Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [111]
CHAPTER 21
After Kemmler
NEWSPAPERS ignored the ban on printing details of electrocutions. In an article head1 lined "Far Worse Than Hanging," the Times asserted that "no convicted murderer of modern times has been made to suffer as Kemmler suffered." Recalling the electric wire panic of the previous fall, the Herald noted that Kemmler suffered the same fate as John Feeks, "the lineman who was slowly roasted to death in the sight of thousands." In London the Standard described the execution as "a disgrace to civilization." "Kemmler's Death was Disgusting," the Buffalo Express stated plainly.1
The suspicions that electricity might stun rather than kill had never entirely been laid to rest. The warden had forbidden Dr. Fell from trying to resuscitate Kemmler with his Fell Motor; to make sure Kemmler would not awaken spontaneously, the doctors chose to wait three hours after the execution before performing the autopsy. As Southwick explained, they wanted to explode the notion "that if the electric shock did not kill him the surgeon's knives would."2
The postmortem revealed that a large part of the brain had been "carbonized"—burned to a crisp black—while the skin of the lower back exhibited a burn four inches in diameter. One doctor reported that the spinal muscles under the burn were "cooked, like 'overdone beef,' throughout their entire thickness." When the autopsy was concluded, the physicians took samples of blood, brain, and spinal cord to study at leisure in their own laboratories. Kemmler's corpse was put inside a pine coffin and driven at midnight to the convict burying ground that adjoined Auburn's Fort Hill Cemetery. There the coffin was reopened and, in accordance with the law, a barrel of quicklime poured over the body. After nailing the coffin shut again, the sextons lowered it into the ground and covered it with earth.3
The only known photograph of the first electric chair. Note the brackets beneath the seat that held the footrest, which was never used. The chair was replaced by a new design in 1893.
Bourke Cockran described Kemmler's death as "a sort of ghastly triumph" for him, because it seemed to confirm his arguments against the method. Some believed that Cockran or his Westinghouse employers had sabotaged Kemmler's execution. "Yes, there might have been corrupt reasons for this," Dr. Spitzka said. "The interests of the company who manufactured the dynamos would certainly be advanced . . . if this execution was a botch." Warden Durston also suspected "crooked work," and the Herald proposed "either that the dynamos were faulty or that the interested company had bribed some one to make them seem so."4
No one ever proved sabotage. The charges simply distracted attention from the more likely cause of the problems: shoddy preparations. Durston's decision to put the chair and the switchboard in different rooms meant that the men who decided when to turn the current off and on had no idea how strong the current was running. Moreover, the switchboard and the dynamo were located more than 1,000 feet apart, and the switchboard room could communicate with the dynamo room only through a crude electric bell signal system. The men in the dynamo room had no outgoing communication system at all, so they could not inform those in the death chamber about problems with the machinery.
And there had been problems. The dynamo rested on a wooden floor that vibrated up and down more than an inch when the dynamo ran at full power. The leather belts linking steam engine to dynamo were brand-new and had not been used enough to get the stretch out. When Kemmler was thrown into