sure none will accuse me, of being an alarmist.” He insisted he was simply saying that “the time has come when those in authority should adopt proper and adequate measures for the protection of life and property.”

  He said “the only remedy” was governmental regulation.

  “There is no plea which will justify the use of high-tension and alternating currents,” he concluded.

  In fact, he said, alternating current could be deadly even at “exceedingly low” voltage. Its commercial appeal was still such that even “the electric-lighting company with which I am connected” had recently purchased the patents for an entire alternating current system despite “my protest against this action.”

  “My personal desire would be to prohibit entirely the use of alternating currents,” he now wrote.

  Edison had incorporated primarily to bankroll his effort to defeat Westinghouse, and for the resulting company to ignore his personal desire regarding such a crucial issue was an indicator of how much control he had lost. It was also a measure of the advantages those investors saw in alternating current, advantages that Westinghouse forcefully delineated in “A Reply to Mr. Edison,” published by the North American Review.

  “Were it a question of prohibiting the use not merely of electricity, but of all other things dangerous to life, we would no longer have fires to warm us or light to enable us to see, and, in fact, would be deprived of most of the necessaries and comforts of existence,” Westinghouse wrote. “As has been the case with the utilization of all other forms of energy, the demand for the most economical methods will ultimately prevail, provided these can be made safe, as they most certainly can, by the exercise of proper precautions.”

  Westinghouse went on to say, “The placing of the wires underground would eliminate many of the causes of accidents from electric currents. . . . Mr. Edison’s statement that the putting of the wires underground will, instead of diminishing, increase the danger to life, is little less than amazing.”

  Westinghouse suggested his opponent in the bitter War of Currents was concerned less with safety than supremacy. He noted that Edison had been preceded in the field of electricity by a number of inventors and quoted the Wizard telling the New York Tribune in 1878, “I have let the other inventors get the start of me in this matter somewhat, because I have not given much attention to electric lights, but I believe I can catch up to them now. . . . I don’t care so much for a fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.”

  Westinghouse did engage in a little humbug of his own, suggesting that the alternating current used in the animal experiments was “not the alternating current of commerce, but was an Edison direct continuous current made alternating . . . incomparably more dangerous than the true alternating current.” Westinghouse was back in the realm of fact when he pointed out that transformers reduced high voltage to low before it reached residences or businesses.

  “There is not on record a solitary instance of a person having been injured or shocked from the consumers’ current of an alternating system,” Westinghouse contended.

  Westinghouse ended by saying that the question of which current was superior was being decided in the marketplace, where alternating current systems were growing at five times the rate of direct current systems.

  EIGHTEEN

  Westinghoused

  Even as Edison sought unsuccessfully to parlay the horrific death of the lineman Feeks into public demand for outlawing alternating current, he had to hope that this same horror did not convince the courts that execution by electrocution constituted cruel and unusual punishment. There was still a chance that Edison could get a sorely needed edge by associating Westinghouse with the new punishment said to be instantaneously deadly.

  Despite Cockran’s contention that if electrocution were anything but instantaneous it would involve “suffering beyond imagining,” and even though the publication of Brown’s letters had made clear that the electric chair was part of an Edison scheme, Judge S. Edwin Day of Cayuga County Court upheld the Electrical Execution Act of 1888. Day did so acknowledging that Brown was still tinkering with the exact particulars and that opinions regarding execution by this means were “speculative and hypothetical, for on no person has the experiment yet been tried.”

  Day suggested in his decision that such questions of law should really be made at the appellate level and the Westinghouse forces did indeed appeal, all the way to the top state court. They lost there and pressed
on to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The victory must have been all the sweeter for Edison because the press had begun excoriating Westinghouse as Cockran’s real client and accusing him of pursuing profit at the expense of due justice. The continued eminence of Edison was such that nobody seemed to consider why Westinghouse had felt compelled to step in on Kemmler’s behalf in the first place. The lies Edison had told at the evidentiary hearing seemed already forgotten. The Wizard’s reputation among the populace remained pristine.

  By 2:00 a.m. on August 6, 1890, more than five hundred people had gathered outside Auburn Prison, squeezing around the gates to peer inside. The window to what was said to be the condemned man’s cell was lit by electricity and glowed steadily as the crowd continued to grow. Figures appeared on the surrounding rooftops and in the trees and on the telegraph poles, everyone gazing as if there were something more to see than the vine-covered walls.

  Just after sunrise, out of view of anybody but prison staff and the official witnesses, Kemmler was led up to the electric chair installed by Brown and an Edison electrician named Edwin Davis, who would become the state’s chief executioner for the next quarter century. Brown had hoped to test the chair with a number of dogs but had been unable to schedule a time.

  One observer later suggested that Kemmler was resolved to “die like a man,” meaning that despite his awareness of what was to come he was calm and obliging, much like the dogs, calves, and horses of Brown’s experiments.

  “Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck,” Kemmler said. “I believe I am going to a good place and I am ready to go. I want only to say that a great deal has been said about me that is untrue.”

  He had suffered a little demonizing of his own.

  “I am bad enough. It is cruel to make me out worse.”

  He was secured to the chair with eleven leather straps and the metal skullcap was fitted over his head. Inside the cap was a wetted sponge of a species known as elephant ear.