Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [67]
To eliminate all doubt that electricity could kill animals larger than dogs and calves, Brown led in a horse weighing 1,230 pounds. This time he and Kennelly tried a different electrode arrangement that had been proposed by Edison, who believed that prisoners should be executed by placing an electrode on each hand, so that the current passed through the chest. To test this theory, Brown and Kennelly attached an electrode to each of the horse's forelegs. They applied 600 volts for five seconds, but the animal did not die, and a second shock of fifteen seconds also failed to kill it. Finally, 700 volts for twenty-five seconds proved fatal.
Kennelly's notes of the experiments indicated that the calves and horse suffered, just as many of the dogs had. But in a report of the experiments published in the Electrical World, Brown insisted that the deaths of all three animals were "instantaneous and painless." He concluded that "the alternating current is the best adapted for electrical executions."
The well-publicized experiments at the Edison lab caught the public imagination. A Brooklynite wrote to Edison suggesting that electrical execution be combined with hanging, by weaving metal electrodes 153 into the hemp noose such that one pole would contact the spine, the other the throat. Combining the noose with an electric shock, the man wrote, would be "more wholesome than screwing the poor victim into a vise of electrical horrors." In Connecticut P. T. Barnum allowed electricians to give nonfatal shocks to animals in his menagerie, including a monkey, baboon, hippopotamus, and elephant. The monkeys screamed in agony, but the elephant, named Tom Thumb, reportedly "squealed with delight." When Chief, a rogue circus elephant in Cincinnati, had to be euthanized, his owners considered killing him with electricity, but they ended up strangling him instead, thus robbing alternating current's foes of an ultimate demonstration of electricity's killing power.12
The December 1888 horse-killing experiment at the Edison laboratory, as illustrated in Scientific American.
The Medico-Legal Society, meanwhile, continued its efforts to ensure that condemned criminals would not die by the rope. At the 154 society's annual meeting on December 12, the committee on electrical execution recommended that the state should give condemned prisoners a shock for fifteen to thirty seconds with an alternating current of 1,000 to 1,500 volts. The full society unanimously adopted the report and transmitted it to state authorities.13
The lessons of the tests were not lost on the press. The Daily Tribune noted that the Edison lab experiments "showed that less than half the pressure used for electric lights in our streets is sufficient to produce instant death. Evidently the danger from electric light wires has not been over-estimated."14
GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE disagreed with the Tribune's conclusion, and a few days after the experiments he published a response in several New York papers. Westinghouse argued that the Edison lab experiments were so carefully calibrated to cause death—with large electrodes placed at the most sensitive portions of the body-that they had no relevance to the possibility of accidental electric shock. "It has been found that pressures exceeding 1,000 volts can be withstood by persons of ordinary health without experiencing any permanent inconvenience," Westinghouse wrote. He described an episode in which a man "held his hand in contact with the wires [bearing 1,000 volts] for a period of three minutes without fatal results—in fact, was able to go on with his work after a short period." Not only could the shocks be survived, but "the alternating current is less dangerous to life" than the direct.15
As Westinghouse saw it, the real reason for the tests