Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [29]
FOR A TIME IT SEEMED that Edison might follow the Jumbo dynamo across the Atlantic. In January 1882 the family doctor warned Edison that his wife, Mary, "seems very nervous and despondent and thinks that she will never recover," and he advised Edison to take her to Europe. Mary suffered from a medley of ill-defined health problems, and marital neglect did not help the situation. Edison's first love was always his laboratory, with home serving primarily as a source of meals. The couple's daughter later said, "Seeing my Father on Sunday was not enough for Mother," but often she was lucky to see him even then. Her health declined further after the 1878 birth of her third child, Will—who weighed in at twelve pounds—but her husband remained as sparing with his sympathy as with his time. In one lab notebook Edison doodled his wife's name several times, transforming her maiden name—Stilwell—into "Stillsick." The doctor's warning early in 1882, however, had frightened Edison. A European vacation seemed excessive to the inventor, but he agreed to take Mary and the children to Florida for a couple of months, and her health improved.12
Edison and his family left Florida and moved back to Menlo Park just as the spring thaw was making it possible for his work crews to start laying feeders and mains again. Reports of the Edison system's triumphs in London appeared in the American press, calling further attention to the delays in New York. The London station buzzed to life so quickly because it was a temporary exhibition only, and Edison therefore allowed the conductors to be strung along a viaduct rather than laboriously buried underground. Most New Yorkers, though, knew only that the Londoners were enjoying the new technology while they were not. Residents of the lighting district grumbled that for more than a year the interiors of their homes had been festooned with useless electric wires, "objects of neither ornament nor utility," as the New York Times described them.13
EDISON WAS STILL CONFIDENT that the decision to place conductors underground was the right one, but his reasons had shifted. Originally motivated by a desire for reliability, he soon became convinced that safety was an equally important concern.
In Edison's propaganda battle with the gas lighting companies, the safety issue was an important weapon. Even gas companies had to admit that electric light was cleaner and steadier than gaslight, so they played up electricity's ability to start fires, such as those at the Vanderbilt and Morgan mansions. In response, the Edison Electric Light Company's Bulletin, distributed to stockholders and the press, highlighted the dangers of gas: house fires, explosions at gas plants, and asphyxiation by leaking gas pipes.14
Before long, many of the warnings issued by Edison Electric referred not to illuminating gas but to electric arc lighting. While the Edison system used only about ioo volts, arc lights required as much as ten times that, and this potent current had begun to claim lives. A carpenter died in Lyon, France, in 1879, n d the following year two more men died from arc light shocks—one aboard a Russian yacht and another in Birmingham, England. In 1882, a year after Lemuel Smith in Buffalo became the first American to be killed by a dynamo, there were electrical deaths in a Pittsburgh iron mill and a Cleveland steel plant, and a lineman for an arc lighting company died dramatically atop a pole on Canal Street in Manhattan.15
When newspapers began to warn of the dangers of electric lighting, the Edison company insisted that its own system was harmless. Because its wires were underground, there was no danger that they would cross with overhead arc light cables and allow high voltages into homes and offices. Edward Johnson, the old friend of Edison's who served as vice president of Edison Electric, took the lead in promoting the safety of the company's current. Showing off for reporters one day, Johnson allowed the Edison current to flow through his body and reported that "there was no appreciable sensation whatever." Johnson