by Jill Jonnes
While the tight election contest stirred electoral passions, Harold Brown and Dr. Peterson retreated to Edison’s prestigious West Orange laboratory and began further dreadful experiments on how to most efficiently kill living things with electricity. With these findings in hand, both attended the November 15 meeting of the Medico-Legal Society, where Dr. Peterson said either direct or alternating current would do the job, “but preferably the latter.”14 The society would announce their electrocution decision at their December 12 meeting. Not content to wait for the society’s decision, Harold Brown swung right back into action, orchestrating a new demonstration that would silence once and for all critics who scoffed that killing dogs was not at all comparable to killing humans. Brown needed to execute creatures more akin in size to grown men.
Once again, the Edison people happily made available the famous West Orange lab for what they termed a “matter of very great importance.”15 On the overcast, chilly afternoon of December 5, Brown and Dr. Peterson were admitted to the Edison complex in West Orange. Assembled in the back in a brightly lit room were numerous reporters and Edison men, several important physicians from the Medico-Legal Society, and two members of the New York State Death Commission: Buffalo dentist Dr. Southwick, who first drew Edison into the issue, and the chairman, Elbridge T. Gerry, long active in the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and its sister society for animals, the ASPCA. Gerry was author of the state’s electrocution bill. Brown’s greatest coup that day was, without question, the august presence of Thomas A. Edison, who heretofore had served only as a silent and reclusive sage (rather than general) for the DC forces. World renowned, a national icon, Edison instantly imbued the lethal proceedings with great legitimacy and an inevitable glamour. Now, here in the celebrated Edison laboratory, these distinguished guests would see with their own eyes just how deadly the alternating current really was.
First came a soft-eyed calf bought from the local butcher. It walked docilely onto a sheet of tin laid on the laboratory floor, its hooves making a loud crackling noise on the metal. Tied to a nearby post, the 124-pound calf was cut on the forehead and upper spine, and sponge-covered plates were fastened to those places. The tin “rug” was attached to wires fed by an alternator, all this being first-rate Edison apparatus. The AC was then zapped up to 700 volts, and after thirty seconds the calf collapsed heavily and died. A second calf weighing 145 pounds was electrocuted after only five seconds. The pièce de résistance was now brought forth: a large, healthy horse weighing 1,230 pounds. Here was a beast far bigger and stronger than any criminal. It whinnied lightly as copper wires were wound around its forelegs. The men stood back, for no one wanted to be struck by the horse’s flailing hooves if things went wrong. When the voltage hit 700, the horse slumped to its knees, dead. This impressive display of lethal AC electricity and the presence of Edison were all that Brown could have hoped for.
The next morning, The New York Times solemnly reported, “The experiments proved the alternating current to be the most deadly force known to science, and that less than half the pressure used in this city [1,500 to 2,000 volts] for electric [arc] lighting by this system is sufficient to cause instant death. After Jan. 1 the alternating current will undoubtedly drive the hangman out of business in this State.”16 Indeed, at the December 12 meeting of the Medico-Legal Society at the Palette Club on West 24th Street, the group unanimously adopted the electrocution committee’s proposal of “death by alternating current” and its recommendation that the criminal be executed in “a recumbent position, on a table covered with rubber, or the sitting position, in a chair especially constructed for the purpose.”17 New York State was on its way to being the first government in history to execute condemned criminals with electricity.
Out in Pittsburgh, where the roaring iron and steel furnaces spewed forth the usual fiery layers of filthy smoke, George Westinghouse read the newspaper stories about Brown’s latest electrical slaughter and muffled his fury so he could write a careful, reasoned reply. This long letter ran in various New York papers the day after the Medico-Legal Society had voted to endorse alternating current for electrocutions. George Westinghouse pointed out that even as Mr. Brown categorically claimed to have proved that anything over 300 volts of AC was deadly, “a large number of persons can be produced who have received a one-thousand volt shock from alternating currents without injury.” Once again, Westinghouse emphasized his company’s huge success. The 1888 Edison annual report showed central station orders totaling forty-four thousand lights for the whole year. Contrast that, he suggested, with his firm’s orders just for October of forty-eight thousand lights.
As was his way, Westinghouse minced no words, scoffing that “the business would not have had this enormous and rapidly increasing growth if there had been connected with it the dangerous features which Mr. Harold P. Brown and his associates of the Edison company so loudly proclaim…. We have no hesitation in charging that the objects of these experiments is not in the interest of science or safety.”18 In one of the most bizarre rejoinders of all time, the egregious Harold Brown wrote to the newspapers and challenged his Pittsburgh nemesis to an electric duel! Like a gentleman of old throwing down a gauntlet, Brown insulted Westinghouse by charging that the great industrial leader cared only about “the pecuniary interests … of the death-dealing alternating current” that had “crippled, paralyzed or otherwise injured for life a number of men.” Then Brown laid out the nature of this unique duel: “I challenge Mr. Westinghouse to meet me in the presence of competent electrical experts and take through his body the alternating current while I take through mine a continuous current…. We will commence with 100 volts, and will gradually increase the pressure 50 volts at a time, I leading with each increase, until either one or the other has cried enough, and publicly admits his error.”19 Westinghouse did not deign to respond.
Stephen Gray’s demonstration of the Electrified Dangling Boy.
FROM A COPPER-PLATE ENGRAVING IN J. G. DOPPELMAYR’S 1744 TEXT
Franklin’s experiment, June 1752.
COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The urban spider webs spun by telegraph lines as lampooned by Harper’s Weekly, May 14, 1881. Soon, electric-light wires would join the haphazardly strung webs.
COURTESY OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Thomas Edison (left front in dark skullcap) and his Menlo Park crew in the second story of the laboratory.
COURTESY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, EDISON NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
An 1880 portrait of J. Pierpont Morgan, the Wall Street banker who helped finance Thomas Edison’s electric company.
COURTESY OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Thomas Edison prided himself on safely burying his company’s electric wires under the streets of Manhattan, an arduous enterprise shown in this Harper’s Weekly print.
COURTESY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, EDISON NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
A cutaway print shows the three floors of the Edison Electric Light Company’s Pearl Street Station, where coal-fed steam engines powered the direct current generators, visible above.
COURTESY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, EDISON NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
Nikola Tesla lecturing before the AIEE at Columbia University, May 20, 1891.
REPRINTED FROM ELECTRICAL WORLD, JULY 11, 1891
Nikola Tesla demonstrates one of his wireless electric lights.
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE MUSEUM
Nikola Tesla posing with his wireless bulb.
COURTESY OF THE NIKOLA TESLA MUSEUM
George Westinghouse and his young wife, Marguerite, in a formal portrait.
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE MUSEUM
The Westinghouses visit Niagara Falls.
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE MUSEUM
George
Westinghouse working. He did not like being photographed; this was taken without his knowledge.
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE MUSEUM
Illustration for July 22, 1894, Sunday World story reading, “Nikola Tesla, showing the Inventor in the Effulgent Glory of Myriad Tongues of Electric Flame After He Has Saturated Himself with Electricity.”
NEW YORK WORLD
As the year 1888 drew to an end, the Edison forces had scored some notable and important victories in the War of the Electric Currents. First and foremost was Harold Brown’s triumph in having alternating current designated as the official New York State “executioner’s current.” Equally important, from the DC standpoint, most public discussions of electricity now revolved largely around questions of safety, with the Edison systems always emerging the shining example of truly safe electricity—low voltage and buried wires. The fact that Edison’s central plant electricity was expensive and unsuitable for anyplace but high-density cities was rarely a part of the discussion.
The spring of 1889 delivered further delightful victories for the Edison forces. Brown was hired by the New York State prisons as their electrical expert. He would design its electrocution apparatus, guaranteeing that Westinghouse machines would soon be used and indelibly linked to an odious death. The month of March brought the dramatic implosion of the French copper corner after eighteen expensive months. Monsieur Secretan, historian Kenneth Ross Toole explains, “had, first of all, forgotten the junkman. His scheme was predicated on control of the world’s supply of copper. But with copper at 17 cents, in very short time scrap dealers had thrown at least 70,000 long tons on the market [about a quarter of the world’s annual consumption]…. Secretan’s second miscalculation was with regard to consumption. When the price of copper soared, many consumers simply stopped buying it.”20 The electrical world turned out to be far less voracious a captive customer than assumed. The copper syndicate found itself sitting atop one hundred thousand tons of gleaming red metal it could not sell for what it had paid. The French banks and the major world producers quickly reached an agreement that would leave copper at twelve cents for the foreseeable future.
The fall served up yet more unalloyed victories for the DC forces. For four years, Edison’s electric light bulb patent cases had been dragging along. In some courts, Edison had received severe setbacks, in others some encouragement. In 1886, Westinghouse had felt so certain Edison’s patent was doomed that he indulged himself and struck back by filing a retaliatory suit. The Westinghouse case, in the guise of Consolidated Electric Light, which held the original Sawyer-Man light bulb patents, had been filed against McKeesport Light Company, an Edison entity. Then, on October 4, 1889, Justice Bradley of the United States Circuit Court in Pittsburgh delivered a serious setback to the light bulb infringers. The good judge upheld Edison’s longtime assertion that what differentiated his light bulb from all its many unworkable predecessors was “high resistance in the conductor with a small illuminating surface and a corresponding diminution in the strength of current. This was accomplished by Edison … and was really the grand discovery in the art of electric lighting, without which it could not have come into general use in houses and cities…. But for this discovery electric lighting would never have become a fact.”21 Westinghouse sought to buy time by appealing the case.
When Nikola Tesla journeyed to Pittsburgh to help develop his AC induction motor and polyphase system, he had finally met George Westinghouse, now forty-one. He admired him right away. Wrote Tesla, “Even to a superficial observer, [Westinghouse’s] latent force was manifest. A powerful frame, well-proportioned, with every joint in working order, an eye as clear as crystal, a quick and springy step—he presented a rare example of health and strength. Like a lion in the forest, he breathed deep and with delight the smoky air of his factories.”22 Tesla toured the impressive Westinghouse electrical shops, met the engineers, and then returned briefly to New York to wrap up his affairs before returning to Pittsburgh to work as a consultant with the Westinghouse Electric Company.
Almost certainly, Tesla was a guest for a time under the Westinghouse roof in leafy Homewood at Solitude. The handsome white brick villa with its white window awnings lowered against the summer heat was surrounded by an attractive array of flower and vegetable gardens. To one side, a long grape arbor provided a filtered shady retreat. The leaves of large ginkgo trees waved and shimmered in the sun. Across the railroad tracks, truck farmers were tending tomatoes and vegetables. The otherwise gracious Westinghouse home had one jarring aspect—the festoons of electric wires drooping along the ceilings and up the stairway. Naturally Westinghouse had installed electricity in Solitude, but he had insisted all the wires remain freely accessible so he could test out new improvements as they came along. The dynamo and generator were far back out in the stable, and the subway that connected the generator to the villa was big enough for a man to walk in.
After the sudden acclaim and overnight wealth of 1888, Tesla’s ensuing year in Pittsburgh was a sharp reminder of the perilous journey between invention and commercial success. First off, it turned out that Nikola Tesla’s much ballyhooed AC induction motor did not, as George Westinghouse had hoped, have any value for traction work, which eliminated its use for the fast-growing and lucrative electric streetcar business. Then, it was worryingly obvious that the polyphase induction motors as shown at Columbia College did not mesh easily with the Westinghouse single-phase AC central lighting stations. Tesla had early on concluded that the ideal frequency was 60 cycles, and all his AC induction motors were so designed. The Westinghouse engineers, however, had designed all their AC central lighting stations to operate at more than twice that frequency, or 133 cycles. Tesla did not endear himself to his new colleagues when he insisted that the central stations would have to be retrofitted, for otherwise they would never get a workable AC motor.
The Westinghouse engineers were loath to concede Tesla’s point and undertake such a major revamping. Like many pioneers of the electrical fraternity, the Westinghouse electricians resented this flowery fellow declaring that everything they knew about making electricity and running motors was now passé and irrelevant. They resented his sudden wealth and fame and the widespread belief by knowledgeable men that he was going to be as big as, maybe bigger than, Edison. Even a world-celebrated writer like Mark Twain had been quietly confiding to his diary in November of 1888, “I have just seen the drawings and descriptions of an electrical machine lately patented by a Mr. Tesla, and sold to the Westinghouse Company, which will revolutionize the whole electric business of the world. It is the most valuable patent since the telephone.” Mark Twain, a great writer who was a notable flop in his own various forays into nonliterary business, never wrote truer words. And that assertion was what was so immensely galling to the Westinghouse engineers. As the months passed, they and some of the electrical press had the satisfaction of concluding that Tesla was full of hot air. It did not help that Shallenberger’s new AC electric meter was quickly and easily adapted to existing Westinghouse AC systems, with impressive results. As soon as customers saw bills based on usage, they began turning off unneeded lights. Westinghouse central stations equipped with meters now had to generate only a half to two-thirds the amount of electricity as those central stations operating still without meters. The savings to the company were dramatic.
Charles Scott was too young and too much of a newcomer at Westinghouse to harbor any animosity. Assigned to work with Tesla as his assistant, helping to build AC induction motors and test them, he was overjoyed. “It was a splendid opportunity for a beginner, this coming in contact with a man of such eminence, rich in ideas, kindly and friendly in disposition. Tesla’s fertile imagination often constructed air castles which seemed prodigious. But, I doubt whether even his extravagant expectations of the toy motor of those days measured up to actual realization.”23 Young Scott also admired how in these trying months, Westinghouse himself was always “suggesting, inspiring, directing, urging. Each
step was a progress toward a universal system of power distribution. That was his great vision and ambition…. [It is hard to] realize how little was then known to imagine the magnitude of what might develop when means were found for making larger generators and larger transformers which would not short-circuit or overheat.”24
And so, thwarted and frustrated in Pittsburgh, Tesla prepared to retreat to Manhattan. “Having worked one year in the shops of George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh,” he would later say, “I experienced so great a longing for resuming my interrupted investigations that, notwithstanding a very tempting proposition by him, I left for New York to take up my laboratory work.”25 That was in the fall of 1889, and Tesla was soon ensconced in a new laboratory on Grand Street. Tesla, reported his friend and biographer, John J. O’Neill, was “thoroughly disgusted…. He felt his advice concerning his own invention was not being accepted.” He also told O’Neill, “I was not free at Pittsburgh. I was dependent and could not work. To do creative work I must be completely free. When I became free of that situation ideas and inventions rushed through my brain like Niagara.”26 One suspects that many among the entrenched electrical brotherhood experienced a highly delicious frisson of schadenfreude, for Nikola Tesla had returned from Westinghouse without managing to produce a commercial AC induction motor that could operate with the firm’s two hundred central stations.