Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [58]
The range of equipment—from heavy machine tools to the most sensitive devices for measuring electricity—was unrivaled, as was the staff. Edison employed more than ioo men, including some of the country's most skilled craftsmen, chemists, and engineers. One of Edison's top researchers described the staff as "about as interesting an aggregation of learned men, cranks, enthusiasts, plain 'muckers' and absolutely insane men, as ever forgathered under one roof." Even more so than Menlo Park, the Orange laboratory was an invention factory, designed to let ideas flow smoothly from the library to the experimental areas to the drafting room to the machine shops. Between his men, material, and machines, Edison boasted, his new lab could "build anything from a lady's watch to a Locomotive."32
Although Edison personally had financed construction of the laboratory, he paid its operating expenses by conducting experiments and developing new products for Edison Electric, the Edison Machine Works, the Edison Lamp Company, and Bergmann & Company. The laboratory began operations at the end of 1887, just as the panic over the Westinghouse competition was peaking. As a result, most of the early experimental work was devoted to testing alternating-current systems, improving the efficiency of dynamos, motors, and lamp filaments, and developing better wire insulation. Assisting Edison with these experiments was a new hire, Arthur E. Kennelly, a quiet, serious, twenty-six-year-old Englishman with a thick mustache and thinning hair. Although self-educated, Kennelly was one of the few electricians of the day who had mastered the complex mathematical knowledge required for modern electrical engineering. He felt lucky to be hired by Edison. "The laboratory is just heaven," he wrote to a friend. "It is 131 certainly one of the finest in the world, and the finest in the States."33
In Edison's laboratory Kennelly began the pioneering research in electrical theory that would eventually earn him international renown and a professorship at Harvard. Some of his first experiments were also his most unusual.
Arthur E. kennelly
IN JUNE 1888, when the reporter from the New York World asked Edison for help answering questions about electrical executions, the inventor was happy to oblige. He instructed Kennelly and Charles Batchelor to prepare the machinery and scheduled an experiment for the afternoon of Thursday, June 21. The World procured a dog for the occasion. About twenty people, Edison among them, gathered outside the dynamo room at three in the afternoon. Kennelly laid a wooden board on the ground and topped it with a sheet of tin, one corner of which was attached by wire to an alternating-current dynamo running at 1,500 volts. Beside this tin sheet, but not touching it, Kennelly placed a metal pan filled with water and insulated from the ground with two strips of rubber. Another wire from the dynamo was attached to the pan. When the dog drank from the pan of water, its body would close the circuit between the tin sheet and the pan.34
Kennelly looped a rope around the animal's neck and tugged it toward the tin plate. The dog yanked violently and broke the rope, but it was quickly recaptured and tied with a stouter cord. Kennelly pulled the dog onto the tin plate, but it refused to drink. When it made another frightened leap, though, a front paw touched the pan of water while a back paw was