The Wizard of Menlo Park (23 page)

Court officials and members of the Board of Aldermen were among the witnesses, and the very public nature of Feeks’s death brought impassioned calls for swift action to bring the company responsible to account. Responsibility could not be easily assigned, however. The pole upon which he was working did not have any wires that belonged to an electric light company. The United States Illuminating Company ran wires elsewhere on the street, but though it was reasonable to assume that one of its wires was improperly insulated, the fatal current could not be traced with certainty to a particular point of contact. Without question, moving all power lines to underground conduits, as in Edison’s system, would eliminate the danger in running them overhead amid tangles with others. Demands for requiring electric light companies to move their lines underground became conspicuously louder following Feeks’s death.

Edison did not add his support to these proposals, which he faulted for not going far enough in addressing the danger posed by alternating current’s relatively higher voltage. He told a reporter that insulation on wires buried in the ground provided no measure of safety—the current would burn through the insulating fibers, and then “the dangerous current will creep into your house, and will come up the manholes.” In October 1889, he urged the readers of the
New York Evening Sun
to press the mayor and the Board of Health to enact regulations that would curtail “deadly currents” within the city’s boundaries. He reasoned, “Is there not a law in New York against the manufacture of nitro-glycerine?”

The only purveyors of “deadly currents,” of course, were Edison’s competitors. The battle of the currents was so important to Edison that he made publicly disparaging comments about his rivals as persons, not just as vendors of inferior technology. This, in turn, left his competitors wondering why he had cast off the restraint expected in civilized competition. When George Westinghouse read in the newspaper that Edison had called him a “shyster,” Westinghouse’s feelings were “very much hurt,” or so he said when he bumped into Edison’s attorney.

Westinghouse faced a genuine crisis. Feeks’s death, the calls for burying power lines, and Edison’s personal attacks added up to a public relations mess for his company. Rather than remaining quiet and hoping that this bad weather would blow over, Westinghouse decided to speak to the press and try to put a better face on his business than Edison had drawn. He could not avoid talking about Feeks, so he argued that direct current, which was used on telegraph wires, was fully capable of inflicting the horrible burns suffered by the unfortunate lineman. The danger came not from the particular form of current but from inadequate insulation. If properly shielded, overhead wires were perfectly safe, he said. The public had been stirred up by “the active work of the managers of the Edison Company and of Mr. Edison, who have sought to turn the present situation to their advantage.”

The defensive position that Westinghouse found himself in is illustrated by the way he contradicted himself as he tried to defend overhead wires. The wires that were supposedly safe were also the same wires that he had to admit, yes, posed dangers, yes, but dangers of various kinds had to be accepted throughout the modern city. Westinghouse said, “If all things involving the use of power were to be prohibited because of the danger to life, then the cable cars, which have already killed and maimed a number of people, would have to be abolished.” Say good-bye to trains, too, he added, because of accidents at road crossings.

Westinghouse was not able to form these few off-the-cuff remarks into a fully developed response. Edison, however, seized an opportunity to further strengthen his position with a long article titled “Dangers of Electric Lighting” that was published under his name by the
North American Review,
which had invited the piece. It repeated the same arguments that he had been making and is notable as the zenith of Edison’s influence in the battle of the currents. At that point, he was fully justified in believing that he had the ear of the world and could make everyone understand the superiority of his system of power and light.

His apparent mastery of the debate was short lived, however. The next month, the
North American Review
gave Westinghouse an opportunity to respond. Having gained some experience in public combat, and with some time to do a little research, he brought new material and fresh counterarguments to the debate. Statistics bolstered his case. In 1888, sixty-four people were killed in streetcar accidents in New York, and twenty-three in gas-related accidents—and only five by accidental electrocution. He pointed out that within an individual’s own home, “there is not on record a solitary instance of a person having been injured or shocked from the consumers’ current of an alternating system.” Don’t underestimate the power of direct current, he warned readers; he had personally “witnessed the roasting of a large piece of fresh beef by a direct continuous current of less than one hundred volts within two minutes.” He invited readers to connect a tin pan to the electrical wires of a home supplied by Edison’s company and reproduce the experiment for themselves.

Westinghouse also dredged up an old interview with Edison and found this quotation: “I don’t care so much for a fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.” Westinghouse suggested to readers that it was this, not the supposed merits of Edison’s own system, that drove Edison to exaggerate the dangers inherent in the systems of others and to minimize them in his own.

The most damning argument against Edison’s system was what the marketplace said about the relative merits and shortcomings of the two rival systems. Those customers who had a choice were voting in favor of alternating current, the less-expensive option. In only three years of operation, Westinghouse’s company had five times as many customers as Edison’s older company, testimony to the public’s view that Westinghouse offered lighting that he described as “safe, cheap, efficient.”

American consumers ignored the question of whether alternating current was truly “safe.” As historian Mark Essig points out, the public simply became blasé about the accidents that continued to occur. Even in the 1920s, when electricity finally became widely available in homes, “about 1,000 Americans died annually from electric shock.” Notwithstanding, the appeal of “cheap” electricity was powerful, and alternating current was considerably cheaper because Edison’s direct current required progressively more expensive investments in copper wiring the farther the system extended out from the generating plant. In 1889, customers were voting every day, and the results showed a landslide victory for Edison’s new competition.

It is probably not mere coincidence that 1880 was also the year that Edison began to withdraw his own financial stake in the industry he had founded. Starved for cash, he was receptive to an offer to gain liquidity, selling his stake in the electric light to a syndicate of investors led by Henry Villard and financed largely by German concerns. What the public saw was a newly formed company, the Edison General Electric Company, which consolidated into a single organization the Edison Electric Light Company and Edison’s various manufacturing companies that supplied the industry.

For his stake, Edison was given shares valued at $3.5 million. In his official biography written decades later, Edison depicted the episode as coming about from being too successful; orders had simply swamped his undercapitalized company. Insull had suggested that they might run into difficulties because of lack of capital, so when the offer to be bought out came, “we concluded it was better to be sure than be sorry, so we sold out for a large sum.” When Insull had his own turn to talk about the same events in his own memoirs, he termed the value of the shares granted to Edison as “a small amount compared to the great value to the world at large of the work done by Mr. Edison” in the field.

The shares in the new company gave Edison an opportunity to cash out, and he did so, liquidating 90 percent of his stake. Why did he divest almost all of his holdings, rather than simply sell slowly, diversifying at a steady rate that would, at the same time, reassure investors that he had not lost faith in the company? He wrote Villard afterward that he had cashed out because he had been “under a desperate strain for money for 22 years.” Even as he continued to bark in public as loudly as ever at alternating current, he was poised to enter “fresh and more congenial fields of work,” he told Villard. Iron-ore mining was going to be his new passion. Insull wrote a colleague that Edison was “practically intoxicated by the business.”

Villard had tried to persuade Edison to agree to merge his electrical companies with alternating-current rival Thomson-Houston. The two companies’ patent holdings were complementary and consolidation in the industry seemed inevitable. But Edison could not accept it, for reasons that were not obvious. It was not the thought of joining hands with the very interests he was campaigning against that was too much to bear. Nor was he passionately committed to his own company, even though this served as a convenient pretext to object to a merger with a better-managed, better-capitalized company. Were Villard to proceed, Edison told him “my usefulness as an inventor [would be] gone,” arguing that it was the spur of competition that provided the fuel he needed to persevere.

In fact, Edison was not interested in sticking around, merger or no. His direct current was going to lose the battle of the currents, and he could not accept graciously a prize for first runner-up. He had cashed out his own personal position and was ready to move on to new projects, but he wanted to leave on his own terms, not someone else’s. He also wanted to make certain that his Orange laboratory would continue to receive financial support. Consolidating his various companies into one, while spurning the Thomson-Houston offer, allowed him to do what he wished.

The new Edison General Electric Company appointed Villard as president, and Insull as vice president and, effectively, the chief operations officer. Edison had assumed that his laboratory would be supported as it had been previously, receiving $250,000 annually from his various companies. But after Edison General Electric was organized, the multiple sources of funds were reduced to a single company, and that one was willing to pay only $85,000. Edison told Villard that the shortfall “has produced absolute discouragement.”

By withdrawing his own financial stake in the industry, Edison discovered too late that he had lost considerable power in directing his own affairs at the lab, too. As a contract researcher, he had to do the bidding of others. When the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, which were the Edison system’s licensees, convened in the summer of 1889, the members spoke in the hoarse voice of the desperate: They begged Edison General Electric to supply association members with an alternating current system as soon as possible, within six months at the latest. Insull was fully supportive and assigned the task of developing the system to the person who was under contract to perform research and new product development: Thomas Edison, the world’s most vociferous opponent of alternating current.

One year after agreeing to deliver the new system within six months, Edison had failed to do so. Insull, not bothering to hide his anger, wrote Edison with the tone used when addressing a subordinate whose recent performance was wanting: “I would like to know definitely from you what I can promise to our District Managers throughout the country.” He was not going to accept hollow assurances that would not be fulfilled. “I think that it is particularly important that in our new organization any promises I make to our people should be absolutely adhered to, and I shall be glad if you will bear this in mind when you reply to this letter.” Edison did not like being spoken to in this manner. He had his secretary write a short note saying that he had perused it but was “unable to reply fully to it at the moment.”

Edison was working on the project, albeit slowly. He may have dragged his feet hoping that the first state-sponsored experiment in electrocution would publicize the menacing aspect of alternating current, making it possible to imagine that its triumph was not certain after all. The convicted murderer William Kemmler exhausted his appeals, and the date of his execution was set for 6 August 1890. Here, at last, was the moment Edison had anticipated: the lethal nature of alternating current would be demonstrated in dramatic fashion. Only the warden of the state prison in Auburn and the individuals he had invited as official witnesses would actually see the execution, but reporters and crowds showed up anyhow. To accommodate the press, Western Union set up a temporary dispatch office at the freight station. Curiosity seekers gathered around the prison walls, and atop trees, rooftops, and telegraph poles, hoping to catch a glimpse of the condemned man.

“They say I am afraid to die,” Kemmler said to one of his jailers after breakfast that morning, “but they will find that I ain’t.” Indeed, when he was led to the room with the chair constructed to bring his life to an abbreviated end, he remained calm. As the warden adjusted the headpiece and the eleven straps that crossed his body and limbs, Kemmler tested each one and advised the jailer when a strap needed adjustment. “Warden, just make that a little tighter,” he asked at one point. “We want everything all right, you know.”

PHOTO INSERT