Old Sparky

by Anthony Galvin

  The electric chair was now a reality. Everyone waited in anticipation of its first victim. But the details still had to be worked out. The chief detail was how the power would be delivered to the chair. Would the prison service use Edison’s direct current, or the newer alternating current? It was a question that would embroil the nascent electric chair in a commercial war that had nothing to do with the administration of justice.

  4

  THE WAR OF THE CURRENTS

  Two things drive America: power and money. Not power in the political sense—that follows the money. But power in an industrial sense. An industrial nation needs power to drive the wheels of commerce, and America relies on oil. This need drives foreign policy, tax regimes, and even environmental policy. But oil is not the only source of power. America has been dependent on electricity for nearly one and a half centuries.

  Electricity has been vaguely known about for a millennium but only since 1600 has it been studied in any systematic way. Benjamin Franklin was one of the most important of the early scientists who tried to understand what the force was. Famously, he flew a dampened kite in 1752 with a key hanging from it and drew sparks from the key during a lightning storm, proving that lightning was electricity.

  In 1800 the voltaic pile was created by Alessandro Volta in 1800. This was a primitive battery consisting of layers of zinc and copper in acid, and it provided a steady current that researchers could study. The understanding of electricity swiftly grew. In 1821 Michael Faraday, an English scientist, invented the first electric motor. Ten years later he invented a machine that would turn rotary motion into electricity—the world’s first electric generator. If you spun the generator, power would come out. How much power depended on the speed at which you spun it, the strengths of the magnets used, the amount of copper in the coil, and other factors. It was a major advance, but it would be another forty years before the primitive dynamo was refined to such an extent as to be commercially viable.

  By 1860, with the work of physicist James Clerk Maxwell, electricity was understood enough to be exploited. Inventors and electrical engineers such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Ernst Werner von Siemens, Lord Kelvin, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse began to explore ways of using electricity to power a range of inventions that would change the world. Electricity was no longer a scientific curiosity. It was swiftly becoming an essential tool for modern life. As steam (and thus coal) had been the driving force for the first industrial revolution from the middle of the eighteenth century, now electricity became the driving force for the second industrial revolution.

  Faraday’s dynamo was now coming into its own. If power could be provided to turn a generator, electricity could be produced. The power came from a number of sources. Oil or coal could be burned to turn a steam engine which would drive the generator, or a river could be dammed and the falling water used to turn a wheel attached to a generator. Two types of power were produced—direct current and alternating current.

  To understand the difference is crucial to understanding the War of Currents that shaped the history of the electric chair. At its most basic, electric current is the flow of electrically charged subatomic particles (electrons) along a wire. Let’s take the example of a light bulb, as perfected by Thomas Edison. The electrons, or electric current, flow into a bulb. The wire narrows to a thin filament of tungsten which the electricity flows through. But as it flows, it heats the filament until it glows white-hot, and this produces the light that illuminates our homes. The electricity can flow from one side of the filament to the other and out again, or it can move over and back across the filament. Imagine the filament is a tube containing a handful of marbles. In the first case, the marbles enter from one side, flow through the tube, and flow out the other side. In the second case, the marbles shake over and back across the filament, but never leave it. The first case is direct current or DC; the second is alternating current or AC. In direct current, the electricity moves from the generator, through the system of wires and appliances, and back to the generator, like water going from a reservoir through the pipes and out the other end at the faucet. In alternating current, the generator causes the electrons in the wire to vibrate over and back, but no electrons travel along the complete circuit of wires to arrive back at their starting point.

  Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. As with driving on the left- or the right-hand side of the road, it was fairly much a matter of choice at the start. Like Betamax and VHS in the early days of videotape the market would eventually decide which would prevail. Each side had its champions. The favorite of Thomas Edison was DC, while George Westinghouse preferred AC. The battle between both men for how America would have its electricity delivered is now known as The War of the Currents. It shaped so much of the modern world, including how we executed people, for more than a century.

  Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. After three months of traditional schooling he was homeschooled by his mother and developed a love for natural philosophy (what we now call science). When he was old enough, he began earning a living selling snacks on trains that ran from Port Huron into Detroit, but he also maintained a small laboratory in the train where he conducted experiments and continued his education. From the start he had an entrepreneurial streak, setting up his own newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald, for the trains. He was a talented young businessman with a passion for science.

  Eventually he set up fourteen companies, including General Electric, which is still one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. He moved to New Jersey in his early twenties and his career really took off. He set up a research facility at Menlo Park, a part of Raritan Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey (near Newark). His first invention was an improved telegraphic device, but when he patented the phonograph in 1877 he became a nationally known innovator. It allowed, for the first time, the human voice to be recorded and became the basis of today’s multibillion dollar music industry. He became widely known as the Wizard of Menlo Park.

  At the research facility he had a large number of talented staff working for him. At one point his roster of employees included Nikola Tesla, the only man to rival him as the most prolific inventor and shaper of the modern world. The research facility took up two full blocks and was stocked with just about every device and material known to man, so that Edison would have whatever he needed instantly on hand.

  Other notable inventions flowing from the wizard’s lair included the motion picture camera and the light bulb. Contrary to popular myth, Edison did not actually invent the bulb, but he designed the first practical, mass-produced bulb that would not blow every second time it was used. In the case of the light bulb, he perfected the ideas of others. By the end of his career, he held 1,093 patents for new inventions. It would not be unfair to say he helped shape the future of the world. His innovations led to electric light and power, sound recording, motion pictures, and telecommunications. He produced a machine for counting votes, a battery for an electric car, new telegraph transmitters—the list goes on.

  Edison founded the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York on December 17, 1880. He began by installing a central generating station on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan. The “Jumbo” dynamos (the largest ever built and named after a popular circus elephant) each weighed twenty-seven tons and had an output of 100 kilowatts, enough to power more than 1,100 lights. There were six dynamos in all, powered by large steam engines. In the summer of 1881, Edison began laying underground cables to deliver the power.

  On September 4, 1882, the switch was thrown and the power began to flow through the first power grid in the world. The new electric light could compete price-wise with gas light and was brighter. Within a month he had fifty-nine customers, and within a year, five hundred. This was the business of the future. But there were rival developers. The Brush Electric Light Company installed carbon arc lights along Broadway. The Brooklyn Br
idge was lit by seventy arc lamps from the United States Illuminating Company. In 1887 H. H. Westinghouse (a younger brother of George) established the Safety Electric Light and Power Company to exploit the new alternating current in New York. Other companies were set up to power neighboring boroughs. By 1900 there were more than thirty companies generating and distributing power in New York alone.

  And Edison had problems aside from his rivals; as a self-educated man, he had his blind spots. One was that his knowledge of science was extensive but patchy. He knew some areas backwards, but to the end of his life it is doubtful whether he ever fully understood AC. Many of his competitors did. One of those was George Westinghouse.

  As an inventor, only the enigmatic and eccentric East European Nikola Tesla could rival Edison. But as a businessman, Westinghouse was the real competition.

  George Westinghouse was born on October 6, 1848, in Central Bridge, New York. At the age of fifteen he enlisted during the Civil War. After the war he went to college but dropped out quickly. At nineteen he patented his first invention, the rotary steam engine. This technology eventually led to the internal combustion engine, the basis of the automobile industry. He followed up with a number of transport inventions. The most important was a train-braking system capable of stopping all the carriages simultaneously. It is still used to this day.

  By 1870 Westinghouse was investing in gas distribution and telephone lines, which led logically to an interest in the new technology of electricity. He began by studying Edison’s distribution system and decided that it was fine on a small scale but would prove difficult to scale up. Edison was using DC, at a low voltage. There were serious power losses during the transmission of the current. But if AC was used, the voltage could be stepped up with a transformer. This high voltage current could be transmitted over high-tension wires, then stepped down at the other end so that it could be used domestically. Far less power would be lost during transmission.

  In 1885 Westinghouse imported a number of transformers from Europe, along with a Siemens AC generator, and set up his own network in Pittsburgh. He refined the system a year later in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He set up a hydroelectric generator that produced 500 volts. A transformer stepped this up to 3,000 volts for distribution, and then a transformer at the other end dropped it down to 100 volts so that householders could power their lights. It was a far more efficient system than the direct current grid of Edison and allowed power to be delivered over far greater distances. The Current War was on in earnest.

  Initially the advantage seemed to be with Edison. Not only was he an American institution, his DC had some advantages. It could be used in conjunction with batteries, which meant there was a backup in case of power outages (not possible with alternating current). It worked well with his new light bulb (the chief electrical device of the day) and it could power an electric motor. At that stage, an AC motor had not been invented.

  More importantly, Edison had invented a meter which could measure how much current had been used, essential for billing purposes. He held the patents, so he was paid every time a rival company used his technology. He was going to make money not just off his own work, but off everyone else’s. He was not prepared to lose that.

  Alternating current technology was being steadily developed in Europe though, and slowly made inroads in America. Westinghouse was the first advocate of the new system and by 1888 he had backed Nikola Tesla who invented an engine that could work off the newer current. He then hired Tesla for a year. Tesla had worked previously with Edison but walked out after a short period when the Wizard of Menlo Park had refused to pay him a bonus agreed upon for vast improvements he had made in Edison’s dynamos. The presence of an inventor every bit as clever and visionary as Edison—but a lot better versed in AC—was a decisive factor in the trade war.

  Edison had banked on a large number of medium-sized generators, delivering power at a steady voltage of a little over 100 V through a series of heavy copper wires. The wires were expensive, but the low voltage meant that contact with an exposed wire was rarely fatal. Safety was a big consideration for Edison. One huge drawback, though, was that the power station could not be more than a mile from the end user or the power would not reach the whole way. That meant every small town needed its own generator, and every city would need several of them. A city like New York might need several hundred power stations.

  Westinghouse’s system, AC at high voltage, would allow power to be transmitted over far longer distances, and the higher the voltage, the longer the wires could stretch. Today voltages of up to 765,000 are common. With AC one could use fewer but bigger power stations. Because Westinghouse used transformers to drop the voltage back down, he could control what the customer got. Households could get 100 volts for their bulbs. Heavy industry could get 500 volts for their motors. For Edison to offer this service with DC, he needed to run a separate wire for each voltage level needed, an expensive and cumbersome undertaking. Although he liked to lay wires underground, Edison was often forced to string his heavy wires (heavier by far than Westinghouse’s) on poles. During the Great Blizzard of 1888 several New Yorkers met their deaths when the wires came down under the weight of snow and electrocuted them.

  Alternating current was even more dangerous. And this was the key to Edison’s battle strategy.

  His first step was a massive publicity campaign highlighting the dangers of alternating current. He had two targets—the general public and politicians. He urged several states to limit the voltage in transmission wires to 800 volts, which would have severely hampered the AC entrepreneurs. And he distributed thousands of pamphlets, purportedly from safety organizations, to the public outlining the dangers of high voltage AC. It was a smear campaign that would have done justice to the dirtiest political dogfight of the last century.

  One of Edison’s favorite ploys was to stage a press conference at which he would subject animals to electric shock in front of the assembled reporters. His team of technicians would scour the neighborhood for stray cats and dogs and would bring one of the unfortunate animals to the event. The animal would be placed upon a metal plate or in a shallow basin of water (a good conductor), and his team would begin by administering an electric shock.

  The first shock would be DC and the animal would squeal, jump, and in other ways make plain its discomfort. Once the poor animal was calmed down, a second shock was administered, this one at a higher voltage of DC. Again the animal would suffer but survive the experience. Finally, the animal was secured in place, and the alternating current was sent coursing through its body. There were often sparks and occasionally the smell of burnt flesh. The animal would drop dead, proving conclusively that DC was dangerous but survivable while AC was a proven killer.

  Edison even tried to popularize the phrase “westinghoused” for being electrocuted. But as one reporter pointed out after watching the execution of an animal in the name of commerce, the poor beast was so weakened by the two shocks of DC that he was only hanging on to life by the merest thread. A loud noise would have been sufficient to have finished him off at that point.

  Cats and dogs were the most common victims of “westinghousing,” and Edison’s employees began going to animal shelters; but the ASPCA objected, so Edison’s employees picked up strays from the streets. They even put a donkey and cow to death during these grisly demonstrations. Their message was clear: alternating current kills.

  The first of these demonstrations was held in 1888 in New York. The circumstances were as follows: the New York legislature passed a bill on June 4, allowing electrocution to be used as a method of execution. The following day, self-taught engineer Harold Brown wrote a letter to the New York Evening Post outlining the dangers of alternating current and accusing George Westinghouse of placing greed ahead of public safety. Brown then teamed up with Edison.

  Brown had been a salesman with the Western Electric Company and the Brush Electric Company, selling devices such as the Electric Pen, one of Edison’s
less successful inventions. It was a primitive duplication system, soon replaced by the typewriter. But Brown had ambitions to move out of sales. His opportunity came with the Current Wars, when his letter to the paper brought him to Edison’s attention. He was taken on board for the campaign of disinformation but was paid in secret so that he could appear to be independent.

  Engraved invitations were sent out to the members of the New York City Board of Electrical Control, leading figures in the new electric light industry, other interested parties, and the press, inviting them to a demonstration in the School of Mines, Columbia College.

  During that demonstration, a large seventy-six-pound dog named Dash was produced. Brown first sent 1,000 volts of DC through the animal, which caused it considerable discomfort but did not kill it. Then he used 300 volts of AC and kept the current flowing until the animal stopped jerking and whimpering and was declared dead. Brown then told the audience that AC was only suitable for “the dog pound, the slaughterhouse, and the state prison.”

  There were a few things that the public did not realize about the electrocution of animals. The first is that the human body can withstand very high voltages if the current is low—Tasers frequently use very high voltages. What kills is not the voltage but the current. And Brown and Edison made sure to use very high current levels for the AC portion of their demonstration. Also, the animal had been weakened by the first shock and so was more likely to succumb to the second.

  Following the lecture, Brown began paying local children twenty-five cents a dog to continue his demonstrations. During one of the executions, Edison employee Arthur Kennelly had been severely shocked himself while holding down a small dog.