Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [136]
12. Quotations from Leslie Ward to Edison, January 18, 1882 (TAEM 50:698); Israel, Edison, 230,163. Also see Conot, Streak of Luck, 122,127,19.
13. New York. Times, March 9,1882.
14. See, for example, Edison Electric Light Company, Bulletin 6 (March 27,1882): 5-6; 7 (April 17,1882): 9; Morning Advertiser, January 5,10,1882 (TAEM 95:111-12).
15. On Edison Electric's warnings on high-voltage cables, see Edward Johnson's letter to New York Tribune, February 7, 1881 (TAEM 94:633); New York Truth, 13. March 6, 1881 (TAEM 94:629). On deaths from the current, see New York Evening Post, December 17, 1882, quoted in Payson Jones, A Power History of the Consolidated Edison System, 1878-1900 (New York: Consolidated Edison, 1940), 113; R. H. Jaffe, "Electropathology," Archives of Pathology 5 (1928): 838; New York Times, February 23, 1882; New York Herald, October 5, 8, 10, 1882. Arc lamp wires also caused fires: see New York. Evening Post, December 1,1881 (TAEM 95:44); Edison Electric Light Company, Bulletin 4 (Feb. 24,1882): 9.
16. Quotation from New York Morning Advertiser, April 12,1882 (TAEM 95:182). Also see New York Morning Post, April 12,1882 (TAEM 95:183); Journal of Gas Lighting, February 21, 1882 (TAEM 95:142); Edison Electric Light Company, Bulletin 7 (April 17,1882): 3-4, 7-8; 8 (April 27,1882): 11; 10 (June 5,1882): 4-5.
17. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 1:380-81.
18. Friedel and Israel, Edison's Electric Light, 219-20; Josephson, Edison, 257; Jones, Power History, 133.
19. Scientific American 47 (August 26,1882): 130.
20. New York Herald, New York Tribune, New York Sun, New York Times, September 5,1882; Jones, Power History, 157-214, 293-94.
21. New York Herald, September 5,1882 (TAEM 24:82).
22. New York. Sun, September 5,1882.
CHAPTER 7. THE HANGING RITUAL
1. Quotation from T. Commerford Martin, Forty Years of Edison Service (New York: Press of the New York Edison Company, 1922), 66. Also see New York Times, August 25,1882; Judge 2 (September 9,1882): 2,16.
2. Quotation from Edison to C. F. Pond, August 22, 1882. Also see Pond to Edison, August 17,1882 (TAEM 60:491, 81:816).
3. Quotation from Manufacturer and Builder 12 (February 1880): 39.
4. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Peter Spierenburg, "The Body and the State: Early Modern Europe," in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, ed. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49-77; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).
5. Spierenburg, "The Body and the State," 33-36.
6. Quotation from Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 22-29.
7. This account of Strang's crime and execution draws on the following sources: Albany Argus and City Gazette and Albany Daily Advertiser, August 25,27,1827; Authentic Confession of Jesse Strang (New York: E. M. Murden and A. Ming, 1827); Confession of Jesse Strang (Albany: John B. Van Steenbergh, 1827); P. R. Hamblin, United States Criminal History: Being a True Account of the Most Horrid Murders, Piracies, HighWay Robberies, &c, Together with the Lives, Trials, Confessions and Executions of the Criminals. Compiled from the Criminal Records of the Counties (Fayetteville, N.Y.: Mason & De Puy, 1836), 258-66. Louis C. Jones, Murder at Cherry Hill: The Strang-Whipple Case, 1827 (Albany: History Cherry Hill, 1982). White hanging shrouds were common as late as the 1820s but mostly disappeared by midcentury, replaced by common black suits: see Thomas M. McDade, The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), xxxi.
8. Quotations from Albany Argus and City Gazette, August 25, 1827; "The Order for the Burial of the Dead," Book of Common Prayer, According