Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [60]
Edison wrote a terse letter of reply. "My laboratory work consumes the whole of my time and precludes my participation in directing the business policy" of the company, he explained. This was not true, for Edison was actively involved in Edison Electric policy—he simply saw no reason to accept Westinghouse's offer. Because Edison believed his own lighting system was safer and more efficient, he expected victory and saw no reason to call a truce.6
In the spring and summer of 1888 the Edison and Westinghouse companies argued bitterly over the relative efficiency, reliability, and versatility of the two systems: which converted mechanical to electrical energy with the least loss; which was less liable to break down; which could provide power to sewing machines and elevators as well as lamps; which could serve houses in far-flung districts as well as urban centers. These were arcane and technical matters that remained confined to the dry pages of technical journals. But one issue—danger-had distinct popular appeal. In 1888 the daily newspapers reported an increasing number of accidental deaths from high-voltage alternating current. A Cleveland man died while adjusting a lamp at a theater, and in upstate New York a light company manager died while fixing the carbon on an arc lamp. In New York City, one lighting utility engineer received a fatal shock while oiling a dynamo, a second while cutting a wire that interfered with fire-fighting equipment, a third while demonstrating to a friend that shocks did not affect him.7
Most of those who died worked in the industry, but electricity posed a threat to the public as well. To see the source of the danger, pedestrians in New York City needed only to look up in the air. By the late 1880s Manhattan hosted nearly a dozen electric light utility companies, which included Harlem Lighting, Manhattan Electric, Mt. Morris Electric, North New York Lighting, Brush Electric Illumi-nating, United States Illuminating Company, Safety Electric, and Ball Electrical Illuminating. Edison Illuminating remained the city's primary supplier of incandescent lighting, its system now stretching as far north as Fifty-ninth Street, while the other companies were primarily in the business of supplying high voltage to arc lamps on city streets. In addition to the lighting firms, there were countless providers of telegraph, telephone, stock quotation, and fire alarm services. Whereas all of Edison's wires were buried underground, the wires of the other companies were strung overhead on tottering poles-some of which carried more than a dozen cross-arms and several hundred wires—or looped across the facades and over the rooftops of buildings.
Bad insulation made many of these wires unsafe. One electrician explained that the most common wire-coating material provided "as much value for the purposes of insulation as a molasses-covered rag." The better insulations were compounded of rubber, gutta-percha, tar, pitch, asphalt, linseed oil, and paraffin, but not even these could long survive the rigors of wind, rain, and high-pressure current. Some arc light cables carried 6,000 volts, far more pressure than the insulation could bear. Poorly insulated high-voltage lines were strung across tin roofs—creating hundreds of square feet of lethal metal surface—or placed just under windows, within easy reach of building occupants. About a third of the overhead wires were "dead," abandoned by their owners and left for years, stripped of insulation and draped across live wires. A drooping bare wire could saw through the insulation of even a brand-new line, and when metal touched metal, whatever the wires carried—human voices on the telephone, telegraphic dots and dashes, or sizzling electric