Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [77]
West was important to Cockran because he was still alive. When Cockran examined electrical experts, he asked them whether a dynamo could produce enough current to throw a man twenty feet, or strip his clothes off, or shatter even a broomstick, much less a tree. The answer was always no. As Cockran saw it, if an electric charge could be powerful enough to toss a man like a doll and strip him naked—and still not kill him—then the apparently weaker electric force of an execution 175 dynamo could not be counted on to kill.3
Cockran delivered the same message by trotting out men who allegedly survived severe electric shocks. "I have had five or six, where I know it was 1,000 volts, right from the machine," said Carpenter Smith, a Westinghouse manager. On various occasions he had accidentally grasped the bars of a live switchboard, touched the poles of a dynamo, and stepped on uninsulated wires. According to Smith, taking the shocks felt like being "kicked by a mule" or "struck with a bundle of loose rods."
Despite the pain, Smith said, such shocks were not a major concern. He told of the time when one of his employees took a big shock that burned his left palm to a crisp black. "I gave him fifty cents," Smith testified, "and told him to go and get a big drink of whisky and call at the doctor's on the way home."
"He took the first part of your advice, I suppose?" Cockran asked dryly.
"He did," Smith replied. "Then he came back after getting the drink of whisky. He wanted to come back and go to work.
"We don't count a 1,000 volt shock anything in the business," Smith told Cockran. "I don't mean by that a man would go and take hold of it, but I don't know a lineman in my employ who hasn't had it time and time again." His fellows felt the same way. "If a man gets a shock like that, he doesn't lay up. He shakes his fingers and thinks he was foolish to get in the road and goes on with his work."4
ALSO TAKING THE STAND was Charles Tupper, who ran a restaurant on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan and lived above it with his wife and their dog, Dash, a St. Bernard-collie mix. One day early in July he had been in front of the restaurant watching two Western Union men cut dead telegraph wires down. Mrs. Tupper, who was upstairs, sent Dash down with a newspaper to deliver to his master. His task completed, Dash ran along the sidewalk and stepped on a wire that was not dead. Stripped of insulation, it had draped across an electric light wire, with its ends dangling to the street. "When he put his paw on the wire he jumped about two or three feet in the air," Tupper said. Dash gave a piercing yelp and fell onto the wire. His owner started forward to pull him away, but the lineman held him back, explaining that if Tupper touched the dog, he would be shocked himself. In any case, the lineman said, Dash was already dead.
Tupper called to a nearby police officer: "Arrest this man," he said. "I will hold somebody responsible for the dog if he is dead." The officer apprehended the lineman and hauled him off to the station house. Tupper then went upstairs to tell his wife, who fell on the bed and wept. "She became prostrated on account of thinking so much of the dog," Tupper said softly.
Dash lay on the wire for fifteen minutes before someone lassoed him with a rope and dragged him off. Tupper put Dash on the floor of the restaurant, not ready to give him up for dead. A man from a lighting company told Tupper to scrape a hole in the earth and put Dash in it, because the earth "would draw the electricity from him." He did so. That was at about four in the afternoon. Six hours later, Dash began twitching his hindquarters and moving his head and eyes. Tupper and his wife offered him milk and brandy, which he refused, so they rubbed his body with alcohol and carried him to their bedroom, where he stayed for five days, gathering strength.
After Tupper related this tale, Dash himself made an appearance in the healing room. The lawyers