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headquarters. The "approaching consolidation" referred to the creation of Edison General Electric through the merger of the Edison Electric Light Company with the separate Edison manufacturing enterprises, a deal that was finalized later that spring. Brown's letter indicated that Edison Electric's managers had already agreed to give him the money, but that they also wanted the approval of Edison, who controlled the manufacturing companies.4

Edison's reply never surfaced, but he must have agreed to give Brown the $5,000, because in May Brown wrote to Edison again: "Thanks to your note to Mr. Johnson [president of Edison Electric] I have been able to arrange the matter satisfactorily; have supplied the State with Westinghouse execution dynamos."5

Because George Westinghouse had refused to sell his generators for the purposes of execution, Brown secured them through a second partner, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. In April and May Charles Coffin, the president of Thomson-Houston, located several utility companies that owned Westinghouse generators and made arrangements to buy those machines and replace them with Thomson-Houston alternating generators. Brown used the money provided by Edison Electric to buy the Westinghouse dynamos from Thomson-Houston. On May 23 Thomas Edison, whom Brown had kept apprised of these arrangements, made an enigmatic statement to a Pittsburgh Post reporter: "The Westinghouse people deny the report, I know, but their machines were certainly purchased, although they may not have been obtained direct from the company." Only with the publication of the Sun letters three months later did the public understand what he meant.6

Charles Coffin helped Brown because he hoped to hurt Westinghouse—not on the safety issue (as Edison did) but through a comparative test of dynamo efficiency. Westinghouse's advertisements claimed that his generators were 50 percent more efficient than those of other companies. In an open letter published in several newspapers, Brown challenged Westinghouse to send one of his alternating generators to Johns Hopkins University, where a professor would compare its efficiency with a competitor's machine. When Westinghouse refused to cooperate, Brown arranged to loan one of the Westinghouse execution dynamos to Johns Hopkins. The Sun letters showed that Brown was working as an agent for Thomson-Houston in arranging this test. Brown told Coffin that he planned to mail copies of the efficiency challenge all over North America in an effort to undermine Westinghouse, and Coffin agreed to pay Brown $1,000 for "expense attending the Baltimore test." Coffin was so pleased with Brown's work that he promised him $500 more for "future expert services." Coffin expected that the Johns Hopkins tests would prove the Westinghouse generators much less efficient than advertised, thereby boosting the reputation of Thomson-Houston's own machines.7

Coffin had another reason to help Brown: If he failed to supply Brown with Westinghouse generators, Coffin ran the risk that Thornson-Houston generators—which could be just as lethal as Westinghouse's—would be used for executions. Brown warned Coffin of this possibility in a May 13 letter: "If anything happens to that [Westinghouse] machine another make of dynamo will have to be used." Later that month, after some delays in delivery of the equipment, Brown told Coffin that the Westinghouse people were "bringing tremendous pressure to bear to prevent the test and to get other apparatus than theirs used." By securing the Westinghouse dynamos for Brown, Coffin protected the interests of his own firm.8

According to Brown, George Westinghouse was so opposed to the use of his generators for executions that he had sent agents to Auburn prison with orders to sabotage the equipment. The agents, Brown wrote to Coffin, "will cripple it if the liberal use of money will do it. I know of their offering money to some of the prison officials some time ago. . . . I can assure you that there is a desperate attempt being made to have the use of the Westinghouse dynamo