Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [125]
In 2001 the Georgia Supreme Court deemed electrocution unconstitutionally cruel and replaced it with lethal injection. In a court opinion, the justices quoted with approval from the 1885 speech in which New York governor David Hill said that "the science of the present day" might provide a "less barbarous" method of execution. Those words had led to the creation of the death penalty commission and to New York's electrical execution law. Just as hanging was deemed unacceptable in the 1880s, the Georgia justices wrote, so now, at the start of the twenty-first century, "electrocution offends the evolving standards of decency that characterize a mature, civilized, society"22
As of April 2003, 4,432 men and women had died in the electric chair in the United States. Nebraska was the only state with electrocution as its sole method of execution. A few more prisoners may be electrocuted, but lethal injection has emerged as the method of the future. The era of the electric chair has come to an end.23
*In 1896 a white boy at a southern fair paid a nickel to hear the Edison phonograph and was treated to a recording of two black men being burned alive.
EPILOGUE
The New Spectacle
of Death
SHORTLY AFTER World War I, when he was about seventy years old, Thomas Edison began taking annual camping trips with Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and the naturalist John Burroughs. A story was told of a time the party's vehicle broke down in West Virginia. A local mechanic took a look under the hood and pronounced the problem to be mechanical. "I am Henry Ford," the automaker said, "and I say the motor itself is in perfect order." The mechanic then suggested a short in the electrical system. "I am Thomas A. Edison," came the response, "and I say the wiring is all right." The mechanic then peered skeptically at the white-bearded Burroughs and said, "And I suppose that must be Santa Claus."1
Although still very much alive, Edison had entered the realm of the mythical, occupying an outsized place in the American imagination. Until his death at age eighty-four in 1931, he continued to experiment; his most successful later ventures involved the production of cement (8,000 tons of which helped build Yankee Stadium) and the manufacture of electrical storage batteries. In 1913 readers of Independent magazine named him the "most useful" man in the United States. There could be few higher compliments in a nation so earnestly devoted to the practical, but the award did Edison something of a disservice. His greatest feats lay in coupling the useful with the magical—a machine that talked, light without fire—in ways that transformed the lives of everyone in the modern world.2
In his later years Edison gave a great deal of thought to his place in history. He collaborated on an official biography, published in 1910, and in an endless succession of newspaper interviews he reminisced—with great enthusiasm and intermittent accuracy—about his life of invention. There was one topic, however, that Edison omitted from the biography and almost never mentioned to reporters: his role in the creation of the electric chair. During a 1905 interview, he broke his silence on the matter and revealed that his views had changed little since 1889: He still believed capital punishment was a "barbarity," and he still considered electrocution to be the quickest and therefore most humane of methods. When asked whether he had invented the electric chair, Edison grew indignant: "I did not invent such an instrument."3
Edison in 1895.
New York's introduction of electrical execution was a momentous change that required the political, medical, and technological skills of many men, including Alfred Southwick, Elbridge Gerry, Governor David Hill, Harold Brown,