Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [97]
The health board's plan failed, but it terrified the alternating-current forces. Facing removal of their wires or even voltage limitations, they embraced the remedy that they had fought bitterly only a few months before: the burial of their wires. George Westinghouse wrote "A Reply to Mr. Edison" for the North American Review, insisting that alternating current would be perfectly safe if tucked under the streets. This tardy concession did not appease the public. Feeks and a dozen other men were dead, the World charged, only because "the Electric-Light Companies scorn the law, defy its officers and twiddle their fingers at a helpless public."20
On December 13, two months after the death of John Feeks, the state supreme court dissolved the injunction against removal of the wires and issued a ruling harshly condemning the light companies: "When they claim that the destruction of these instruments of death, maintained by them in violation of every duty and obligation which they owe to the public, is an invasion of their rights of property, such claim seems to proceed upon the assumption that nothing has a right to exist except themselves."21
Judge magazine offered the tongue-in-cheek proposal that rubber suits offered the only means of protecting oneself (and one's animals) from the dangers of electric shock.
Time had run out for the Westinghouse lighting interests in New York. The electrical board ordered them to shut off their current by eight o'clock the next morning, and the removal of lines began at precisely half past nine. The Department of Public Works hired twenty-five men, equipped them with rubber gloves and insulated wire shears (known as "nippers"), and divided them into four gangs. Each gang started at a central station and followed the wires radiating from it, searching for violations: bad insulation, unauthorized poles, lamps hanging too low, wires affixed to telegraph poles or elevated train platforms. When they spotted problems, a lineman climbed the pole and snipped the wires, and then one of his fellows went at the pole with an ax. The crews toppled twenty-three poles and stripped nearly 50,000 feet of wire on the first day, a Saturday. Eager to continue, they started in again the next morning, although the World noted that "churchgoers expressed disapprobation of the Sunday work."22
New Yorkers took gleeful pleasure in this assault on private property. After the carnage of the previous months, the attack on the poles became cathartic. Crowds gathered to cheer and watch the chips fly as workers used axes to fell electric light poles. "Destruction of Property Goes Merrily On," read a headline in the staid Times. When the work continued on Christmas Eve, the newspaper described "the music of the axes and nippers" as "fitting accompaniment to the spirit of holiday merrymaking." The destructive frenzy tailed off on December 30, by which time more than 1 million feet of wire—a quarter of the city's total—had been stripped from the streets.23
Without wires, however, there was less light. The companies could lay new wires underground, but that would have to wait until the spring thaw unlocked the ground and the laying of conduits resumed. The only light company unaffected was Edison Illuminating, whose wires had always been underground. But Edison did not light the streets. A few months earlier, Brush, United States Illluminating, and a few other companies sent current to more than 1,000 arc lamps that threw a harsh white glare on the city's night life. On New Year's Eve 1889, all of those lights were off. Early in the evening the interior lights of stores and saloons threw a glow onto the sidewalks, but when businesses closed, the streets grew black.