Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [71]
Largely missing from these discussions was the word that would eventually gain currency. The World's February 1889 article on the matter did not even mention electrocution. It is unclear precisely when the word was first used, but by the summer it appeared frequently in the World and in a few other popular newspapers.32
Electrocution was formed by combining electro and execution. Execution derived from the Latin sequi (follow), which with the prefix exmeans "follow out" or "carry out"—as in executing a sentence of death. Etymologically, electrocution meant something along the lines of "the following of electricity." Although state officials, most medical journals, and highbrow newspapers still preferred electrical execution, the more concise electrocution gradually crept into common usage, and the self-appointed gatekeepers of the English language were appalled. The editors of the New York Times wrote, "We pray to be saved from such a monstrosity as 'electrocution,' which pretentious ignoramuses seem to be trying to push into use. It is enough to make a philologist writhe with anguish." The Buffalo Courier lodged a "protest against the adoption of the proposed new words, electrocute, electrocution, and electrocuted. There's quite enough bastard philology already" A law journal described electrocution as "the very worst barbarism* yet perpetrated by an illiterate neologist."33
*A critic of electrical execution noted that George Fell shared a surname with a figure from a nursery rhyme—"I do not like thee, Doctor Fell/The reason why I cannot tell"—and commented, "The clue appears now perhaps to be within our grasp."
*To linguists, a barbarism is a word formed without respect for etymological meaning.
CHAPTER 13
Condemned
ALTHOUGH the electrical execution law took effect on January 1,1889, newspapers had to wait until May for the year's first capital murder trial. It took place not in Manhattan, the state's murder capital, but at the opposite corner of the state. Buffalo—the city where Lemuel Smith became the first American to die from the shock of a dynamo, where Alfred Southwick conducted the first tests in electrical killing, and where George Westinghouse installed his first alternating system-was also home to the first man sentenced under the electrocution law.
Mary Reid owned a big square cottage on South Division Street in Buffalo. She lived with her two young daughters at the front of the house and rented four small rooms in the back to William Hort, his wife, Tillie, and their four-year-old daughter, Ella. At about eight o'clock on the morning of March 29,1889, as Mrs. Reid washed dishes, she heard a shrill scream from the back of the house, then the hollow thwack of someone chopping wood, then a few low moans, then silence. She walked toward the back of the house and called out, but she received no reply. She then walked outside, where she saw Mr. Hort walking toward her, his hands smeared with blood.
"I have killed Mrs. Hort," he said.1
Mrs. Reid gathered her children and fled to tell a neighbor, a bookbinder named Asa King, who walked to the Hort residence and opened the kitchen door upon a horrific scene. The tables and chairs were overturned, broken dishes and an uneaten breakfast scattered across the floor, blood spattered across the walls. Tillie Hort was on her hands and knees, rocking back and forth and moaning quietly. Her long hair, matted with blood, swept down to the floor. Not far away was a bloody hatchet. William Hort had returned inside and was standing at the back of the kitchen, wiping his bloody hands on a cloth. King urged Hort to go for a doctor, but he refused. Instead, Hort stepped over his bleeding wife, went