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Back at Pearl Street, the head electrician closed the switch and sent current flowing through the streets. At the Morgan office, Edison, pocket watch in hand, advanced toward the switch controlling a large electrolier and turned it.20

The lamps glowed, but they seemed a bit dim—it was midafternoon on a late-summer day, and electric light could not outshine the sun. As darkness fell, the virtues of the lamp grew more apparent. The throng of Brooklynites heading down Fulton Street to the ferry were stopped in their tracks by the new lights shining in the windows of the shops. Instead of tongues of flame, they saw slender threads glowing within glass globes. According to the Herald, "From the outer darkness these points of light looked like drops of flame suspended from the jets and ready to fall at every moment."21

Edison told the gathered reporters, "I have accomplished all that I promised."22

CHAPTER 7

The Hanging Ritual

ONE RAINY AFTERNOON a few days before the official start-up of the Edison system, a policemen ran into the Pearl Street station and said there was trouble at the corner of Ann and Nassau Streets. Edison rushed to the spot, where a wet patch of pavement was giving electric shocks, and a large crowd had gathered to await the next unwary passerby. Just as Edison arrived, an old horse approached, pulling a fruit peddler and his cart. When the mare reached a certain spot on the cobblestones, she reared like a circus stallion and galloped off at a frantic clip, nearly capsizing the cart. The crowd roared with laughter, but a policeman put a stop to the fun by blocking off the street. After Edison and his men cut the current, they dug up the street and found that a company laying steam pipes had damaged the electric main, allowing electricity to escape into the wet ground.

The newspapers played the story for laughs, and so did Edison, who said that a horse seller requested a dynamo for his lot so "he could get old nags in there and make them act like thoroughbreds."1

At the low voltages of the Edison current, accidental shocks were a source of humor, but the inventor understood that higher voltages could be deadly. The three arc lighting fatalities in 1882 had raised public concerns about the safety of electricity; they also revived interest in electricity as a method of deliberate killing. In late August 1882, a week or so before the cart horse incident, Edison received a letter from a woman who wanted to know if electricity could kill livestock humanely. He told her that a dynamo could "kill instantly."2

Others claimed that electric currents might be a good way to kill human beings. In 1879 the New York Herald had run several articles on executing prisoners with electric currents, and a year later the trade journal Manufacturer and Builder proposed placing a prisoner in "an arm chair—the seat of death" and using electricity to "shock the victim into the next world." The 1870s and 1880s saw many proposals for new ways of killing condemned prisoners. The suggestions arose from the growing sentiment that hanging—the standard method of capital punishment in America—was barbaric and therefore unsuitable for a civilized nation.3

HANGING RITUALS and other elaborate methods of execution arose alongside the modern state. In medieval Europe justice had been carried out on a private basis: When a person was murdered, his family members sought vengeance upon the killer. That practice held sway as long as political power was fragmented, but by the fifteenth century a few rulers had asserted control over large regions of Europe and found that personal feuds were not conducive to orderly government. In order to gain a monopoly on violence, they decreed that justice would be a public rather than a private matter—the state, rather than the victim's family, would kill the murderer. Authorities began to stage executions as public ceremonies in which criminals were branded, whipped, beheaded, burned, drawn and quartered, or hanged. These were not gratuitous displays of violence;