Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [96]
The inventor soon earned an even bigger forum. The North American Review, one of the nation's most influential opinion journals, asked Edison to contribute an essay, published in November as "The Dangers of Electric Lighting." It opened with an invocation of Feeks's death: "If the martyrdom of this poor victim results in the application of stringent measures for the protection of life," Edison wrote, "the sacrifice will not have been made in vain." He said the tragedy could have been avoided had authorities heeded his earlier warnings. Alluding to his dog-killing experiments, he wrote, "I have taken life—not human life—in the belief and full consciousness that the end justified the means." These tests had shown that the passage of "alternating current through any living body means instantaneous death."
"Burying these wires," Edison believed, "will result only in the transfer of deaths to man-holes, houses, stores, and offices, through the agency of the telephone, the low-pressure systems, and the apparatus of the high-tension current itself"
"I have no intention, and I am sure none will accuse me, of being an alarmist," Edison said, having just raised the specter of people being shocked dead in their homes as they picked up the telephone. He said he was simply calling attention to an unseen danger and proposing a remedy. His own low-pressure system was commercially successful and perfectly safe. He therefore advocated "rigid rules for the restriction of electrical pressure," although he would have preferred to go a step farther: "My personal desire would be to prohibit entirely the use of alternating currents. They are as unnecessary as they are dangerous."16
IN LATE NOVEMBER and early December, three more Manhattan men died in electrical accidents. Two of the victims were light company employees, but it was the third death that further stoked the public's rage. While closing up shop for the night, a clerk in an Eighth Avenue dry-goods store picked up a tall metal display case to move it from the sidewalk into the store. The case touched a low-hanging Brush arc lamp, and the clerk fell dead from the shock. It was exactly the type of tragedy Edison warned about: a private citizen struck dead on the sidewalk while performing the routine tasks of life.17
"Mr. Edison has since declared that any metallic object—a doorknob, a railing, a gas fixture, the most common and necessary appliance of life—might at any moment become the medium of death," the Tribune warned. New Yorkers took heed. Some refused to have doorbell wires strung through their homes, fearful that the touch of a button might bring instant death. The Evening Post observed, "One scarcely ventures to put a latch key into his own door." An electrical journal branded such fears "lunatical" and "nonsensical," but the public was not reassured. The Tribune and other New York newspapers endorsed Edison's call for voltage limits, as did papers in other states. Referring to Edison as "the highest authority on the matter of electricity," a South Carolina paper called for limits on voltage. "Mr. Edison is right in his position that electric tension should be regulated by law," another paper said. "The only reasonable solution of the whole problem lies in making every electric wire safe, not because it is insulated but because in its nakedness it carries no death-dealing power."18
The movement gained ground in New York as well. The World pointed out that the city's Board of Health had the power to remove from the streets anything "dangerous to life or health." At the World's request, Harold Brown filed a petition with the health board asking it to prohibit "any current liable to cause death or injury to human life." The city health department conducted tests at a local light company and found that even new wires leaked, exposing the public to grave dangers. The board passed a resolution calling for limits of 250 volts on alternating current, but it deferred enforcement to the electrical board. "In the estimation of Thomas A. Edison,"