Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [66]
New York's Medico-Legal Society decided to find answers to the many questions surrounding electrical execution. The private society, which was dedicated to improving relations between the medical and legal professions, took up the matter of its own accord and had no official status with New York State. Its membership simply recognized that New York State needed expert guidance, and that a physician's knowledge could apply just as well to ending life as to saving it. The death penalty commission had rejected the injection of poison as a method of execution in part because of "the difficulty of finding any medical man who would act as a public executioner." As it turned out, electrical execution relied heavily on medical knowledge, and state officials had no trouble finding physicians willing to kill. Many doctors saw their primary responsibility as serving not individuals but the state. The death penalty was "a question of therapeutics," in the Medical Record's view. "If society can better preserve and protect itself against criminals by their strangulation or electrothanatosis, why, then, these measures should be employed. No question of first principles or inherent rights or sentiments is involved."8
In September 1888 the Medico-Legal Society appointed a committee to investigate the technical requirements of killing with electricity. One of the committee's members was Dr. Frederick Peterson, who had taken part in the Edison lab's dog experiments. In a report presented at the society's November meeting, Peterson and his fellow committee members recommended a current of 3,000 volts. On the question of type of current, the committee wavered: "Either a continuous [direct] or an alternating current may be used, but preferably the latter."9
Rather than adopt the committee's report, the Medico-Legal Society tabled it until its December meeting. A few members still needed to be convinced that alternating current was indeed more dangerous than direct. Others objected because the report was based on tests involving dogs, which were considerably smaller than humans. To reassure the doubters, the committee turned for assistance to Thomas Edison, who again agreed to serve as host for experiments in electrical killing. Arthur Kennelly and Harold Brown made the necessary arrangements.
Kennelly hoped to hold the tests at night because "an experiment of this kind by daylight naturally attracts very much curiosity and renders the necessary privacy and care difficult to obtain." He did not get his wish. On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 5,1888, Thomas Edison welcomed a group of observers, including members of the Medico-Legal Society, newspaper reporters, and—most important—Elbridge Gerry. Because Gerry was the chairman of the death penalty commission and the author of the new7 law, his views carried great weight.10
The guests arrived around noon, but equipment problems delayed the experiments until after three. Brown and Kennelly connected an alternating generator to a transformer, which they hoped would boost the current up well over 1,000 volts. The first victim was a calf weighing 124 pounds. They clipped the hair from two areas, between the calf's eyes and beside its spine just below its shoulders, and attached two electrodes, both covered with sponges soaked in a conducting solution of zinc sulfate. They ran the dynamo up to 1,100 volts and closed the circuit, but "the animal fell uninjured," according to Ken-nelly's notes. He determined that the problem lay with the transformer, so he disconnected