Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [89]
Many voices within the Edison fold wished he would do just that. At a convention of local Edison companies in the summer of 1889, Edison affiliates voiced a desperate need for a new system that could compete with alternating current, something using "higher pressures and consequently less outlay of copper than that involved by the three-wire method. We earnestly appeal to the parent organization to supply these deficiencies." Instead of building a rival alternating system, Edison tried to develop a five-wire circuit, which proved too complex. A high-pressure direct-current system was equally balky and, Edison feared, too dangerous.10
Later in 1889 Edison consented to build an alternating generator—but he did not agree to sell it. He thought that if he built a system exactly like Westinghouse's, he could use it to show the inefficiency and danger of alternating current. "Our condemnation of our apparatus would carry with it condemnation of theirs," Edison said. "We are, of course, agreed that the Edison Company has no desire, and no intention of actually selling alternating apparatus for electric lighting, if they can possibly avoid it."11
In his opposition to alternating current, Edison was fully supported by Edward Johnson, his old friend and the president of Edison General Electric. Johnson explained that selling alternating equipment would "destroy the reputation of the Edison Company, which has, in a large measure, been built up on the safety and economy of the Edison apparatus."12
IN 1882, when a humane society representative had inquired whether electricity might offer a better way to kill livestock, Thomas Edison told her that "the alternating machine of Gramme would kill instantly."* At that point Edison had no possible economic motive for saying this; the Gramme machine was used exclusively for arc lights, which Edison did not make, and an alternating incandescent lighting system to rival his own direct-current system was still four years in the future. Edison had a genuine fear of alternating current based on the theory that its rapid back-and-forth motion did more damage to the body than the steady flow of direct current.13
The tests performed at Edison's laboratory in 1888 had confirmed that alternating current was more dangerous. In the fall of 1889, those results were further buttressed by Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval, one of the most eminent physiologists in Paris, whose reports on electrical safety were translated and published in American electrical journals. Edison kept up with d'Arsonval's research and shared it with the publie. "Let me read you part of an article by Mr. d'Arsonval, the greatest authority in France upon electrophysiology," Edison told a newspaper reporter in October. "He says:'... at a mean equal pressure alternating currents are much more dangerous than continuous currents.'"14
Safety had long been Edison's preeminent concern. When he first introduced electric light, he argued that it was safer than illuminating gas because it was less likely to cause fires and would not asphyxiate people in their sleep. When in 1882 Brush Electric introduced its storage battery electric lighting system—which sent high-voltage direct current into batteries in people's homes—the Edison company warned that introducing high voltage into homes was unwise. "If deaths happen from such contact with electric wires," Edison Electric's president wrote to the New York Times, "a storm of undiscriminating public indignation will attack all methods of domestic lighting by electricity."15
Even in 1889, Edison believed that the electrical industry was in a precarious state. Only a tiny fraction of American