Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Then Cockran brought on an odd character named Alexander McAdie, a Harvard graduate who had worked at the U.S. Signal Service Laboratory in Washington, D.C., there devoting himself to the study of lightning. Cockran asked the young man if he thought the electric chair would work. He responded haltingly, “Its deadly effect would depend upon the subject’s resistance and upon the route through the body…. It might only paralyze one half of his body and leave the other half unharmed…. It might kill him, and if it didn’t kill him instantly, it might carbonize him—burn him up…. Yes, I think it would char his flesh.”12 The strange Mr. McAdie, who had left the weather service to study lightning on his own, described standing atop the pinnacle of the Washington Monument during a thunderstorm and deliberately taking lightning through his own body—and here he was to tell the tale. One can imagine Cockran’s glee at this damaging testimony. “Carbonize” Kemmler—if that wasn’t cruel and unusual, what was?

  To keep up the lively doubts generated in the morning session, after lunch Cockran brought on one of his most entertaining witnesses: Dash the dog, a “splendid looking … big fellow, a cross between a Scotch collie and a St. Bernard.” Dash, it was related, had been thrown four feet in the air by a dangling Western Union wire supercharged with errant AC, knocked unconscious, feared dead, and then revived many hours later. Dash was living canine proof that a big mammal could be knocked out cold, taken for dead from electric shock, and gradually come back to life. Might Dash the dog foretell Kemmler’s dreadful fate of rising from the seeming dead? This was disquieting information to the state, which wished Kemmler’s life permanently and electrically extinguished. Surely putting a man to death twice would be considered cruel and unusual? The day ended with the cheering news that Elbridge T. Gerry, head of the legislative New York State Death Commission (which promoted electricity over the rope), would now be able to detach himself from the summery delights of yachting at Newport to testify at the next day’s session.

  Cockran’s puckish approach to the deadly question of painless finality had stirred up enough naysayers and doubters to get the state and Harold Brown worried. On July 17, the day after Dash the dog’s winning appearance, Harold Brown was anxiously requesting the ultimate reinforcement for this battle of judicial opinion: the appearance of the world-famous electrical wizard Thomas A. Edison. Who would give a second thought to a McAdie or a Gibbens if Edison said the electric chair was a sure thing? In the year and a half since Thomas Edison had written that fateful letter to Dr. Southwick endorsing electricity in general—and Westinghouse machines in particular—for electrocution, the great inventor had never once personally appeared in a public forum or uttered a public word on the whole matter, allowing others always to wage his battles. Now for the first time he was flushed out from the shadows. Without his influence, Harold Brown and the state might lose to the silver-tongued Cockran.

  On July 23, a cool and rainy day in an unusually cool summer, Edison sallied forth for the first time to assume personal leadership of the DC forces. He ascended to Bourke Cockran’s law offices, which were filled with eager spectators hoping to see and hear America’s most celebrated inventor in the guise of star witness. Harold Brown attended as his aide-de-camp. Such was the great man’s deafness that the yelled questions and Edison’s equally loud answers “might have been heard on the street,” reported The New York Times. At one point, a smiling Edison arose and dragged his chair closer to Cockran so he could hear through his better ear. There was a great deal of (loud) discussion once again about what the average man’s resistance was in ohms, since presumably resistance was an integral reason some men survived big electric shocks and others keeled over dead. How could anyone know for sure? But Edison did. He said he had made numerous experiments of resistance on the 250 men in his lab before coming to testify. This revered scientist and inventor, the man who had brought the electric light to the world, was unequivocal in his answers to Bourke Cockran’s questions. Asked Cockran loudly in his Irish brogue: “In your judgment, can artificial electric current be generated and applied in such a way to produce death in human beings in every case?”

  “Yes,” said Edison, fingering his unlit, half-smoked cigar.

  “Instantly?” Cockran asked.

  “Yes.” Edison’s only caveat was that “the culprit’s hands [should be placed] in a jar of water diluted with caustic potash and connecting the electrodes therewith.”

  “How much of a current do you think it would take to burn a man?” Cockran asked very loudly. The New York Times reported the following exchange.

  Edison thought a moment and answered probably “‘several thousand horse power … you’d probably burn him up.’

  “‘Have a nice little bonfire with him, would you?’

  “‘Oh, no,’ said Edison, ‘Just carbonize him.’

  “‘Well, Mr. Edison, with this tremendously wicked Westinghouse dynamo,’ Mr. Cockran threw all the sarcastic power at his command into the question—‘when it has been worked up to its most thoroughly wicked point, how long do you think it would take to burn a man?’

  “‘His temperature would rise 3 or 4 degrees above the normal and after a while he’d be mummified.’

  “‘Mummified,’ cried Mr. Cockran gleefully. ‘Now we are getting the true inwardness of electrical science. How?’

  “‘The heat would evaporate all the fluids in his body and leave him mummyized.’”13

  Naturally, Bourke Cockran inquired about the nature of Edison’s relationship with Harold Brown, the official state electrical execution expert. Had Edison, for instance, ever given him a letter of recommendation? Not at all, said Edison, obviously forgetting or ignoring a March 22, 1889, testimonial he had provided at Brown’s behest so Brown could prove his bona fides to the mayor of Scranton. His dealings with Mr. Brown, said Edison, were strictly limited to Brown’s use of Edison’s West Orange laboratory, a privilege granted to numerous other engineers and scientists. After a few more questions, Bourke Cockran dismissed Edison, first lighting his half-chewed cigar stub for him. The newspaper headlines the next day were all that Harold Brown and the Edison Company could have hoped for: EDISON SAYS IT WILL KILL, THE WIZARD TESTIFIES AS AN EXPERT IN THE KEMMLER CASE, HE THINKS AN ARTIFICIAL CURRENT CAN BE GENERATED WHICH WILL PRODUCE DEATH INSTANTLY AND PAINLESSLY IN EVERY CASE—ONE THOUSAND VOLTS OF AN ALTERNATING CURRENT WOULD BE SUFFICIENT.

  Cockran did a yeoman’s job of trying to show that the great and beloved Edison was woefully ignorant on this particular aspect of electricity—its effect on the human body and its ability to kill swiftly and painlessly. Yet Edison’s usual cocky manner and absolute assertions carried the day. Historians Terry S. Reynolds and Theodore Bernstein argue, “Edison’s reputation probably overrode Cockran’s exposure of [Edison’s] ignorance of the effects of electricity on living organisms.” Certainly some newspapers regarded his testimony as critical. The Albany Journal, for example, noted: “The Kemmler case at last has an expert that knows something concerning electricity. Mr. Edison is probably the best informed man in America, if not the world, regarding electric currents and their destructive powers.”14

  Edison and his lovely young wife, Mina, sailed off to Paris ten days later for a two-month visit. On the Continent, Edison the international celebrity was feted at elaborate and adulatory banquets, presented official state honors from France and Italy, and received standing ovations at the Paris Opera, with the entire bejeweled crowd chanting, “Vive Edison! Vive Edison!” Hailed by the local press and officials as a genius, Edison reaped phenomenal publicity for his company’s products at the important Paris Exposition. His exhibition enthralled huge crowds daily with its twenty-five “perfected” phonographs speaking in dozens of languages, along with all manner of electrical lights and devices. Edison adored the Eiffel Tower, erected for the exposition by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel as a fantastic specimen of modern engineering and lit up at night from top to bottom. “The tower is a great idea,” Edison told the dozens of rep
orters hanging on his every lively phrase. “The glory of Eiffel is in the magnitude of the conception and the nerve of the execution. I like the French, they have big conceptions. The English ought to take a leaf out of their books. What Englishman would have had this idea? What Englishman could have conceived the Statue of Liberty?”15 However, the stylish Parisian way of life annoyed Edison. “What has struck me so far chiefly is the absolute laziness of everybody over here,” he commented bluntly. “When do these people work? What do they work at? People here seem to have established an elaborate system of loafing. I don’t understand it at all.”16

  Back across the Atlantic in suddenly hot and sticky Manhattan and then in cooler Buffalo, Bourke Cockran plugged away for a few more sessions, taking the testimony of physicians who had attended men killed by electricity or hearing from men who had survived lightning strikes. Cockran elaborated his basic themes with verve, but there was no one he could produce for his side with Edison’s fame or stature. When Edison the world-famous celebrity weighed in so definitively for the electric chair, the battle was almost certainly lost.

  While New Yorkers sweltered in a blanket of oppressive August heat, the electricians had gathered farther north in the cool and watery precincts of Niagara Falls to vent their spleen against Edison, Brown, and the planned electrocution. One man angrily told his fellow members of the National Electric Light Association, “We are here for the purpose of advancing the uses of electricity, to make it rejuvenate the world, to carry it forward as a civilizing agent, not as an instrument of torture…. I say, let us here condemn that action…. Let it not be trumpeted over this country that the dying groans of that criminal cursed electricity with its last sound.”17 The assembled agreed to dispatch emissaries to the governor of New York to push for repeal of death by electricity.

  This was rather encouraging to the Westinghouse forces, and late August of 1889 brought yet another small but delicious triumph. In its Sunday edition, the New York Sun ran an exposé on Harold Brown, with the headline FOR SHAME, BROWN! and a subhead that told the story: “Paid by One Electric Company to Injure Another.” Someone had broken into Harold Brown’s Wall Street office and stolen forty-five letters from his locked rolltop desk. These missives showed that for some time he had indeed been advised, aided, abetted, and paid by the Edison Company and Thomson-Houston, both explicit rivals of Westinghouse. As the Sun wrote, “Brown is known not to be a wealthy man, and that he could afford to devote all his time thus purely for the benefit of the human race at large with little thought of self, has been a mystery to those acquainted with him.”18 Yet little changed. Brown complained to the district attorney, requested an investigation, and offered a $500 reward for information about the thief. To the rest of the press, Brown still blustered, “I am exposing the Westinghouse system as any right-minded man would expose a bunco starter or the grocer who sells poison where he pretends he sells sugar.”19

  On September 11, referee Tracy C. Becker submitted to Judge Edwin Day the full record of 1,025 pages of transcribed testimony, describing the widely varying electrical near death and actual death experiences, with all the contradictory opinions about how quick and painless Kemmler’s electrocution would be. Just over a month later, on October 12, a few days after Thomas Edison returned in triumph from Europe, Judge Day ruled against Cockran, who immediately appealed to the Supreme Court of New York.

  Even as the Kemmler case dragged on through the courts, there came a great and unexpected coup for Edison: the most spectacular high-voltage death yet. It was a death so hideous, so public, so highly visible—occurring just blocks from City Hall at lunch hour—that it galvanized the high-voltage safety debate as nothing before had managed to do. It was, unbelievably, the second public roasting of a lineman in three days in lower Manhattan. The first death in the wires on October 9 killed a fellow so dissolute and brutish that his wife had long since fled with their six children to a refuge in the country. The strong implication was that the first lineman was working while drunk, became careless, and managed to electrocute himself. He toppled dead onto the pavement. An ugly tale. But two days later, on Friday, October 11, came yet worse. Far, far worse.

  This time, on a lovely fall noon a handful of Western Union linemen were working forty feet up a towering wooden pole at Chambers and Center Streets, a block from the magnificent Tweed Courthouse, cutting out dead wires from the great spiderweb of lines looping hither and yon from poles to buildings and back. Far below, the thick lunchtime crowds surged along the sidewalks and across the streets, weaving in between the horsecars and teamster carts. One of the linemen, John E. H. Feeks, high above the milling throngs, was standing astride the fourth crossbar from the bottom of the fourteen bars laddering up the top of the light pole. He reached through a tangle of wires to cut out a dead wire “when he was suddenly seen to shiver and tremble as though he had received a violent shock. He put out his right hand and seized a wire as though to steady himself, and immediately there was a flash of flame under his hand. Then bright sparks and tongues of blue flames played all about his hand and a small cloud of smoke curled up into the air. His right hand next slipped from the wire and he fell forward across a network of wires which caught him across the throat and face and held him suspended some forty feet above the ground. The man appeared to be all on fire. Blue flames issued from his mouth and nostrils and sparks flew about his feet. Then blood began to drop down from the body on the pole and a great pool formed on the sidewalk below…. There was no movement to the body as it hung in the fatal burning embrace of the wires. A great crowd of people collected and stood awestricken and fascinated by the fearful sight.”20 As some men yelled for help, mesmerized spectators jammed the sidewalks and roadway, blocking all the passing streetcars and teams. From every nearby window and roof, people craned through the haze of electrical wires to see this grisly sight of the smoking, sparking man. Feeks’s body was so interwoven with the numerous wires that he swayed but did not fall. His corpse was held horribly aloft for forty-five minutes, like a poor fly stuck in the spider’s sticky web, until at last the current was turned off and his blackened body extricated and lowered to the silent street.

  Public outrage at this latest accidental electrocution reached fever pitch. Feeks was a solid citizen and husband, long employed. A tin cracker box donated by nearby Coogan’s Saloon was nailed to the deadly light pole for donations to the deceased man’s pregnant wife, already mother to one child. Reported the Times, “Men and women whose dress was of the poorest came in a constant stream and dropped in money. Newsboys, bootblacks and Italian fruit vendors brought pennies and nickels. Drivers on the Madison avenue cars stopped their teams and ran to the box to drop in a dime.” In ten hours the amazing sum of $822.23 was gathered. Three days later, that figure had risen to $1,873.50. (It’s unlikely that Feeks earned more than $12 a week himself.)

  Mayor Hugh Grant rose from his sickbed and came to City Hall to order the shutting down of all the high-voltage electric arc lights in Manhattan while the companies were forced to remove, repair, and upgrade the jungle of overhead wires. The citizenry, who had not experienced such pitch black cloaking the city in decades, since before there was gaslight, were most distraught, and a great hue and cry arose at the loss of the man-made light. “Again last night did the city seem to have gone into mourning for its lost brilliancy,” lamented The New York Times. “Darkness and gloom were everywhere.”21 Several unhappy facts quickly emerged: The New York City Board of Electrical Control had made little headway in getting built the electrical subways mandated by law for all the city’s electrical wires. The three Tammany-appointed commissioners each took home the breathtaking salary of $5,000 a year and rarely did a day’s work. The press had a field day of high dudgeon: OF NO USE TO THE PUBLIC, THE DILATORY BOARD OF ELECTRICAL CONTROL or NOT ON THE PUBLIC’S SIDE, THEY BLOCK THE MAYOR’S EFFORTS TO HASTEN THE SUBWAY WORK—THE CITY IN DARKNESS.

  The heinous Feeks affair propelled Thomas Edison at long last fully into
the open. Emerging from the shadows whence he had directed Harold Brown, Edison stood forth in all his radiance as the true general and leader of the DC forces. For the first time, Edison personally issued his own clarion battle cry in his holy war against the “executioner’s current”: Death to AC! In the November issue of the prestigious North American Review, Edison thundered that the “the martyrdom” of Feeks offered dramatic and horrible witness of what the future held—unless electrical pressures (voltage) were legally limited. Edison had heard the “popular cry” to bury the wires and restore safety to the city streets. But this was no solution, he asserted. Burying AC wires “will result only in the transfer of deaths to man-holes, houses, stores, and offices, through the agency of the telephone, the low-pressure systems, and the apparatus of the high-pressure current itself.” DC should never be higher than 700 volts. As for the safe voltage for AC, “I myself have seen a large healthy dog killed instantly by the alternating current at a pressure of one hundred and sixty-eight volts … it is difficult for me to name a safe pressure.” He then told how his own company had purchased the ZBD patents. “Up to the present time I have succeeded in inducing them not to offer this system to the public, nor will they ever do so with my consent. My personal desire would be to prohibit entirely the use of alternating currents. They are as unnecessary as they are dangerous.”22

  As the War of the Electric Currents grew uglier and fiercer, George Westinghouse decided in the fall of 1889 to hire a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter named Ernest H. Heinrichs to promote his companies and their achievements. On Heinrichs’s first day, Westinghouse came by to wish him success and explain his purpose. “All I want to see is that the papers print [things] accurately. The truth hurts nobody.”23 One November morning soon thereafter, Heinrichs was installed at his desk in the brown, turreted nine-story Westinghouse Building scanning a New York newspaper with an article and an editorial attacking AC and Westinghouse. The young man became so incensed, he leaped up and rushed into his boss’s office without knocking. Westinghouse was sitting in his big upholstered chair at the gigantic wooden dining table that served as his desk. He was calmly reading that selfsame newspaper. He saw that Heinrichs was agitated and what he was clutching. The Pittsburgh industrialist cocked his great head and asked Heinrichs, “Well, what’s the hurry?”