Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [20]
Electricity was also administered for darker purposes. In 1878 the Ohio state penitentiary began using strong jolts from an induction coil to punish inmates, applying the electrodes "to the bare skin of the convict in various places." The coil "is so small that it looks like a toy," the New York Sun reported, "but it makes the subject of punishment yell sometimes, as though he was badly hurt."13
Killing experiments, first attempted by Benjamin Franklin and others in the 1750s, continued in the nineteenth century. The British physician B. C. Brodie killed a guinea pig with a Leyden jar in 1827 and concluded that in victims of lightning strikes "there is an instantaneous and complete destruction of the vital principle in every part of the animal machine." Fifty years later Benjamin Ward Richardson, a noted British physician, applied sparks from a big induction coil to various animals. A frog survived twenty-five shocks with no obvious ill effects, and a rabbit emerged from thirty jolts with only singed fur. When Richardson coupled the induction coil with a large Leyden jar, however, he managed to kill pigeons, reporting that after receiving such a shock a bird will appear "perfectly, livingly, natural, and yet it will be dead. No mark will be left on its body."14
Edison's inductorium, a device for giving mild electric shocks, was sold as a cure for rheumatism and as "an inexhaustible fount of amusement."
Richardson, like Brodie, was investigating the physiological effects of lightning strikes, but others became interested in electrical killing for other reasons. In November and December of 1879, as Edison was preparing to unveil his incandescent lamp, the New York Herald published a series of articles on the possibility of executing condemned criminals with electricity. The Herald printed no comments from Edison on the matter, but the inventor's friend Dr. George Beard endorsed the idea. Beard claimed that sending a large Leyden jar shock from ear to ear would kill a man "in the small fraction of an instant."15
CHAPTER 5
"Down to the Last Penny"
SHORTLY AFTER Edison's demonstration of incandescent lighting on New Year's Eve 1879, an English expert published his view of the matter in the Saturday Review. "What a happy man Mr. Edison must be! Three times within the short space of eighteen months he has had the glory of finally and triumphantly solving a problem of world-wide interest. It is true that each time the problem has been the same, and that it comes up again after each solution, fresh, smiling, and unsolved, ready to receive its next death-blow. But. . . there is no reason why he should not for the next twenty years completely solve the problem of the electric light twice a year without in any way interfering with its interest or novelty." After crying wolf so many times, Edison deserved the mockery, but the doubts that greeted his announcement were quite genuine. Many engineers considered an inexpensive electric light to be a mathematical impossibility, something like a perpetual motion machine. One called Edison "a fraud, a willful deceiver of the public" who was interested only in booming his stock price. The humor magazine Puck offered a backhanded defense: "Edison is not a humbug. He is a man of a type common enough in this country—a smart, persevering, sanguine, ignorant, show-off American. He can do a great deal and he thinks he can do everything."1
The criticism infuriated Edison, but before reporters he maintained his genial public persona. Early in 1880 he announced plans to build his first commercial lighting station in New York, the city where he had made