Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [61]
Major cities in Europe required that all electric light wires be placed in underground conduits, and Chicago followed the same course. New York, however, allowed what an electrical journal called "aerial freebooting," in which wires were strung with "absolutely no official supervision." In 1884 the New York State Legislature passed a law much like Chicago's, requiring that all wires be placed in underground conduits. The lighting and telegraph companies, however, ignored the law, so the following summer the legislature created the Board of Electrical Subway Commissioners to enforce the burial of wires. As with much governmental action at the time, incompetence and corruption delayed the work. The law granted an exclusive contract to build the underground conduits to the Consolidated Telegraph and Electrical Subway Company, which was controlled by friends of the subway commissioners. The company's officers dithered in the digging of trenches, and their cronies on the subway commission were not inclined to hurry them along.9
In the late 1880s thousands of telegraph, telephone, and electrical wires ran above New York's streets, posing a danger to the public.
The delays pleased the lighting utilities. They resisted placing their wires underground because they would have to rent space in the conduits, and because underground wires required more expensive forms of insulation. This relentless pursuit of cost savings also discouraged the companies from conducting routine maintenance or installing safety devices that would have protected the public from overhead wires. In 1887 the legislature tried to force the issue with a stronger law that replaced the subway commissioners with the Board of Electrical Control and named New York's mayor as a member. After underground conduits were ready, companies would have ninety days to put their wires in them. When that time expired, the electrical board was to cut down any overhead wires that remained. Finally, by the spring of 1888, a few telegraph and light wires began to go underground.
But there was one notable holdout. The United States Illuminating Company, an arc lighting firm that used alternating current, refused to bury its wires or even maintain them properly. The firm challenged the law in court, insisting that its lines were perfectly safe and required neither burial nor regulation.10
That position became increasingly difficult to defend. In April 1888 a boy peddler died on East Broadway after touching a downed telegraph wire that fell across a high-tension light wire. Later that month a young clerk died in front of his uncle's store after touching a low-hanging arc lamp wire. In May a lineman for Brush Electric died from a shock while working outside a building on Broadway. All of those fatal wires carried alternating current.11
When asked his opinion of the best method of executing criminals with electricity, Thomas Edison replied, "Hire them out as linemen to some of the New York electric lighting companies."12
Harold Pitney Brown
WITH THIS CLUSTER of three deaths in New York, the debates over high-voltage current jumped from the pages of electrical journals to the mass-circulation daily newspapers. On June 5—one day after Governor Hill signed the electrical execution bill into law—the New York Evening Post printed a letter from an obscure electrician named Harold Pitney Brown. Just thirty years old, Brown had a decade of experience in the electrical industry. In 1877 he had started working for Western Electric in Chicago, which manufactured a wide variety of electrical devices, including medical apparatus, telegraph and telephone equipment, and an "electric pen"—a sort of early mimeograph—invented by Edison. During the early 1880s Brown installed arc lighting plants for Brush Electric, and by 1888 he was describing himself as an independent electrical consultant. Brown's boss at Western Electric had been a man named George Bliss, a close associate of Edison's who 140 became a fierce opponent of Westinghouse in the battle of the