Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [160]
7. New York World, New York Herald, New York Tunes, January 5,1903. Electrocuting an Elephant, (Thomas A. Edison, 1903). The film was first advertised in the New York Clipper, January 17, 1903, p. 1052, as Electrocution of the Baby Elephant, 'Topsy' (Topsy was in fact more than thirty years old). A clip from this Edison film appears in Errol Morris's documentary, Mr. Death (Lion's Gate Films, 1999). In 1901 officials of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo tried to kill the rogue elephant Jumbo II. Electricians gave the elephant six shocks at 2,200 volts, but the "shocks had simply tickled him." New York Herald, November 9,10,1901.
8. For New Jersey's first electrocution, see Newark Evening News, December 11, 1907; Trenton Evening Times, December 11,1907. On Davis, see New York Times, April 29, 1890; New York Sun, April 30, 1890, July 8, 1891; New York Tunes, August 6,1890; Thomas P. Dimitroff and Lois S. Janes, History of the Coming-Painted Post Area (Corning, N.Y.: Corning Area Bicentennial Committee, 1977), 147; Robert G. Elliott, Agent of Death: The Memoirs of an Executioner (New York: Dutton, 1940), 51.
9. Quotations from Adams Electric Company to E. F. Morgan, March 30,1908; Adams Electric to E. F. Morgan, September 25, 1908, Virginia folder, Miscellaneous Correspondence folder, Carl F. Adams Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries (hereinafter cited as "Adams Papers"). Also see North Carolina and South Carolina folders, Adams Papers; "Trentonian Built Death Chair at Prison Here; Consulted with Edison, then Went to Work," unidentified, undated clipping (probably 1936), Adams Papers; Charles V. Carrington, "The History of Electrocution in the State of Virginia," Virginia Medical Semi Monthly (November 11, 1910): 353-54; Daily State Gazette (Trenton), August 20, 1910. When a state official in Canton, China, wanted to adopt electrocution, his repre-sentatives wrote to Montgomery Ward of Chicago, apparently under the impression that electric chairs might be available by mail order, alongside washing machines and dining room tables. Montgomery Ward referred the Chinese official to the Virginia penitentiary, which referred the matter to Adams, who offered an electrocution plant for $3,000 plus all expenses for his trip to China to install it. J. A. Cheony to Virginia State Penitentiary, January 14, 1914; Adams Electric Company to Cheony, February 28, 1913, China, Kansas, Kentucky folder, Adams Papers.
10. James W. Clarke, "Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South," British Journal of Political Science 28 (1998): 269-89; Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black. America (New York: Random House, 2002). For the phonograph recording of the lynching, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 159.
11. For articles explicitly promoting capital punishment as an alternative to lynching, see "Lynch Law and Its Remedy," Yale Law Journal 8 (October 1898): 335-40; J. E. Cutler, "Capital Punishment and Lynching," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 29 (1907): 622-25. Virginia's prison surgeon preferred the electric chair because, he said, it prevented its victims from finding glory on the gallows: "A negro likes nothing better than to be the central figure, be it a cake-walk or a hanging." Carrington, "The History of Electrocution in the State of Virginia," 353. For death penalty statistics, see William J. Bowers, Legal Homicide: Death as Punishment in America, 1864-1982 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), appendix A.
12. Banner, Death Penalty, 196-202, 349, n. 36; Bowers,