Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [1]
"What amount of electrical energy," Poste continued, "do you think would be sufficient to produce instant, painless, death in all cases?"
"One thousand volts," Edison said.
"What experiments have you observed in your laboratory bearing upon that question?"
"Only of horses and dogs."
Edison referred to a series of tests that had taken place over the previous year at his New Jersey laboratory. The inventor's assistants attached electrodes to dogs—about two dozen in all, bought at a quarter a head from neighborhood boys—and killed them with powerful jolts of electricity. Six calves and two horses also died in the experiments.
"Now, Mr. Edison," the attorney said, "in your opinion, can an electrical current be applied to the human body by artificial means in such a manner as to produce death in every case?"
"Yes, sir."
"Instant death?"
"Yes, sir."
"Painless?"
"Yes, sir."2
A year and a half earlier New York State had abolished hanging and decreed that condemned criminals would be executed with electricity. The first murderer condemned under the new law filed an appeal, claiming that electrical execution was a cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. A judge ordered hearings to collect expert testimony on the matter, and Edison agreed to testify in support of the new method.
Electricity had long been considered a mysterious, miraculous force—telegraph operators sent it zipping along slender copper wires, showmen amused fairgoers by giving them mild electric shocks, and doctors claimed that the current could cure illness and revive victims of drowning or suffocation. It had even been used to kill: In the 1750s Benjamin Franklin slaughtered chickens and turkeys with static electricity.
But using electricity to execute criminals was unprecedented. One newspaper declared that state officials had been swept up in an electrical craze and were "merely endeavoring to show that there was no end to the wonders of electricity."3
Although in 1887 Edison had said he would "join heartily in an effort to totally abolish capital punishment," a year later he became the most powerful advocate of this new method of scientific killing. Like other defenders of the electrical execution law, he claimed that a powerful current would be far more humane than hanging.4
Edison's critics, however, believed there was more to the story. In the hallways outside the hearing room and in the pages of newspapers and electrical journals, insiders alleged that Edison's support for electrocution was motivated by a devious scheme to gain control of the electrical industry; that an Edison competitor was spending tens of thousands of dollars to defeat the electrocution law and foil Edison's plans; that the convicted murderer whose life was on the line had become a pawn in a bitter industrial struggle.5
If any of these rumors were true, Edison did not let on. Killing with electricity was simply "a good idea," he said. "It will be so lightning like quick that the criminal can't suffer much."6
CHAPTER 1
Early Sparks
THE ANCIENT GREEKS were the first to record the observation that amber, after being rubbed, attracted bits of straw or cloth. Around 1600 the Englishman William Gilbert noted that materials such as diamond and glass shared amber's attractive qualities. He coined a new word, electric, based on elektron, Greek for amber. An electric was a substance that, when rubbed, drew light objects to itself; electricity was the property shared by these substances.1
After Gilbert the study of electricity languished for a century or so until it was taken up by members of London's Royal Society, a new association devoted to the study of the natural world. Using hollow glass tubes thirty inches long and one inch in diameter, Royal Society members produced the strongest electrical effects ever witnessed. In 1729 Stephen Gray, an experimenter with the society, corked the ends of his tube to keep dust from being sucked inside. After rubbing the glass, he noticed to his surprise that feathers were attracted