Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [93]
It was the lunch hour in Manhattan's busiest district, and the lineman's ascent drew a crowd. About twenty-five feet up, Feeks slowed to ease past the first cross-arm, which bore two thick cables carrying the pole's only electric light current. After that, it was a clear shot of twenty feet up to the pole's top, where the other fourteen crossbars bore their heavy burden of telegraph wires. Feeks stopped again at the lowest crossbar and stared straight up, plotting a route through the dozens of interlaced wires. After shifting to the north side of the pole, he poked his head through a small opening in the wires and drew his shoulders together as he squeezed through. Then he looked for the next gap in the weave. When none offered itself, he yanked the wires apart with his hand and hoisted himself through. In this way Feeks passed the first, second, third, and fourth crossbars, before arriving at the place where he had work to do. He wrapped his left arm around a crossbar and braced his left foot against a wire on the crossbar below. His right leg dangling free, he drew the pliers from his belt and reached out to snip a wire. As he did so, he lost his balance and grasped a wire with his right hand to steady himself.
As far as Feeks knew, the only danger was falling, because the telegraph wires normally carried too little current to pose a risk. But somewiiere, blocks away, an alternating-current light wire had crossed the same telegraph wire Feeks held in his hand. As the wires blew in the wind, the dead telegraph wire cut through the insulation on the light wire. High-voltage current diverted from its charted course and surged down the telegraph wire, into Feeks's right hand, and out his left foot. His body went tense, his right arm quivered, his mouth opened but emitted no sound. Feeks's head reared up, and his throat came to rest on the live wire. A tiny blue flame played around his right hand and his left foot, and small puffs of smoke drifted away on the wind.
The small group of men who had watched Feeks's ascent screamed, and immediately every face on the street turned and looked up to see a man trapped like a fly in a web of wires. Before long, thousands of people filled the rooftops and blocked the streets and the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. World reporter Nellie Bly, just a few days from setting off on her famous globe-girdling trip, pressed her way through the crowd in time to see the wires burn into the lineman's flesh. "The hand ceases to quiver," Bly wrote, "and a dark-red stream gushes from the wrist. Now it springs from the throat, spotting the pole and dripping down on the heads of the fleeing crowd."
The death of lineman john as illustrated in the New York World.
After forty-five minutes another lineman, wearing rubber boots and gloves, climbed the pole, tied a rope around Feeks's waist, and tossed the other end over a crossbar and down to the street, where more Western Union men took up the slack. As the lineman clipped the wires that ensnared Feeks, they whipped to the street and sent the crowd running again. When the last wire was severed, Feeks swung free and was lowered slowly to the ground, doubled up, his hands touching his feet. "Killed first, cut afterwards, then roasted," Nellie Bly reported, "not by heathens, but by a monopoly. All at mid-day in the streets of New York."2
Electricity had killed other men in New York, but there had never been anything like the death of John Feeks. It was a shared trauma. Thousands witnessed the bloody spectacle in person, and hundreds of thousands more read about it and saw the illustrations in the newspapers. The Tribune wrote that it had been more than a decade since the city had experienced "so many unmistakable indications of popular