Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [74]
WESTINGHOUSE HAD ACCUSED Edison of promoting electrical execution to damage the market for alternating current; after Kemmler's trial, Westinghouse found himself accused of attempting to defeat the execution law in order to defend his system. It was clear to all observers that competition between the two firms had grown ferocious since the battle of the electric currents had started a year before.
Westinghouse was not timid about the methods he used to ensure success, and, even by the freewheeling standards of the time, he earned a reputation as an unscrupulous businessman. "We do not like the method of doing business of the Westinghouse Co.," a smalltown electrical entrepreneur reported, and many agreed with him. In 1888 the Thomson-Houston company decided to begin producing street-railway equipment. To do so it needed to revise its corporate charter, which required a special act of the Connecticut legislature. Westinghouse interests, fearful of a new competitor in the railway business, lobbied strongly against the bill. Edward Johnson of Edison Electric considered the Westinghouse effort grossly unjust and helped Thomson-Houston win the charter revision. "The methods of the Westinghouse people are, as we know, of the most unfair and undignified character," wrote Elihu Thomson, the cofounder of Thomson Houston.10
A year later Thomson was outraged to learn that George Westinghouse had been awarded a broad patent on an alternating-current meter that he had not even invented. Whereas Thomson's own application for a meter patent—filed much earlier than Westinghouse's—gathered dust in the government office for ten months, Westinghouse's was issued only two months after filing. As Thomson saw it, "the Patent Office could only have allowed this patent through corruption or bribery of some kind." According to a banker who knew all the major players in the industry, Westinghouse "irritates his rivals beyond endurance." Charles Coffin, the president of Thomson-Houston, complained of Westinghouse's "attitude of bitter and hostile competition."11
Thomas Edison had a particular reason to resent Westinghouse, who made a habit of appropriating Edison's inventions for his own use. Edison told a reporter, "It . . . always made me hopping mad to think of the pirates in the electric business, not merely stealing the radical inventions which made the lamp possible, but taking advantage gratis of the long line of thousands of experiments which I had made night and day for a couple of years."12
Edison Electric was embroiled in two crucial suits with Westinghouse. In one, it defended its basic patent for the incandescent lamp Edison invented in 1879. Although the suit was originally filed against the U.S. Electric Lighting Company in 1885, by the time it came to a hearing in 1889, that company had been purchased by Westinghouse. In the other suit, Edison Electric was the defendant. The Consolidated Electric Light Company had sued Edison Electric, claiming that Edison's lamps violated a patent, owned by Consolidated Electric, on incandescent lamp filaments made from paper. In 1888 George Westinghouse gained control of Consolidated, adopted the suit as his own, and pressed it with vigor. Of the hundreds of lawsuits filed in the first decades of the electrical industry, only these two carried real significance. In both cases, Edison defended his most prized invention—the lightbulb—against infringement by George Westinghouse.13
Edison took the matter personally. Early in 1889, as the patent battle intensified, a mutual friend of Edison and Westinghouse tried to broker a peace, urging Edison to visit Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. Edison would have nothing of it, explaining that Westinghouse's "methods of doing business lately are such that the man has gone crazy over sudden accession of wealth or something unknown to me and is flying a kite that will land him in the mud sooner or later."14
At the time Westinghouse's kite was flying high, with his business growing far more quickly than Edison's. Some Edison Electric