Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [112]
WITNESSES DIFFERED WIDELY in their assessments of the execution. Alfred Southwick flatly denied the reported horrors of the death chamber: "A party of ladies could have been in that room and not known what was going on, so silent was the process—not a cry from the subject, not a sound." Other witnesses claimed that it had been a gruesome spectacle, but the question of whether Kemmler had suffered remained in dispute. "I will see that bound figure and hear those sounds until my dying day," said the electrician Charles Huntley, who came to the reasonable conclusion that Kemmler's moaning was evidence of great pain. However, most of the physicians present believed that Kemmler had suffered no pain whatsoever, because he was knocked unconscious at the start of the first shock. They did not explain how they came to this conclusion.6
Some were comforted by this claim and saw in it hope for the future of electrocution. "The failure was due not to the system but to the bungling, inefficient way in which the execution was managed," the Herald claimed. In the view of Thomas Edison, the electric chair was like any other new device, requiring a few trials to work out the bugs. The next electrocution, Edison predicted, "will be accomplished instantly and without the scene at Auburn today"7
George Westinghouse disagreed. "It has been a brutal affair," he told a reporter. "They could have done better with an axe."8
In the weeks following the execution, more people agreed with Westinghouse than with Edison. Many believed that no one else would ever die in an electric chair. Dr. Spitzka, despite his assertions that Kemmler died quickly, nonetheless predicted, "There will never be another electrocution." According to the World, "The first experiment in electric execution should be the last." Newspapers all across the country—the Philadelphia Times, Terre Haute Express, Indianapolis Standard, and Boston Globe—agreed with this judgment. The Sun urged the state legislature to repeal the law, then acidly added, "Civilization will find other lines on which to manifest its progress."9
In the official execution report, filed in October, Dr. MacDonald described electrocution as "the most efficient and least painful method that has yet been devised." He proposed boosting the execution voltage 257 to 2,000 volts and placing the voltmeter in the same room as the chair. MacDonald also urged the state to build a special dynamo for the purpose in order to avoid doing "injustice to any electrical lighting company"10
Also in the fall of 1890, other physicians present at Kemmler's death published their views on the matter in medical journals. According to Dr. Spitzka, Kemmler was "dead, in the usual sense of the word, after the first passage of the current." The blood flowed from Kemmler's cut not because he had a pulse but because the electricity broke down its structure and inhibited normal postmortem coagulation; the spattering mucus and saliva were caused by postmortem muscle contractions; and the apparent breathing was simply a release of air that had been trapped in Kemmler's lungs by current-induced muscle contractions. Spitzka's claim about the breathing contradicted the reports of every other witness, who reported that Kemmler had inhaled as well as exhaled. Dr. Fell offered an ingenious explanation that played on the uncertainties concerning the definition of death. In Kemmler's execution, Dr. Fell said, "effective