Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [122]
THE SAME MESSAGE spread through more popular venues. In 1901 Thomas Edison's motion picture company released Execution of Czolgosz, a film reenactment of the electrocution of President William McKinley's assassin. In the film, an actor playing Leon Czolgosz was strapped into an electric chair. The current was turned on and off three times in rapid succession, and each time he reared back and then relaxed. After the third shock, a doctor checked his heart with a stethoscope, found him dead, and gave a curt nod of satisfaction. The whole process took less than ten seconds. The film, which enjoyed enormous success, brought alive the fantasy of the quick, clean death that supporters of the electric chair had long promoted, while omitting the gruesome details that marked real electrocutions.6
Two years later, Edison's film company filmed an actual electrocution—but not of a human being. Topsy, a rogue Coney Island circus elephant, was condemned to death in 1903. Her owners proposed hanging her from a scaffold with a huge rope and pulley, but the ASPCA objected. Instead, Topsy was fitted with copper-lined wooden sandals on her right front and back left legs, and the sandals were wired to a dynamo at the local Edison lighting plant. As a Sunday crowd of 1,500 people looked on, 6,000 volts of electricity were sent through Topsy. She stiffened, then crashed over on her right side, dead. Cameramen from the Edison Manufacturing Company caught the execution on film. As with the Czolgosz film, Electrocuting an Elephant was distributed across the country and watched by thousands of viewers eager to see the killing power of electricity.7
With widespread popular and scientific support, electrocution spread to more states. In 1906 New Jersey abolished hanging and a year later killed a murderer in the electric chair. Present at this execution was Edward A. Spitzka, as well as two technicians of electrical death, Edwin F. Davis and Carl F. Adams. Davis, who controlled the switchboard room at Kemmler's execution, had become New York's official electrocutioner. In 1897 he was awarded a U.S. patent for an "electrocution-chair," and he supervised the first such deaths in Ohio and Massachusetts, charging $150, plus expenses, for each execution.8
Not long after New Jersey introduced its death chair, Davis retired from the business, and Carl Adams replaced him as the entrepreneur of electrical death. As the chief electrician at the New Jersey state prison in Trenton, Adams constructed the state's electric chair, which proved so successful that Adams Electric Company had a new line of work. When Virginia became the fifth state to adopt electrocution in 1908, Adams submitted a bid to install "one complete Electrocuting Plant." The bid—$3,200—included an assurance of success: "We fully guarantee our machine to give perfect satisfaction if operated according to our instructions." Six months after the contract was signed, Adams informed Virginia officials that he would give them free of charge a newly designed component of the chair that was not specified in the contract, because "the more efficient we make the outfit the better it will be for our future business with other States." In 1912 Adams installed an electric chair at South Carolina's new death house.9
The first four states to adopt electrocution—New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, and New Jersey—were in the North and had long been at the center of America's humanitarian reform movements. The next four states to make the switch were Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and South Carolina. The electric chair assumed a different identity in the South, where the alleviation of physical suffering had never been a top priority. In the years after Reconstruction, the white population brutally enforced the disenfranchisement and social subjugation of African-Americans, about 2,000 of whom were lynched in the South between 1890 and 1910. Accused of some infraction against