Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [68]
It is generally understood that Harold P. Brown is conducting these experiments in the interest and pay of the Edison Electric Light Company; that the Edison Company's business can be vitally injured if the alternating current apparatus continues to be as successfully introduced and operated as it has heretofore been, and that the Edison representatives, from a business point of view, consider themselves justified in resorting to any expedient to prevent the extension of this system. . . . We have no hesitation in charging that the object of these experiments is not in the interest of science or safety, but to endeavor to create in the minds of the public a prejudice against the use of the alternating currents.16
Westinghouse could not prove his charges against Brown, but one claim in his letter was undoubtedly true: Westinghouse Electric was badly hurting Edison Electric's business. The Edison market position had deteriorated further since summer, as Westinghouse continued to win most of the lighting contracts in smaller towns and to expand much more quickly than Edison.17
Edison Electric remained silent on Westinghouse's charges, but Harold Brown proffered a dramatic challenge to Westinghouse in a letter to the New York Times. "First, allow me to deny emphatically that I am now or ever have been in the employ of Mr. Edison or any of the Edison companies," Brown wrote. He claimed that it was Westinghouse who was motivated by selfish business interests: To protect his alternating-current system, he was denying solid scientific evidence of its dangers. Because Westinghouse had insulted his honor, Brown proposed a duel: "I therefore challenge Mr. Westinghouse to meet me in the presence of competent electrical experts and take through his body the alternating current, while I take through mine a continuous current We will commence with ioo volts, and will gradually increase the pressure 50 volts at a time, I leading with each increase, until either one or the other has cried enough, and publicly admits his error." An electrical journal suggested a way to make the duel even more dramatic: It published an illustration of two men fencing with electrified foils. To the regret of many in the industry, the duel never took place.18
Brown found other angles of attack. In late December he sent a circular to city governments, insurance executives, and prominent businessmen in every town in the United States with a population of more than 5,000. He enclosed a copy of the Medico-Legal Society report, explaining that it supported alternating current's "adoption for EXECUTION PURPOSES at exactly the pressure used for csafe and harmless' electric lighting." Calling for laws limiting the current to 300 volts, Brown urged public-spirited citizens, "Lend me your aid in securing legislation which will keep this EXECUTIONER'S CURRENT out of our homes and streets and prevent reckless corporations from saving their money AT THE EXPENSE OF THE LIVES OF THOSE DEAR TO YOU." The appeal had its desired effect. Anxious citizens from across the country wrote to Brown, and in response he sent more information about the dangers of alternating current. Some letters brought requests for Brown's personal services, so he traveled to many towns to conduct tests on the local alternating systems, sometimes persuading mayors and city councils to support the call for a 300-volt limit.19
The December circular, a three-and-a-half-page typewritten document, offered a mere sketch of Brown's case against Westinghouse. In the early months of 1889 he published a more sustained attack, a sixty-one-page booklet titled The Comparative Danger to Life of the Alternating and Continuous Electrical Currents. It was a narration of Brown's crusade against alternating current, starting with his letter to the Evening Post in June 1888 and continuing through his experiments with Kennelly and Edison and his work with the Medico-Legal Society.