Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [92]
As much as the lost business and patent dispute, it was Westinghouse's continued intransigence on the safety issue that outraged Edison. By late 1889 Edison's long-standing views about the greater dangers of alternating current had been confirmed by his own tests and independent experiments in France. His rival, he felt, was destroying his business by stealing his patents, installing slapdash systems carrying lethal levels of electricity, and denying the dangers. Overhead wires continued to kill, and Edison feared the deaths might turn the public against all forms of electric lighting. Edison fought back, using the most dramatic means at his disposal—his public support of the electrocution law—to demonstrate the dangers of his competitor's current.30
ON OCTOBER 9, 1889, three days after Edison returned from France, that law survived its first legal challenge: Judge S. Edwin Day of the Cayuga County Court issued a ruling rejecting William Kemmler's appeal. One of the first reasons the judge cited was that, since hanging had been abolished, New York would have no capital punishment law if electrocution were declared unconstitutional. As a result, convictions of all murderers sentenced under the new law might be overturned. Many attorneys argued, to the contrary, that the state would simply revert to the law previously in effect, so that condemned prisoners could be sent to the gallows. But Judge Day raised doubt on the issue, and Kemmler's appeal became shadowed by the specter of prison doors clanging open and murderers strolling free.31
Judge Day had reviewed the transcript of the Kemmler hearings-two bound volumes running to more than 1,000 pages—but he had little to say about it, because his ruling rested upon a more basic question of the separation of governmental powers. As the judge saw it, electrical execution "became law after much more than ordinary consideration and deliberation," and he refused to contradict the legislature and the governor. "Every statute is presumed to be constitu-tional," he wrote, and the burden of proof rested with the party challenging the law. Although the hearing testimony was "conflicting," the judge ruled, Kemmler had not proven that electrical execution was beyond doubt cruel and unusual.32
"It's a victory for us," Harold Brown told the World. "By the way, there have been five deaths in this city from alternating currents since September i."33
*Zenobe-Theophile Gramme was a Belgian who built some of the most advanced generators of the 1870s.
CHAPTER 17
The Electric Wire Panic
ALTHOUGH BROWN was pleased with the judge's ruling, the true goal of the Edison forces—banning alternating current or restricting its voltage—seemed no closer to reality. Westinghouse Electric and other lighting companies continued to resist New York law requiring burial of all wires, and accidents claimed more lives. Yet most people ignored Edison's warnings—until October 11, two days after the rejection of Kemmler's appeal, when one spectacular accident awakened the city to the terrors of electricity.1
John Feeks, a lineman for Western Union, was a calm man of medium height, with a sunburned face and a bristly red mustache. At noon on October 11, his job took him to the intersection of Centre and Chambers Streets in downtown Manhattan, an area with one of the densest networks of wires in the city. The pole Feeks stood under bore fifteen crossbars—nine running north and south, six east and west—carrying more than 250 wires. Some of those wires were dead, and the lineman's task that day was to cut them away so that they would not interfere with those still in use.