Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [101]
The bill died in committee not long after Edison boarded his train for North Carolina. To the Virginians, Edison's motives seemed transparent. "Though purporting to guard the interest of the people of Virginia," one opponent said, the bill "was in reality a continuation of the struggle for supremacy of two electrical companies." Richmond, like most Virginia cities, was lit by alternating current, but the allegedly lethal current had yet to kill a man there. "Why should the promoters of the bill come here from New York and New Jersey, where persons had lost their lives by pure carelessness?"15
Ohio proposed similar restrictions on alternating current a month later. On Edison's orders, Arthur Kennelly packed up an alternating generator and took it to Columbus. The legislative committee considering the bill gathered at the local Edison lighting station, where Kennelly and Harold Brown quickly dispatched a calf and a horse. "Committee evidently impressed," Kennelly reported to Edison. The Ohio bill failed nonetheless.16
When New York's legislative session started in Albany in January 1890, the state senate's Committee on Laws proposed an investigation into the matter of electrical safety. Considering the carnage in New York City the previous fall, it seemed a reasonable undertaking. The newspapers, however, familiar with the rampant corruption in the legislature, believed that bribery was the true motivating force. In an article headlined "Electricity and the Spoilsmen," the Herald called attention to "two very fat birds known as the Edison and Westing-house roosters. Both are more willing to be plucked than to be slaughtered. It is well known that either of these birds is willing to give up a great deal of 'corn' rather than see the other fattened by legislative preference." The Times declared that the senators leading the investigation were quick "to grasp a matter that is agitating the public mind, and bend it to conform with their personal interests."17
The committee's hearings, which stretched through March and April, were a tedious and predictable affair, with both Westinghouse and Edison producing lawyers and experts testifying in precisely the way everyone expected that they would. The hearings could not even rely on the excitement of an appearance by Edison, who was still vacationing in North Carolina. One senator complained that the hearings without Edison were "like 'Hamlet' with Hamlet left out."18 But the committee's investigation was more farce than tragedy As the press saw it, the legislators were stuffing their pockets with bribes and neglecting the safety of the public. The lawmakers had hijacked an issue of great public concern, stalled any action through the expedient of endless hearings, and waited for public outrage to dissipate. Fortunately for them, no spectacular electrical accidents took place during the hearings to reawaken public fear. Edison's campaign to ban alternating current was dying with a whimper.19
AS THE STATE SENATE conducted its bumbling investigation into electricity regulation, one clause of the electrical execution act came under attack. Many saw the "gag law" provision—which barred newspapers from printing any execution details beyond that bare fact that it had taken place—as an unconstitutional violation of press freedom. The Electrical Review's editor worried that "secrecy would enable the executioners to cover up any blunders," while the New York Press editor expressed the darker fear that scientists