Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [116]
Although he was under contract to develop electrical equipment for Edison General Electric, Thomas Edison was not used to receiving such peremptory marching orders. He nonetheless complied. He and Kennelly worked on a transformer in August, and during the fall they began designing a generator as well. Before long they had a working alternating system.2
In the fall of 1889, during the frenzied months of the electric wire panic, Edison's goal of having alternating current banned had looked surprisingly attainable, but one year later all of his lobbying efforts had ended in failure. Although he still had doubts about the safety and efficiency of the technology—as late as 1891 he would say that "the use of the alternating current is unworthy of practical men"—he conceded that his firm needed an alternating system. He also tempered his rhetoric. "The death rate [from high-voltage alternating current] will be reduced to a minimum, or rather there will be none at all," the inventor told a reporter in November 1890. "The electric wires—I mean the small, cheap, high tension wires—ought to come under strict inspection laws." A year after having advocated a complete ban, Edison claimed that the safety of alternating current could be assured simply through proper regulation.3
ALTHOUGH EDISON'S STATEMENTS indicated that the battle of the currents was inching toward a conclusion, competition among the leading electric light firms remained fierce. Edison, Westinghouse, and Thomson-Houston were fighting city-by-city skirmishes for lighting and electric streetcar contracts, and patent litigation grew feverish. Competition took a heavy toll on the firms, which struggled to remain profitable. The situation turned darker in the fall of 1890, when the failure of a major London brokerage house roiled world money markets. Westinghouse was forced to reorganize and find new investors, and Edison General struggled to remain solvent.4
The crisis confirmed Edison General director Henry Villard's view that competition—with its expensive takeovers, patent litigation, and price slashing—was killing the electrical industry. Villard and Charles Coffin, the head of Thomson-Houston, had discussed a merger as early as 1889, but Thomas Edison refused to go along. "If you make the coalition, my usefulness as an inventor is gone," he told Villard. "My service wouldn't be worth a penny. I can only invent under powerful incentive. No competition means no invention." Edison knew how much money his business demanded, but he clung defiantly to an earlier model of entrepreneurial culture, one based on pride in craft, in which the inventor's identity and the company's identity were one and the same. Edison managed to hold off Villard's merger plans in 1889 and again early in 1890.5
After the financial crisis of late 1890, Villard again explored consolidation with Thomson-Houston. Again, the talks went nowhere, but this time the major obstacle was not Thomas Edison's pride but the lamp patent infringement suit against Westinghouse, which in July 1891 was decided in Edison's favor. The presiding judge ruled that Edison had invented the first commercially viable incandescent lamp by placing a high-resistance carbon filament in a one-piece glass globe exhausted of air. The decision, which gave Edison interests a monopoly over a central element of all electrical systems, convinced them they could outcompete their rivals and therefore did not need to merge. That confidence proved misplaced. Both Thomson-Houston and