Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [70]
Not surprisingly, George Westinghouse refused to sell his generators for the purpose of execution. Brown said that he managed to obtain them anyway, but he would not reveal how. According to the Times, "The news that three of their dynamos have been sold by Mr. Brown to the State will be a surprise to the Westinghouse people."27
AS BROWN MANEUVERED to acquire execution dynamos, linguists took up the task of naming the new method of killing. Soon after the law took effect, the World noted that "the gallows and the hangman will disappear, to be replaced by what? A machine! That is as far as anybody has yet got in describing the curious contrivance which will play such a ghastly role in future executions." Death by electricity and electrical execution were clumsy terms, certainly too long for space-conscious headline writers. Some looked to the past for models. The guillotine had been named after Joseph Ignace Guillotin, the strongest advocate (though not the inventor) of the device. Since Elbridge Gerry was the man most identified with the electrical method, some suggested gerricide. When the World sought Gerry's opinion in February 1889, he instead proposed electrolethe, "which is a combination of two pure Greek words. . . . The man who touched the button would be the electrolether, with the accent on the third syllable." Others interviewed by the World coined many words using the prefix electro-, including elec-tronirvano, electrorevoir, and electrosiesta. An assistant district attorney in Manhattan proposed virmort from the Latin for "man" and "death." A warden at the Tombs prison, more conversant in popular slang than classical roots, said, "What's de matter wid callin' her de whizzer?" A fellow warden proposed razzle-dazzle.,28
When the scholarly journal American Notes and Queries put out a call for new words, proposals arrived from professors at Cornell, Harvard, Brown, Johns Hopkins, and Yale. Most offered etymologically impeccable but thoroughly impractical words: electrophony, electricize, electroctony, thanelectrize, electrothanasia, joltacuss, voltacuss, electrostrike, galvanation, gal-vanification, electronation, and super electrification. A frequent suggestion was electricide, modeled after suicide or patricide. When some objected that this word implied the death of rather than death by electricity {patricide, for example, meant the killing of the father), the term was revised to electrocide (on the model of electroplate, or plating by means of electric ity). Forsaking Greek and Latin, one correspondent proposed the Teutonic blitzentod—lightning death.29
A Johns Hopkins professor threw up his hands in defeat: "The word will be a hideous one, however compounded." Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel and an author in his own right) had the firmest grasp of how new words entered the language: "Very likely some chance inspiration of slang may settle the matter."30
The editor of American Notes and Queries wrote to Thomas Edison seeking his opinion. The inventor proposed ampermort, dynamort, and electromort, but he preferred to hand over the question to one of his attorneys. "The trouble is that none of us here remember enough latin [sic] to inspire confidence in the etymology of these coined words," Edison's secretary told the lawyers. "Mr. Edison would like you to revise them." The lawyer rejected Edison's ideas and proposed a different sort of coinage: "As Westinghouse's dynamo is going to be used for the purpose of executing criminals, why not give him the benefit of this fact in the minds of the public, and speak hereafter of a criminal as being 'westinghoused',