Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [98]
CHAPTER 18
Designing the
Electric Chair
AS CITY WORKERS in Manhattan nipped wires and chopped poles, William Kemmler suffered another legal defeat. On December 30 a three-judge panel of the New York Supreme Court—the state's second-highest appellate level—affirmed the lower court's decision in Kemmler's case. If the legislature had prescribed a punishment that involved "torture and a lingering death," it would be the duty of the courts to intervene. The question was whether electrical execution was cruel, and there was no reason to believe that the court's judgment on this matter would be more competent than the legislature's.
The judges also declared that it was "within easy reach of electrical science" to use electricity "to produce instantaneous, and therefore painless, death." As evidence they pointed to Manhattan's recent electrical fatalities: "The frequency and publicity of death by accidental contact with electric wires during the last few years, and especially the last few months, has made the deadly power of the electric current shockingly familiar wherever the newspaper is read."1
THE DAY AFTER the New York Supreme Court issued its ruling, Harold Brown traveled to Auburn, where William Kemmler was starting his seventh month in prison. Brown had first worked on the Auburn electrical plant back in August, just after the Kemmler hearings. Now his machinery was to be tested by the state electrocution commission, which consisted of the physicians Carlos MacDonald and A. D. Rockwell, as well as Columbia College's Professor Louis Laudy who had been Brown's host for the first public dog-killing experiments in the summer of 1888. For the Auburn tests the commission was joined by Dr. George Fell.2
Just as the tests began on December 31, 1889, one of the pulleys linking the steam engine to the dynamo snapped. While a workman repaired it, the prison warden, Charles Durston, took the visitors on a tour of his domain. Auburn prison was built in the 1820s as part of the movement to reform rather than punish criminals. Prisoners labored in prison workshops daily but they were forbidden from talking to each other, and they could not receive visitors or correspond with friends or family. The "Auburn system" of prison discipline became internationally famous. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America grew from his travels in 1831 and 1832, but his official business on that trip was to study prisons, including Auburn. Enthusiasm for the penitentiary waned in the sixty years after Tocqueville's visit, but Auburn's program of strict discipline and manual labor survived. Warden Durston took his physician visitors to the prison workshops, where inmates—known as "stripeds," after their uniforms—earned their keep by making chairs, baskets, and other goods.3
By the time the tour ended, the pulley was repaired, and commissioners began their work. An old horse died from a thirty-second shock at 1,200 volts, and a four-week-old calf succumbed to a ten-second shock at the same voltage. As soon as the calf collapsed, Dr. Fell performed a tracheotomy and attached a "Fell Motor," an artificial respiration device he invented. The commission had invited Dr. Fell and his motor to Auburn in order to lay to rest the fears that electricity might stun rather than kill its victims. After thirty minutes of artificial respiration, the calf showed no signs of recovery and was pronounced dead.4
THE TESTS AT AUBURN showed that the Westinghouse generator had the power to kill a horse. Executing a human being required more complex considerations, such as the positioning of the victim. There was nothing inevitable about the choice of a chair. A writer in the Medico-Legal Journal suggested a tiny room, "something like a sentry-box or watchman's hut," with a metal-lined floor