Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [65]
Kennelly also took the fight to the popular press. When the New York World reported that, since the dog experiments started, "the faith of experts in electricity as an executioner has steadily decreased," Kennelly took it as an affront to himself and to his boss and immediately sent a long letter of rebuttal. "Having carried out those experiments under Mr. Edison's instruction," Kennelly explained, he had proven that he could "kill a dog instantly by electricity . . . and without sigh, moan, or struggle." Alternating current was "beyond all doubt more fatal than the continuous current."4
According to Brown, these dog experiments assessed the relative danger of alternating and direct currents for lighting purposes and had nothing to do with electrical execution. Most people failed to grasp the distinction. Brown's avowed goal of preventing accidental deaths and New York State's interest in intentional killing were two sides of the same coin: Both required knowing what type of electrical current could kill a human being.
Drawing cables into an underground conduit. Many companies resisted state laws requiring that all wires be placed under the street rather than on utility poles.
In November 1888 Thomas Edison granted his first public interview on electricity's dangers since his dog experiment for the World in June. He told the Brooklyn Citizen that electrical execution was "a good idea. The man will be killed with a current of the proper number of volts in the tenth of a second." He explained how he came to this conclusion: "I did quite a lot of experimenting with currents on dogs. It was funny. At first, we used continuous currents. After the electricity charged the dog he stood still without the slightest change in his appearance. He did not move, and his eyes retained the same expression they usually wore. Then after a minute, or a minute and a half, he would collapse and tumble over, dead. Finally, we tried alternate currents. . . . Then it was found that this shock of one-tenth of a second killed the dog." Edison said that one dog was granted a reprieve after surviving a shock of 1,400 volts (current type unspecified): "He is walking round to-day as good as ever after his shock. We call him Ajax, because he played with the thunder-bolts."5
Edison used the occasion of this interview to tackle one of the puzzles of the debate: Although its advocates described electrical execution as painless, electric shocks were known to hurt quite a lot. Arthur Kennelly himself accidentally took a 1,000-volt alternating-current shock and vividly described the sensation as "violent rending pain." Defenders of the new execution method would have explained that Kennelly suffered only because he had not been killed. Nerve sensation, they said, traveled at a rate of about 100 feet per second, whereas electricity sped along at 160,000 miles per second. In the victim of lethal electric shock, a mismatched race was staged between the sensation of pain and the destructive force of electricity. By the time a nerve impulse from the victim's arm or leg meandered its way to the brain to announce the presence of pain, electricity had gotten there first and destroyed consciousness. As Edison put it, "There won't be time for these sense-bearing nerves to telegraph the news that he is hurt to his brain before he will be dead from the shock."6
The explanation sounded reassuringly mathematical, but it skirted some important issues. If only a fraction of a second separated the sensation of pain from the end of life, it was crucial to understand how and when death occurred. But doctors could not agree whether electricity killed by stopping the heart, cutting off the breath, destroying the blood, or some other mechanism. In an experiment described in the death penalty commission report, Dr. Fell anesthetized a dog and removed its