Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [87]
Johnson's pointed mention of Westinghouse's dynamo revealed the motive behind the request: If the city used an alternating generator to kill dogs, it would bolster Edison Electric's claim that alternating current was too dangerous for use in America's homes.
Using Westinghouse machines to kill humans would make the same point even more strongly. By the fall of 1888, the state had still not decided whether to use alternating or direct current for executions. Working with Harold Brown, Edison Electric arranged to kill two calves and a horse before Elbridge Gerry and the Medico-Legal Society in December 1888. According to a letter Brown wrote to Kennelly the day after the experiments, Edison had engaged in some discreet lobbying in favor of execution by alternating current: "The results [of the experiments] were very satisfactory, especially so since Mr. Edison's talk with Mr. Gerry and the members of the committee of course carried great weight." Within a week of the experiments, the medical society advocated alternating current for electrocutions.21
Edison Electric paid for those December experiments. The Edison archives contain an invoice, prepared by Kennelly and submitted to Edison Electric, of "expenses incurred by Mr. Edison in connection with the experiments of electricity on animals [for] the New York committee." The costs included:
Edison Electric financed all of the physiological experiments. The Edison laboratory billbooks contain careful records of all expenses—both materials and labor—connected with the tests and submitted the bills to Edison Electric. Between August 1888 and April 1889, the laboratory submitted six bills totaling $200.29.22
In May 1889, two months after the last of those experiments, Harold Brown secured the state contract to supply execution dynamos, and he used his official position to buy Westinghouse machines. The charges that critics had been making since the first dog experiments in July 1888 turned out to be true: Edison Electric was orchestrating a plot to discredit Westinghouse. Although no single document spells out the plan in detail, the evidence detailed in the Sun letters and in the Edison archives—Hastings's close alliance with Brown, Edison and Kennelly's experiments in dog killing that did not involve Brown, Johnson's promotion of Westinghouse machines for use at the dog pound, and Edison Electric's sponsorship of the experiments—clearly indicate that such a plan was being carried out. Brown's pose as an independent, public-spirited researcher provided cover for his role as attack dog for the Edison interests.
*The testimonial itself did not appear in the Sun; in all likelihood it was not in Brown's desk because it had been sent on to the officials in Scranton.
CHAPTER 16
Pride and Reputation
WHEN THE Harold Brown scandal broke in New York in August 1889, Edison was an ocean away. Not long after he testified at the Kemmler hearings, he and his wife, Mina, boarded the steamship La Bourgogne, bound for the Universal Exposition in Paris.
Edison was grandly received at the world's fair. French newspapers hailed him as "His Majesty Edison" and "Edison the Great," and when he ventured onto the street, crowds gathered to cheer and stare. In their rooms at the Hotel du Rhin, floral offerings to Mina crowded every piece of furniture, and assorted European royalty dropped in to record their voices on Edison's personal phonograph. Edison also found himself besieged by visitors of lower rank; many of them, he complained, were crackpot inventors who begged him to "give the last touches to some lunatical invention of theirs." Mina found all the attention wearying. "We never get out as somebody is after him all the time," she wrote to her mother. Despite the complaint, Edison and his wife went out often, attending an incessant round of ceremonies and banquets in his honor. A special envoy of King Humbert of Italy named Edison a grand officer of