Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [94]
"Any moment may bring a similar horrible death to any man, woman or child in the city," the World warned.4
Panic-stricken building owners took the law into their own hands and chopped the wires running over their rooftops. According to the World, some people grew so terrified that they threw out their telephones, "as if the little wires which connect them went straight to the river of death."5
On the pole where Feeks died, a saloon keeper nailed a tin cracker box with a sign reading "Help the Victim's Widow," and within a few days the donations totaled more than $2,000.
The day after Feeks died, Mayor Hugh Grant convened the Board of Electrical Control and ordered that all unsafe wires be cut down immediately Before the removal of wires could commence, however, George Westinghouse set his lawyers to work and scored a quick legal victory, persuading Justice George Andrews of the state supreme court to issue an injunction barring the city from touching the wires of Westinghouse's subsidiaries, the Brush and U.S. Illuminating companies. The World hinted at the all-too-plausible possibility of bribery, charging the judge with "ignorance or worse" and asking, "What influence was it which induced Judge Andrews to render so absurd a decision?"7
George Westinghouse suddenly appeared to be the man that Edison and Brown had long described: a cold-blooded villain denying the dangers of alternating current and risking lives for the sake of profits. "How ignorant or how deceitful, and how contemptible in either case, appear the assurances of safety with which the community has been mocked for years past," a newspaper editorial charged.8
THE TRIBUNE took this occasion to bemoan the "extraordinary condition of impotence to which the complicated machinery of civilization has reduced this community." It was an unusual admission, for Americans rarely paused to acknowledge that economic growth was taking a heavy toll in lives. In fact, more Americans were killed and maimed in the peacetime economy of the 1870s and 1880s than in the Civil War, and the most dangerous industries—railroads and coal mining—were the same ones that fueled the boom. Every year 1 out of 100 railroad brakemen died, along with 6 percent of the workers in some Pennsylvania coal fields. The danger was not inevitable. In late Victorian England—hardly a model of the compassionate state—the rate of railroad worker deaths was much lower, thanks to more stringent regulation. The United States, on the other hand, did not begin to adopt effective safety regulations until after 1900. In the 1880s, the government and the courts showed little interest in protecting the lives of workers.9
Electricity accounted for fewer than 1 percent of the accidental deaths in New York in the late 1880s. If the raw numbers were the guide, the city should have been in a panic over the many things—elevator shafts, street railways, illuminating gas—that killed far more people than overhead wires. But electricity was different. It was new and mysterious, a force of life as well as a cause of death. Electricity held people in thrall, and it was a short step from awe to dread.10
This illustration, which appeared in Judge magazine shortly after Feeks's death, captured the widespread fear that no one was safe on the streets of New York.
The death of John Feeks showed Americans that the danger was no longer restricted to workers in a few industries. Electric wires brought the terror home. "Death does not stop at the door," one expert said, "but comes right into the house, and perhaps as you are closing a door or turning on the gas you are killed.