Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [19]
George Beard became famous for inventing an illness. In the 1860s many of his patients complained of vague ailments that included fatigue, anxiety, indecision, and sexual debility. Whereas earlier physicians claimed the problem was all in the head, Beard deemed it physical. Borrowing freely from Galvani's theory of animal electricity, he claimed the human body manufactured a "nervous force," electrical in nature, that carried messages between the brain and the body. But people possessed limited stores of this force, and nineteenth-century life—with its trains and telegraphs and bustling cities—easily exhausted it, producing what Beard called neurasthenia, or weakness of the nerves. He treated his patients with electricity, convinced that the fluid from a battery could recharge a depleted human system. Neurasthenia—or American Nervousness, as Beard titled his popular book—became the fashionable illness of America's upper classes. Like Sigmund Freud a few years later, Beard pioneered in the study of neuroses and the social causes of mental disease. For Beard, though, neurasthenia was not a mental illness to be talked through; it was the symptom of a disordered mechanism in need of a minor manipulation and a fresh infusion of energy.9
BEARD AND THOMAS EDISON became acquainted in 1874, when Edison branched out from telegraphy into medical machinery and Beard offered to endorse the inventor's new product: the inductorium. Edison noticed that instrument makers were collecting tidy profits selling medical induction coils, which were used to transform low voltages from a battery into more powerful shocks, so he decided to enter the market himself. "This instrument should be in every family as a specific cure for rheumatism," according to an Edison advertisement that ran in more than 300 newspapers. In three months he sold more than 100 inductoriums.10
Edison's induction coil had uses beyond the medicinal. He suggested creating a burglar alarm by connecting the battery's wires to a door or window and the electrodes to a cat: "When a window is raised 45 or a door opened it will close battery ckt [circuit] & the handles being connected to a cat she will give an unearthly & diabolical yell & wake all up." This idea, contained in Edison's scribbled notes, never made it into print, but the newspaper advertisement for the inductorium does describe it as "an inexhaustible fount of amusement." Edison, who had played pranks with his induction coil in his days as a tramp telegrapher, thought administering shocks to unsuspecting victims was good fun. When he considered starting a "Scientific Toy Company," one of the devices he proposed was a "Magneto-elec-shocking Machine."11
The induction coil was a common toy even before Edison took hold of it. One electrical expert fondly recalled the "dreadful shock . . . given to our school-fellows when we became the proud possessors of our first electrical machine." The Ward B. Snyder catalog of sportsmen's goods advertised its electric battery as "an endless source of amusement for an evening party." In Salem, Massachusetts, an itinerant lecturer performed what a member of his audience described as "the old experiment of sending a sharp shock of electricity through the joined hands of some scores of people, each one of whom really believed he was the first one hit, so synchronous was the blow." At carnivals, fairgoers paid showmen for the pleasure of receiving shocks from an induction coil. Similar amusements took place at dime museums—those catchall