The Wizard of Menlo Park (22 page)

Our view of a battle over two competing technical standards is colored by our knowledge of the outcome. In retrospect, alternating current appears fated to best direct current, just as VHS video recording would best Betamax, and Edison appears naive in his faith that his direct-current system would eventually triumph. In this case, however, he was not as naive as it may appear. He believed his technology would triumph for a perfectly good reason: Edison’s technology did not kill utility workers; the competition’s did.

“Killed By an Electric Shock” was a headline that ran frequently in any city newspaper. A sample story from October 1887: A superintendent for Brush Electric in Detroit clambered up a pole to find out what was wrong with a streetlight and set to work too hurriedly, neglecting to put on the rubber gloves that were in his pockets. A police officer who happened to be walking up the block saw the man fall unconscious, draped across the wires. Firemen were called, he was brought down, and carried into the drugstore. No bruise or mark left visible evidence of his electrocution. Eulogized as a “careful man” who had been a longtime employee, the victim also happened to be engaged to be married. The news story provided one more horrible detail: “When his body was carried into the drug store last night his fiancée by some strange chance was at the counter making some purchases. Her grief was most heartrending and moved some of the spectators to tears.”

These stories invariably commented upon the paradox: The electrical current was lethal, yet did not leave visible marks that were proportionate to its power. When a manager of an electric light company in Lyons, New York, stopped for a moment on his way home to tinker with a malfunctioning arc light on the street, he was fatally felled, but the only mark was a small hole in his thumb where it had come in contact with the alternating current. In another incident, reported under the headline “Struck Dead in a Second,” a superintendent of the United States Illuminating Company in New York was called upon to snip wires that were interfering with firefighters who were trying to extinguish a fire in the commercial district. He received a fatal shock. When rushed into a nearby store, the crowd of curious onlookers who followed were mystified by the invisible nature of the force that had killed him. “His features were not in the least distorted, and death might have resulted from heart disease.”

Passersby occasionally were victims, too. In April 1888, a seventeen-year-old boy walking down Broadway was killed when he brushed against a telegraph wire that dangled overhead, crossing two wires from the United States Illuminating Company. The
New York World
worried that “right on Broadway, where thousands and thousands of people are passing during all hours of the day, scores of wires are swinging in mid-air, any one of which is likely to become dislodged.” An alert person could avoid being run over by a careless driver, but “no amount of agility will be of any avail to him when a deadly arc-light current is conveyed without a note of warning into his anatomy.”

The lethal potential of electricity caught the notice of New York state legislators in Albany who were interested in utilizing electricity for capital punishment. A commission was appointed to look into the matter. It surveyed judges, district attorneys, sheriffs, and doctors, and found slightly more respondents favored electrocution than hanging (though five held out for the guillotine and four for the garrote). One physician pointed out that little was actually known about the effects of strong currents on the body, and “if lightning [does] not always kill, surely we cannot expect death to result from artificial electricity.” Nevertheless, the commission decided to recommend using “current of electricity” as the means of execution, replacing hanging.

When Edison first introduced electric light service in New York City, his primary competition at the time had been the gas utilities, so he had done his best to call public attention to the dangers of gas. But when Westinghouse and other well-capitalized competitors entered the power-and-light business, Edison began instead to talk of the dangers of alternating current. The state’s consideration of adopting electrocution for executions gave him an opportunity to point to the inherently dangerous nature of the competition’s technology. Edison personally favored abolishing capital punishment, but as long it remained in place, he advocated using the technology that was most lethal and thus would inflict the least amount of suffering: alternating current. He told the New York advisory commission that the best machine for this purpose was the standard dynamo manufactured by “Mr. Geo. Westinghouse, Pittsburgh.”

Edison was also more than happy to give thought to devising a new word for this new form of capital punishment. One associate suggested a new verb for execution by electricity, “to westinghouse,” and also a new noun, as in “such and such a man was condemned to the westinghouse.” Dr. Guillotin had been so honored; why not give Mr. Westinghouse “the benefit of the fact in the minds of the public”? To his credit, Edison was not so crass and instead favored “ampermort,” “dynamort,” or “electromort.” The
New York Times
did not spell out which word it favored, but expressed emphatically its opposition “to ‘electrocution,’ which pretentious ignoramuses seem to be trying to push into use.”

By the time George Westinghouse had entered the electric light business in 1886, he had already made his first fortune from his invention of the air brake for railroads, and he was no slouch himself in piling up hundreds of patents as an inventor. In Edison’s view, however, Westinghouse did not pose a serious threat in the power-and-light business because he used the relatively more dangerous alternating current, certain to kill one of his own customers within six months.

Edison’s conviction that direct current was less dangerous than alternating current was based on hunch, however, not empirical scientific research. He, like others at the time, focused solely on voltage (the force that pushes electricity through a wire) without paying attention to amperage (the rate of flow of electricity), and thought it would be best to stay at 1,200 volts or less. Even he was not certain that his own system was completely safe—after all, he had elected to place wires in underground conduits, which was more expensive than stringing wires overhead but reduced the likelihood of electrical current touching a passerby. Burying the wires could not give him complete peace of mind, however. Privately, he told Edward Johnson that “we must look out for crosses [i.e., short-circuited wires] for if we ever kill a customer it would be a bad blow to the business.”

The Edison system was spared the scandal of causing accidental deaths, which gave Edison all the more reason to feel confident that customers would very soon see the differences in systems. He coined an infelicitous slogan to describe his own: “High Economy, No Risk.” Surely customers would reject Westinghouse’s and embrace his. But it did not happen. The accidents involving alternating current were not frequent enough, nor was responsibility for the deaths publicly pinned on Westinghouse or any single company.

Westinghouse’s alternating current was superior to Edison’s direct current if considered from a strictly business perspective. Alternating current could be distributed much more economically, and to greater distances from a generating plant, than could direct current. This gave Westinghouse’s company the ability to undercut Edison’s prices; by 1887, it was expanding quickly all over the map, as if no competition stood in its way.

Cooperation between rivals was another possibility, one that occurred to George Westinghouse. Antitrust restrictions did not exist—this was two years before the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was enacted and many more years would pass before the federal government began to enforce it. In June 1888, Westinghouse took the initiative and wrote Edison a warm letter, exploring the possibility of rapprochement. He said that it must have been others who had sought to drive a wedge between Westinghouse Electric and Edison Electric. He, for his part, was most appreciative of the hospitality that Edison had shown him when Westinghouse had paid a visit to Menlo Park, shopping for a power plant for his own house before he had entered the business himself and even before Edison Electric had formally launched its own service. It would be a pleasure, Westinghouse wrote, if Edison would visit him in Pittsburgh where “I will be glad to reciprocate the attention shown me by you.” Edison turned down Westinghouse’s overture, however, claiming that his work in the laboratory forced him to turn over all business matters to others. He would later say to a colleague that Westinghouse’s “methods of doing business lately are such that the man has gone crazy over sudden accession of wealth or something unknown to me and is flying a kite that will land him in the mud sooner or later.”

Westinghouse’s invitation had arrived just as Edison was directing lab experiments whose purpose was to undermine Westinghouse’s reputation, namely, how much electrical current was needed to execute a human being? Stray dogs were used as surrogates at the lab, which offered to boys in Orange a bounty of twenty-five cents for each hapless dog delivered to its gates for the advancement of science (and intercompany competition). Edison told the
Brooklyn Citizen
how the effect of direct current left the dog subjects unchanged in appearance, and then, after a minute, they would tumble over dead. Alternating current, however, killed in as little as one-tenth of a second. This impressed the lab assistants, who took care to wear rubber gloves even when writing in the lab’s notebook, Edison said “with a grin.”

Edison’s bounty offer was so successful that soon no more canine volunteers could be had. The very day after he had curtly turned Westinghouse away, Edison wrote to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to augment his local supply. Anticipating that mention of capital punishment was unlikely to elicit the desired cooperation of the SPCA, Edison blandly explained that he was looking into determining the exact quantity of electricity required to kill dogs, work that would incidentally help to safeguard the lives of linemen in the electric power business. Would the SPCA be so kind as to supply some “good-sized” animals as soon as possible?

Henry Bergh, the society’s president, could not understand how Mr. Edison, whom he regarded as a “genius” who had “conferred such great and lasting benefits upon humanity,” could have so misunderstood the mission of the SPCA. The dogs placed in Edison’s care would be subjects in experiments that entailed suffering, not instantaneous death. And the great scientist had to be told that any data that he collected at his lab would have no value for his avowed purpose, saving the lives of linemen, given the disparity in electrical force required to kill humans compared with small animals.

Such was his celebrity and presumed expertise that no one pointed out that it was strange that Edison was experimenting with small mammals months after he had spoken with such certainty about the effects of electrical currents upon humans. It had been his letter—the one recommending generators made by “Mr. Geo. Westinghouse, Pittsburgh” to “inflict the least amount of suffering upon its victim”—that had persuaded one member of the New York commission to shift his support from morphine executions to electrocution, making the panel’s recommendation a unanimous one. Its report, in turn, led directly to passage of a new capital punishment law in New York State, changing the method of executing criminals from hanging to electrocution.

Perhaps the state had acted a bit too hastily. The first person to be sentenced under the new law was one William Kemmler, a Buffalo resident convicted of murdering his female companion with an ax. He lacked sufficient education to do more than mark an X on his confession, but the world took notice of the case when he was sentenced to death by electrocution, making him a human guinea pig. His plight drew attention and a new attorney who volunteered to press his appeal, arguing, “We hold that the state cannot experiment upon Kemmler.”

The judge who heard the appeal understandably blanched at upholding the constitutionality of the new law without assurance from the scientific community about the humaneness of electrocution. Hearings were ordered up, and the leading experts were deposed. The star witness was the world-renowned authority on all matters electrical. “How long have you been engaged in the work of an inventor or electrician?” Edison was asked. “Twenty-six years.” What would happen if current—not that from Edison’s system, but the competition’s—were applied to Kemmler for five or six minutes? Would he be carbonized? Edison was asked. “No,” he replied, “he would be mummyized. All the water in his body would evaporate in five or six minutes.” The tone of peerless authority, which was Edison’s public style, remained intact even when he was cross-examined. The Wizard, who was chewing an unlit cigar, received a light and was dismissed; Kemmler’s initial appeal was not successful. New motions were filed, but the appointed day of execution neared.

Edison’s campaign to link in the public’s mind alternating current with fatal consequences, whether accidental or intentional, was gaining momentum. George Westinghouse stepped forward to counterattack, his words thrown against those of Edison’s and the other proponents of electrocution.

Westinghouse wielded a variety of arguments in defense of alternating current. Its low cost brought incandescent lighting within the reach of the multitude, and its low voltage within the house—lower than Edison’s—made it safer, he claimed. The package also included his own pseudoscientific theory, with no more substance than Edison’s, that an alternating current was inherently less harmful because its momentary reversal of direction “prevents decomposition of tissues.” No discussion was complete without argument by anecdote, and Westinghouse was not remiss. A lineman had accidentally grabbed hold of a live wire with one thousand volts of alternating current and held on for three minutes. Yes, the man was shocked insensible, but not only had he lived, he “in fact was able to go on with his work after a short period.”

This was a reassuring tale, uncomplicated with details that would permit it to be independently verified. Westinghouse could not provide such a comforting coda to another accident involving a lineman, however. On 11 October 1889, John E. H. Feeks, thirty-two, was engaged in cutting down dead telegraph and alarm wires on a pole in downtown Manhattan for Western Union when the accident occurred. The time and location made it visible to many people: just after one o’clock in the afternoon, near Chambers and Centre Streets, in the shadow of the city offices, with hundreds of people hurrying below on the sidewalk. Astride a crossbar, Feeks was reaching out for a wire that he intended to cut when he appeared to shiver and tremble. Putting out his right hand, he seized another wire as though to steady himself—and sparks and blue flames shot out of his hand. He fell forward, and was held aloft by the dense bands of wires that ran across lower crossbars, suspended some forty feet above the ground. With flames seen coming from his mouth and nose and feet, and blood dropping and pooling on the sidewalk below, this tableau could not have been more ghastly. The crowd swelled, and police had difficulty clearing space for the rescuers. It took thirty long minutes before the body could be brought down.