Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [86]
Brown chose to ignore the letter in which he asked Thomas Edison for $5,000 to purchase the Westinghouse dynamos, and he must have felt fortunate that another batch of documents did not become public at the time. Those records, preserved in the archives of the Edison laboratory, show that Brown's participation in the plot against Westinghouse was even more extensive than the Sun letters indicated.
Whereas the first of the Sun letters was dated January 1889, Brown's involvement in the conspiracy dated back at least as far as the dog experiments of the previous summer. At the Kemmler hearings, Edison, Kennelly, and Brown claimed that the tests in July 1888 had been entirely Brown's idea, but Edison's laboratory records tell a different story. Both Brown and Kennelly testified that the first dog-killing experiments at the Edison lab took place on July 9,1888, but neither mentioned that Brown was not present for this experiment. Kennelly also did not acknowledge that he conducted tests on a fox terrier on July 6, also in the absence of Harold Brown. It is not until July 12 that Kennelly's notebook first notes that the experiments took place "before Mr. H.P. Brown." Brown assisted again on July 14, but on the seventeenth—when two more dogs died—Kennelly wrote in his notebook, "Mr. Brown not present at this experiment." More tests were performed in August and September, when Brown was occupied elsewhere. Rather than instigating the tests, Brown simply assisted in a series of experiments by Kennelly and Edison that were in progress before he appeared at the laboratory and that continued in his absence.17
Private correspondence from the laboratory also shows that Brown's role in the tests was more minor—and Edison and Kennelly's much greater—than any of the men later admitted. In a letter written to the Electrical Review in September 1888, Kennelly explained that although Brown had "taken part in" the tests, "all the experiments made and published on the dogs except at Columbia College have been carried out by your humble servant." In another letter Kennelly made it clear that he performed those tests on orders from Edison, who supervised and directed the labors of all of his assistants: "We are continuing the experiments for Mr. Edison, and can kill a dog now more swiftly than a rifle bullet when desired," Kennelly wrote to Edison Electric official Frank Hastings. "I have lately been trying various experiments on dogs," Edison himself wrote in a letter dated July 13, 1888, acknowledging that the physiological tests were not Brown's but his own.18
The evidence in the Edison archives indicates that, starting in the summer of 1888, Brown worked closely with Edison Electric while publicly maintaining that his only interest was promoting public safety. Although there is no direct proof that he was on the company's payroll, it is likely that he was paid for his services. The campaign against Westinghouse was coordinated by two Edison Electric officials: President Edward Johnson and Secretary-Treasurer Frank Hastings. As Brown prepared for the public dog-killing demonstrations at Columbia College in late July 1888, Hastings arranged for him to borrow equipment 197 from the Edison laboratory. "Mr. Johnson and I are both very much interested in these experiments and are very anxious that everything should be there in time," Hastings wrote to Charles Batchelor, Edison's lab superintendent. "It is of course understood that these materials are to be loaned to Mr. Brown in our interests and at as little expense to us as possible." Hastings acknowledged that Brown's work was promoting the "interests" of Edison Electric.19
Six weeks after the Columbia experiments, in September 1888, Edward Johnson tried to persuade Manhattan authorities to replace drowning with electricity as the method of exterminating stray dogs. "I don't want to buy a Westinghouse machine just now," Johnson wrote to Edison. "Have you an alternating dynamo that will give us 1000 volts which you can loan us for a week or so?" If the demonstration worked, Johnson told Edison,