Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [43]
The unanimous conclusion of the report masked a furious debate that took place behind the scenes. Alfred Southwick had favored electricity from the start, and fairly early on he convinced Matthew Hale to support it as well. But Elbridge Gerry—the most famous and well-respected man on the panel—believed that an injection of morphine would be the most humane method. Without Gerry's support, electricity did not stand a chance. At the last moment, however, he abandoned his preference for poison and came out in favor of electrical execution.29
It was not Alfred Southwick who changed Gerry's mind. On December 19, 1887, just a few weeks before the commission issued its report, Thomas Edison wrote a letter to the commission advocating electrical execution. Edison's opinion shifted Gerry's vote from morphine to electricity. The great inventor was an "oracle," Gerry later explained. "I certainly had no doubt after hearing his statement."30
*Southwick had changed his mind about the painlessness of the guillotine. A year before the report was issued, he told a newspaper reporter that "the guillotine is a barbarous mode of execution. Death does not ensue instantly, as it should in such cases. In fact, a condemned man and I can agree upon certain eye and mouth signals before his head is laid on the block, and I can communicate intelligently with the severed head for some time after the execution by means of such signals."
CHAPTER 9
George Westinghouse
and the Rise of
Alternating Current
IN THE LATE summer of 1882, about the time the Pearl Street station began delivering light to lower Manhattan, Edison took a lease—at an exorbitant $400 a month—on a home on Gramercy Park. The move to New York had been proposed by his wife, Mary, who was anxious to escape the isolation of Menlo Park. At first she thrived on city life, hosting receptions and teas in her home. A year later, though, her health deteriorated so much that she had to give up housekeeping, and the family moved into a hotel.
Mary's health improved somewhat after a Florida vacation in the spring of 1884, but something was still not right. "I am so awfully sick," she wrote in April. "My head is nearly splitting and my throat is very sore." In the summer the couple once again left the city for the comfort and familiarity of Menlo Park, but Mary's condition worsened, and she unexpectedly died early in the morning of August 9. Dot awoke that day and found her father "shaking with grief, weeping and sobbing so he could hardly tell me that mother had died in the night." Mary Stilwell Edison was twenty-nine years old. The doctor attributed her death to "congestion of the brain."1
Mary's death so upset Edison that it brought about (at least temporarily) a realignment of his concerns. A thirty-seven-year-old widower, for the first time he began paying attention to his children: eleven-year-old Marion, eight-year-old Tom, and five-year-old Will. After her mother's death, Marion became her father's chief companion. He took her to the theater and afterward to Delmonico's, where he smuggled her into the men's dining room and kept her there with him until past midnight. He also bought his daughter a horse and a parrot. The bird never learned to speak, and the inventor complained that it had "the taciturnity of a statue, and the dirt producing capacity of a drove of buffalo." The horse was more useful. At least once a week they hitched it to a carriage and took a drive in the country, with Marion at the reins (her father could never be trusted to control a horse). "It seems wonderful... that Father had so much time for me," Marion later recalled. "He was interested in my clothes, diary, the novel I was going to write." As the ultimate mark of approval, he allowed her to assist at the laboratory. Her entry into this all-male preserve