by Jill Jonnes
Nor was Brown a mere blowhard. His strident urging of a swift legislative end to high potentials—“No alternating current with a higher electromotive force than 300 volts shall be used”—would indeed put the AC men out of business. He swiftly seized new and strategic ground: The famously dilatory New York City Board of Electrical Control convened days later on Friday, June 8, another warm and lovely late spring day, and Brown himself appeared, a young and rather harmless-looking fellow, his dark hair parted neatly to one side and a tame handlebar mustache highlighting a biggish nose. Yet when Brown spoke he was very much the firebrand, insisting his now notorious letter be read verbatim into the record. His proposed safety rules were to be published in the minutes and marked copies sent for comment to an array of eminent electric companies and electricians, including George Westinghouse. Events had now escalated beyond angry phrasemaking to bellicose and economically threatening efforts to legislate AC out of existence.
Many hours west in Pittsburgh, where the summer heat and humidity concentrated the city’s famous grime and soot into an unhealthful black celestial umbrella, Brown’s main target, George Westinghouse, was biding his time. He put off answering the New York City Board of Electrical Control’s request for comment. Instead, on June 7 he sat in his large office with its lovely Persian rug and wrote a personal note to Thomas Edison in West Orange, in part about rumors of mergers between their two companies. But his main purpose was to propose peace: “I believe there has been a systematic attempt on the part of some people to do a great deal of mischief and create as great a difference as possible between the Edison Company and The Westinghouse Electric Co., when there ought to be an entirely different condition of affairs.
“I have a lively recollection of the pains that you took to show me through your works at Menlo Park when I was in pursuit of a plant for my house, and before you were ready for business, and also of my meeting you once afterwards at Bergman’s factory; and it would be a pleasure to me if you should find it convenient to make me a visit here in Pittsburgh when I will be glad to reciprocate the attention shown me by you.”1 Edison responded in a noncommittal fashion on June 12: “My laboratory work consumes the whole of my time…. Thanking you for your kind invitation to visit you in Pittsburg.”2 And that was all. Not long after, Edison’s sales force began accusing their Westinghouse rivals of lying about AC advantages, a tactic that so infuriated Westinghouse, he briefly considered suing.
His olive branch rebuffed, George Westinghouse was heard from publicly for the first time when the New York City Board of Electrical Control reconvened at Wallack’s Theater on Monday, July 16. Unlike Thomas Edison, who at this point operated quietly behind the scenes, George Westinghouse hid behind no one. Certainly, by mid-July of 1888, he had no further illusions. Thomas Edison and his company were serious about their holy war against AC. The time had come to strike back. So Westinghouse’s letter to the New York City Board of Electrical Control was a skillful, hard-hitting piece of PR. First, he excused his tardy response by pleading the tremendous press of business. In less than two years, his company and its licensee Thomson-Houston had installed 127 AC stations, 98 of which were up and operating already. Of those 98 AC plants, a third had already expanded. The plant in Pittsburgh was the “largest incandescent lighting station in the world.” With so much business, explained Westinghouse, “it has been considered inexpedient, heretofore, to take any notice of, or make any reply to, the criticisms and attacks of some of the opposition electric lighting companies.”
Westinghouse, a corporate titan well seasoned in the most cutthroat of Gilded Age business warfare, declared himself amazed at a “method of attack which has been more unmanly, discreditable and untruthful than any competition which has ever come to my knowledge.” If they wanted to fight a dirty war, Westinghouse could lob his own incendiary devices. Was the issue safety? Well, not one Westinghouse central station had sustained “a single case of fire of any description from the use of our system. Of the 125 central stations of the leading direct current company [Edison] there are numerous cases of fire, in three of which cases the central station itself was entirely destroyed, the most recent being the destruction of the Boston station; while among the almost innumerable fires caused by this system, among the users, may be mentioned the total destruction of a large theater at Philadelphia.”
An octet of pro-AC affidavits had also fluttered into the quiet offices of the electrical control board in the preceding weeks, and these were now duly read aloud at Wallack’s Theater. All followed along the lines of one from Philadelphia, wherein an electrical worker named W. L. Wright described his inconsequent encounter with the supposedly fatal AC current. Working on some wires in a damp basement, read his testimonial, and forgetting that a 1,000-volt current was active in it, “I took hold of the socket while standing on the wet ground, when I received a shock which threw me on my face with my hand underneath me, and still handling the socket…. When I came to my senses I was sitting in the cellar held up by two of the men. In the meantime, an ambulance had been called. I went down to the electric light station and waited there for fifteen or twenty minutes to receive my money; it being pay-day, and then went home.” The company insisted he visit a doctor, who dressed his burned hand. “These burns healed very slowly; but I have not felt in any way any of the after effects from this shock, such as are usually felt from high tension direct current machines…. I feel sure that had I received this kind of shock from a direct current machine of any of the ordinary types … it would have been fatal.”3
Harold Brown was not present at the Wallack’s Theater meeting, being conveniently away in Virginia on business. This was probably just as well, for the opposition forces were in a highly hostile mood, questioning everything from Harold Brown’s fitness and training as an electrician to his motives. Where, his critics reasonably demanded, was Brown’s proof? On what basis was he urging that their electrical enterprises be banned?
Brown had catapulted from utter obscurity in two brief weeks to become the self-appointed, impassioned champion of one of America’s most revered icons—Thomas Alva Edison. What must Edison have thought when he read Brown’s passionate diatribe against Edison’s own most hated enemies? We do not know, but the beleaguered and indignant Brown tells us he was determined to prove his case and so called upon Edison, “whom I had never met before, and asked the loan of instruments…. To my surprise, Mr. Edison at once invited me to make experiments at his private laboratory, and placed all necessary apparatus at my disposal.”4 (Brown was probably the only electrician in Gotham surprised by Edison’s hearty embrace of his mission.) From this moment forth, Edison eagerly aided and abetted this self-appointed crusader against the “damnable current,” a man whose stated goal was the legislative end to Edison’s biggest rivals, the AC companies. Brown needed to respond to his critics, he said. He needed to prove his case. Edison offered Brown not just space in his extraordinary new laboratory, but the help of his most trusted lieutenants, Charles Batchelor and newly hired British scientist Arthur Kennelly, son of the Bombay harbormaster and future eminent professor at MIT and Harvard.
Edison’s new laboratory had been built over in New Jersey on ten acres just half a mile down the hill from his new estate, Glenmont, in the quiet valley of West Orange. Edison had been a widower briefly before becoming engaged to the young and lovely Mina Miller. He and Mina had first gone to see the sprawling Queen Anne–style château Glenmont in December of 1885. On a cold wintry day they had crossed the Hudson River and then driven out to the snow-covered garden suburb of Llewelyn Park. There they inspected the brick-and-wood mansion’s many gables, admired the vast entry hall and glittering chandeliers, the broad curving staircases, gleaming wood floors, rich stained-glass windows, and palatial living rooms and marveled that it was all lavishly and conveniently furnished, including walls bedecked with oil paintings and niches filled with statuary. Outside, the rolling grounds white with the recent snowfall boasted numerous greenhouse
s and dormant flower beds certain to be beautiful come spring and summer. Built for $235,000, Glenmont was on the market for a bargain $50,000. (The original New York millionaire owner had been caught embezzling from his firm, the Arnold Constable department store, and had fled overseas.) The lovely Mina thought it a fittingly opulent new home for the nation’s greatest inventor, and Edison was anxious to please her.
Charles Batchelor then supervised both the purchase of nearby land for Edison’s new laboratory and its construction. Edison’s up-to-the-minute invention factory, ten times larger than ramshackle Menlo Park, included a vast and graceful central building with sixty thousand square feet, housing a machine shop, glassblowing, chemical, and photographic departments, electrical testing rooms, and stockrooms. Here Edison put his stately wood-paneled office and library, his huge rolltop desk arranged just below a two-story gallery that held ten thousand scientific volumes. No longer so given to playing the hick, Edison appreciated the importance of impressing his multitudes of visitors. A quartet of other buildings provided further space. The laboratory was stocked with “eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goat, minx, camel.” Edison, ever the kidder, told one reporter he “ordered everything from an elephant’s hide to the eyeballs of a United States Senator.”5
Edison’s early ambitions of being far more than an inventor were undimmed. He yearned to succeed as an industrial titan. And he had come to see from developing his electrical networks the commercial advantages of a well-stocked, well-financed laboratory that could quickly parlay ideas into products. It was here, in quiet West Orange, an hour by ferry and train from noisy, dirty, moneyed Manhattan, that the energetic and eager Brown set himself to proving during numerous late night experiments in Thomas Edison’s state-of-the-art facility that AC was truly the “damnable” current, one that should be made illegal.
By late July, Harold Brown felt prepared to confront his critics with the kind of definitive scientific evidence they had been clamoring for. Engraved invitations went forth to the members of the New York City Board of Electrical Control, representatives of all the electric light companies, and numerous others in the electrical fraternity, inviting one and all up to Madison Avenue and 50th Street for a demonstration in “Prof. Chandler’s Lecture Room at the School of Mines, Columbia College,” on Monday, July 30.6 The day was warm, but seventy-five electrical gentlemen and numerous reporters gathered in the large, airy college lecture room with a sense of delightful anticipation, for Brown had already shown that he was a lively sort not likely to turn the other cheek. “No intimation of the character of the exhibition had been given,” noted one journal. How would he make his case?
Brown, his hair neat and glossy, his mustache trim, began by saying that “he had been drawn into the controversy by his sense of right. He represented no company and no financial or commercial interest.” He then discussed the differences between the alternating and the continuous current and stated he had proved “by repeated experiments that a living creature could stand shocks from a continuous current much better.”7 This would explain the large wooden cage with copper wires interlaced between the bars. At this point, Brown vanished for a moment into a side room and then reappeared, leading a large black retriever dog. After muzzling the animal, he put him in the large cage, strapped him into place, and locked the cage door. The crowd of men holding their straw hats and light-colored derbies stirred and murmured. Brown said that the dog, which looked quite a brute, was in perfect health but of vicious disposition. He weighed seventy-six pounds. The dog woofed through his muzzle.
Arthur Kennelly, the Edison chief electrician, served as Brown’s assistant, as did Dr. Frederick Peterson, a doctor who specialized in treating patients with electricity, and a few others. They were needed to hold the struggling black dog as wires were attached to the furry right foreleg and left back leg, each being already wrapped with some waterlogged material. The dog’s “resistance” was found to be 15,300 ohms. Harold Brown began by applying 300 volts of DC. The dog seemed startled and unhappy. When the power was upped to 400 volts of DC, the large black creature struggled and yelped pitiably inside his cage. The crowd of men shifted in their seats, and there were audible murmurs of disapproval in the lecture hall growing warm with summer heat and bodies. At 700 volts DC, the dog’s violent thrashings broke the restraints and he had to be restrapped.
Brown ignored the rising feeling against his cruel display and increased the voltage to 1,000. “Many of the spectators left the room,” reported one journal, “unable to endure the revolting exhibition.”8 The poor beast contorted in pain, and some in the audience began loudly telling Brown to cease. At this juncture, Brown turned off the direct current. He told his restive audience, “He will have less trouble when we try the alternating current. As these gentlemen say, we shall make him feel better.” A Siemens Brothers alternator was hooked up, and 330 volts of AC was administered to the quivering and terrified retriever, which quickly collapsed in a horrible heap, dead. At that moment, a reporter for the New York World stood up. He fiercely protested any further such torturing of dogs, which emboldened an agent for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) to step forward and forbid Brown from executing another dog. Seeing how the audience had grown hostile rather than enlightened, Brown stopped.
The shaken electricians stood up, put on their hats, and began to disperse unhappily from the lecture hall. Despite Brown’s assertion that he had now provided the demanded proof, few in the audience concurred, for the black retriever had obviously been much weakened by his initial electrical torture with DC before he received the killing zap of AC. Brown bitterly resented being thwarted from quickly killing a dog with straight AC. He blamed the “treachery” of the AC forces. He reassured the departing audience that he had many other dogs and had experimented on enough in the past month to be quite certain of AC’s superior fatalness. Harold Brown’s final remark as the demonstration ended was that “the only places where an alternating current ought to be used were the dog pound, the slaughter house, and the state prison.”9
This electrical dog show was what Brown had been preparing for all those unusually cool July nights across the river at West Orange. He had gathered his dogs by paying a twenty-five-cent bounty to local children. Kennelly and Charles Batchelor had frequently helped out. The latter had been severely shocked himself when holding down a puppy. He felt “body and soul being wrenched asunder … the sensations of an immense rough file thrust through the quivering fibers of the body.”10 Brown learned that he could kill a dog with only 300 volts of AC, but with DC he needed 1,000 volts.
Four days after Brown’s first truncated demonstration, he returned again uptown, arriving at the Columbia School of Mines on Friday with three big caged dogs in the suddenly soggy heat of early August. This time, few but his helpers, public health officials, and newspaper reporters were present in the stifling lecture hall. In short order, Brown and his minions dispatched a sixty-one-pound mongrel with AC of less than 300 volts, a ninety-one-pound Newfoundland after eight seconds, and a fifty-three-pound setter-and-Newfoundland mix who survived four excruciating minutes before finally collapsing, his tongue lolling out. In the sticky heat, among the smells of one of the dead dogs being dissected, Brown felt most pleased and vindicated. “All of the physicians present,” said Brown, “expressed the opinion that a dog had a higher vitality than a man, and that, therefore, a current which killed a dog would be fatal to a man.”11
First thing the next day, from his warm office on Wall Street, where the noises of the street drifted in the windows open for any breeze, Harold Brown wrote triumphantly to Arthur Kennelly out in West Orange, reporting, “We made a fine exhibit yesterday, as you will see from all the papers, and I had the report of the proceedings signed by all present and sent to the associated press throughout the country. I missed you, but as no representat
ive of the alternating current concerns favored us, it was just as well that there should be no Edison man there…. Whatever action the Board of Electrical Control may take, it is certain that yesterday’s work will get a law passed by the legislature in the fall, limiting the voltage of alternating currents to 300 volts.”12 At the bottom of this typewritten letter, Brown wrote in a nice even hand, “I have lost 12 lbs over this struggle and am all worn out, but am going to the mountains today to rest.” The Edison camp must have been delighted with Harold Brown’s tremendous get-up-and-go and his natural flair for publicity, though his confident prediction of a state law limiting volts to 300 that fall was overly optimistic.
Once rested up in the cool, pine-scented air of the mountains, Harold Brown returned to launch the most macabre of all battles in the fast escalating War of the Electric Currents. The New York State Legislature, having designated electrocution as its official state mode of capital punishment, was now seeking technical advice from the Medico-Legal Society of New York. How best did one electrically kill condemned prisoners? The chairman of this new committee happened to be Dr. Frederick Peterson, Harold Brown’s able assistant in both of his ghoulish dog-killing demonstrations at Columbia College. Brown was now hell-bent on one thing: getting AC designated as the ideal form of electrocution.
Most Americans that fall had turned their attention to the drama of presidential politics, with Democrats cheering on President Grover Cleveland, the Big One who backed Civil Service reform, curbed dubious Civil War pensions, and infuriated big business by opposing higher import duties. This bland, fat chief executive had also charmed the nation by marrying late in life the beautiful young Frances Folsom in a White House wedding. The Republicans rallied around Ohio senator Benjamin “Little Ben” Harrison, a short, gray-bearded grandson of the nation’s ninth president, who held the right ideas about high tariffs and wielding American clout. Harrison would win by a hair and thanked providence. But Pennsylvania’s all-powerful Republican boss, Matthew Quay, wondered if Harrison knew “how close a number of men were compelled to approach … the penitentiary to make him President.”13