The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  The bottom line was that DC power systems needed fat, expensive copper wires, while AC systems didn’t. As a bonus, thanks to the higher electrical pressure, AC systems didn’t need to have power plants every few blocks; a single plant could serve a whole city. All these factors put Edison’s plan to wire cities with DC at a big disadvantage.

  Still, alternating current back then did have one major downside— poor equipment. Unlike with DC, no Edisons had invested their time and genius in making good, reliable AC motors, generators, and transmission gear. As a result, Edison believed that his superior machinery—coupled with his glittering public reputation—would overcome the high cost of construction and copper wires and give him a decisive edge in the marketplace. It all might have worked out that way, too, if not for a young Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla.

  If you like your scientists eccentric, it’s hard to beat Tesla. He claimed to speak to Martians on occasion, and would compulsively calculate the volume of any bowl or cup placed in front of him at meals. “I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver,” he once said, and he’d get physically ill if he saw a peach or pearl. No one knew why. But few in history could match Tesla for sheer intellectual horsepower. Often he didn’t even need to test his inventions—they appeared fully formed in his mind, the gears already whirring. While walking in a city park with a friend once, the friend watched Tesla freeze mid-stride. Then his face fell slack, to the point the friend assumed Tesla was having a seizure. In reality, a new type of electric motor had popped into his brain, whole and unbidden. Once Tesla snapped out of it, he sketched the idea in the dirt with a stick, beaming over its elegance. At that point, actually building the machine was superfluous to him. Tesla knew it would work, and it did.

  After studying electrical engineering in Europe, the twenty-eight-year-old Tesla traveled to the United States in 1884; he arrived with four cents, a book of poems, and a letter recommending him to Edison. (“I know two great men,” it said, “and you are one of them; the other is this young man.”) Impressed, the thirty-seven-year-old Edison hired Tesla as an engineer, but the two clashed immediately. Some of this tension sprang from scientific differences. Edison favored DC, while Tesla believed the future belonged to AC. Furthermore, Tesla was something of an elitist, and he scorned Edison’s greatest gift—his penchant for hard work. In trying to come up with a better lightbulb filament, Edison and his assistants had laboriously tried thousands of different materials, including horsehair, cork, grass, corn silk, cinnamon bark, turnips, ginger, spider silk, and macaroni. This scattershot approach drove Tesla batty. “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack,” he once complained, “he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search… I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of his labor.” Why didn’t everyone just hallucinate brilliant new ideas like him?

  Electrical whiz and Edison rival Nikola Tesla. (Photograph by Napoleon Sarony.)

  What really produced sparks, however, was the friction of their personalities. Tesla was a neurotic germophobe who dressed in elegant suits. Edison was sloppy and uncouth, with stained shirts and dirty fingernails that disgusted the Serbian. (A reporter once said that Edison “looked like nothing so much as a country store keeper hurrying to fill an order of prunes.”) And while it’s hard to imagine Tesla ever smiling, Edison loved boneheaded practical jokes. One favorite involved hooking up a battery to a metal sink and turning a crank to build up a big charge. When some dupe touched the sink and leapt back in pain, he’d howl with laughter.

  That penchant for jokes, in fact, ultimately destroyed his relationship with Tesla. In the spring of 1885, Edison was at wits’ end trying to redesign some DC generators. They were inefficient and prone to breakdowns, and he couldn’t see a way around the problems. He told Tesla he’d pay him $50,000—$1.5 million today—if he could fix the flaws. Tesla worked himself to exhaustion, vastly improving the generators’ performance. But when he went to claim his bonus, Edison doubled over laughing. “Tesla,” he said, “you don’t understand our American sense of humor.” Edison then claimed— perhaps falsely—that he’d been clowning around the whole time and had no intention of paying such a ridiculous sum. Tesla quit on the spot, unspeakably furious. He was reduced to digging ditches for a while in order to eat, but he refused to work for a liar.

  Quitting the job, however, ultimately benefitted Tesla. He soon landed in Pittsburgh with entrepreneur George Westinghouse, who was investing heavily in AC technology. Hiring an unknown like Tesla was a gamble, but over the next few years, the move paid off handsomely. Tesla eventually earned forty different patents for the Westinghouse company on AC devices, eliminating many of the problems plaguing the technology. To be sure, just like with Edison and the lightbulb, Tesla didn’t do everything alone. Other people invented key pieces of equipment, and Tesla rather snobbishly disdained the work of actually implementing his ideas, leaving that to those beneath him. But between Tesla’s genius and Westinghouse’s business savvy, AC power suddenly looked formidable.

  A hiccup in the commodities market soon boosted AC’s chances even more. In 1887, some greedy French speculators cornered the world supply of copper, driving its price up to 20 cents per pound ($3 today), twice as much as before. This didn’t hurt Westinghouse much, since his company could still use thin wires and just boost the voltage-pressure. Edison, meanwhile, faced ruin. Because his DC system couldn’t boost the voltage easily, he needed thick wires to deliver power, and the sudden rise in copper costs threatened his entire vision.

  Even worse for Edison, Westinghouse was aggressive. Westinghouse had opened his first AC plant in Buffalo in November 1886. Less than a year later, sixty-eight more plants were open or under construction. AC was proving especially popular in the small towns and suburbs where the vast majority of Americans lived then. The low population density in those places meant that building power plants every few blocks didn’t make sense. Westinghouse’s scheme proved far cheaper overall.

  Pretty soon, Edison was facing checkmate. So, getting desperate, he made the one move he had left. If he couldn’t beat AC on merit, then he’d beat it on public relations. He would declare AC a public menace, and use the bully pulpit of his fame to discredit it in people’s minds. In short, he’d declare war—what historians now call the War of the Currents.

  For Edison this war was only partly about money. Yes, he wanted to fund his beloved research lab, but he’d also made his reputation as an electrical wizard, and the thought of being bested in this arena enraged him and threatened his scientific ego. Edison also still dreamed of revolutionizing America through electrical power—but only if America did things his way. In fact, he’d ousted his company’s entire board of directors a few years earlier when they’d challenged his vison of what the electrical industry in America should look like. He’d replaced them with cronies of his, and this sort of groupthink can lead to ethical blind spots—or worse. In sum, Edison found himself in a winner-take-all competition, and losing would threaten not only his bank account but his sense of self; the danger was personal. Psychologists have noted that people in those circumstances are all too willing to trample moral niceties and play dirty, and when he started smearing AC in public, there was no one around to tell him to stop.

  Now, Edison’s claims about the danger of alternating current did have a modest basis in fact. There’s no question that DC at high voltages can be deadly: Lightning, after all, is direct current. But the push-pull, back-and-forth nature of AC does more damage to body tissue, and at a given voltage, AC is more likely to kill (usually by damaging your heart or frying your nerves). Add to that the fact that AC power plants transmitted at much higher voltages in the first place, and things did look scary.

  At least to the uninformed. Because while AC would be transmitted at high voltages inside power lines, tho
se voltages would be “stepped down” to much safer levels inside people’s homes. In demonizing AC, however, Edison always neglected to mention that inconvenient truth. Other things he claimed were outright lies. He told newspapers that, in a house wired for AC, any metal object might kill its inhabitants—doorknobs, railings, light fixtures. As a result, people in AC homes were suddenly afraid to ring buzzers or use house keys. Another bogus claim involved burying wires. Again, Edison’s crews buried transmission lines beneath cobblestone streets, whereas Westinghouse’s strung the wires overhead, where they might break and shock people. But Edison declared that even if Westinghouse buried his wires, AC would “come up the manholes” and attack people, like a sewer monster. In Edison’s telling, there was no safe level of alternating current.

  To be fair, fin de siècle American capitalism was pretty rough-and-tumble, and the claims Edison made, however false, might have been forgivable if he’d stopped there. But Edison soon decided that smears weren’t enough. He needed to show people the dangers of AC—make them cringe. In short, in a dog-eat-dog world, he decided the best way to get ahead would be to kill some actual dogs.

  Edison didn’t pioneer the use of electricity to kill animals. That distinction belongs to another man, who was engaged in a battle over the future of the death penalty.

  In the 1880s, New York State was seeking a more humane way to execute criminals. The standard method, hanging, had too many bad associations—not only with Southern lynchings but also with the debauchery of public executions in Europe, where drunken revelers gathered to leer at the victim and anatomists brawled over the body afterward. Executioners often botched the job anyway. They’d give prisoners too little rope and leave them dangling in gurgling agony—or too much rope and inadvertently decapitate them when they fell and snapped. Not to mention that prisoners often vomited, soiled themselves, and ejaculated mid-hanging. Not exactly wholesome.

  In 1886, New York appointed a three-person committee to devise a better way. First things first, the trio scoured the annals of history and picked out forty possible methods of capital punishment for consideration, including crucifixion, exposure to serpents, boiling in oil, the iron maiden, defenestration, shooting people from cannons, and running the gauntlet. All were rejected as cruel. In the end, support coalesced around two fairly modern methods: lethal injection and electrocution, both of which seemed to kill people gently. In August 1881, for instance, a man named Lemuel Smith had broken into an electrical plant in Buffalo with his friends to touch some poorly grounded equipment, which gave them a pleasant tingling sensation. Later that night, after getting roaring drunk, Smith snuck back in for more jollies and accidentally electrocuted himself. The autopsy showed little internal damage, and from this and similar accidents, doctors concluded that electricity killed people instantly and without pain.

  Still, two committee members voiced support for lethal injection. That’s when the third member, Buffalo dentist Alfred Southwick, who supported electrocution, took matters into his own hands. The city of Buffalo had recently started paying 25¢ for every stray dog turned into the pound. Local urchins took full advantage, and the pound’s cages were soon overstuffed with mutts—far more than attendants could care for. Southwick stepped in and offered to help them cull. He built a wooden cage with a zinc floor connected to a local power line. He then filled the box with an inch of water and placed a terrier inside. It wore a metal muzzle, also connected to the power line. When everything was ready, Southwick flipped a lever and completed the circuit. The terrier slumped over dead. Further trials dispatched twenty-seven more dogs, none of which yelped or bucked or showed any signs of suffering.

  These tests convinced Southwick that electrocution was the perfect mode of death. To bolster his case, he then sat down in November 1887 and wrote a letter to the most famous electrician in the world. He wanted Thomas Edison’s endorsement in supporting this quick, easy method of execution.

  Edison rebuffed him. He told Southwick he found the death penalty barbaric and opposed capital punishment on humanitarian grounds. (As Edison once put it, “There are wonderful possibilities in each human soul, and I cannot endorse a method of punishment which destroys the last chance of usefulness.”) In short, he would never support Southwick’s cause.

  However chagrined, Southwick wrote Edison back in December. Nations have executed criminals since the beginning of time, he argued. Given that reality, shouldn’t we strive to minimize suffering and find more humane ways of putting people to death?

  Southwick no doubt expected another tongue-lashing. But Edison’s answer surprised him. Although Southwick couldn’t have known it, the exchange took place during the middle of Westinghouse’s big expansion of AC power plants. DC technology was on the ropes, and Edison’s genius was taking a pummeling. While Edison didn’t allude to these affairs in his response, his answer looks suspicious in light of them. He would certainly abolish the death penalty if he could, he wrote. But until that day came, nations should strive to adopt “the most humane method available,” and electrocution fit the bill. He then helpfully added that, while several different generators could kill, “the most effective of these are known as ‘alternating current’ machines, manufactured principally in this country by Mr. George Westinghouse.”

  Thrilled, Southwick took Edison’s letter to the committee members who’d been leaning toward morphine injections. This changed their minds. If Thomas Edison supported electricity, well, that was good enough for them. In early June 1888, they publicly recommended electrocution for New York State.

  Despite Edison’s none-too-subtle hint, the committee didn’t specify whether to use alternating or direct current for executions, leaving that choice to the future. The next day, however, an Edison partisan published an incendiary letter in a newspaper to influence their decision. He denounced AC as a “damnable” technology, and added that hanging AC lines above New York streets “is as dangerous as burning a candle in a [gun]powder factory.”

  Seeing this letter, and sensing trouble, George Westinghouse wrote Edison a few days later with a peace offering: “I believe there has been a systematic attempt on the part of some people to do a great deal of mischief,” he said, and exacerbate the conflict between them. Let’s put an end to it. He also extended an offer. Years earlier, before Edison viewed him as a threat, Westinghouse had toured Edison’s labs in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Westinghouse now proposed returning the favor and letting Edison tour his headquarters in Pittsburgh, to establish “harmonious relations.”

  Edison spurned the offer. Too busy to travel, he claimed.

  Remarkably, though, Edison did find time to hatch another plot against Westinghouse. The newspaper letter had kicked up a hornet’s nest among engineers about the merits of AC versus DC, and a reporter called Edison in mid-June for comments. Edison invited him out to his lab for a demonstration instead. The reporter arrived to find a dog with a rope around its neck. It was standing on a tin sheet, which was connected to a generator. A nearby water dish was connected to the generator as well. When the dog leaned down to drink, Edison explained, it would complete the circuit and kill itself.

  The dog, however, refused to cooperate. Sensing something amiss, it wouldn’t drink on its own; when Edison’s assistants yanked its head down with the rope, the dog snapped it and ran away. The assistants replaced both rope and dog and resumed the tug-of-war. Finally, after one hard pull, the dog slipped. Its paw splashed into the water dish, and 1500 volts coursed through its heart and brain. After a single yelp, it dropped dead. The reporter was impressed and wrote up a story. In it, he dutifully noted Edison’s main point—that they’d used alternating current.

  Things quickly got worse from there. The author of the original newspaper letter was an electrician named Harold Brown, who more or less worshipped Edison. But his diatribe had been denounced by several engineers, who maintained that he had too little evidence to support his claims about the dangers of AC. So despite having never met Edison, Br
own wrote to the Wizard of Menlo Park and asked whether he could use the labs there to generate more evidence—by electrocuting more dogs.

  To Brown’s surprise, Edison agreed. In truth, opening up his lab to strangers wasn’t unusual for Edison, who could be quite generous sometimes. In this case he even loaned Brown his top assistant to help out. What was unusual here was the conditions Edison put on the work. Normally Edison encouraged collegiality and the open exchange of ideas—the scientific ideal. But he told Brown to keep mum about these experiments. He also restricted Brown to working at night, so that people wouldn’t hear the howls.

  As in Buffalo, someone posted a sign near Edison’s lab offering a quarter apiece for stray dogs, and local ruffians once again came through. Brown planned to electrocute the mutts systematically, but in reality the work was haphazard. The dogs differed wildly in size—setters, terriers, Saint Bernards, bulldogs—and he zapped them with both DC and AC at anywhere from 300 to 1400 volts. The results were nevertheless consistent—an uninterrupted litany of suffering. The dogs jumped and yelped and whimpered in pain, and those that weren’t stunned by the shocks made “violent effort[s] to escape,” he noted. One started bleeding from its eyes.

  After a month of this, Brown felt confident enough to arrange for the demonstration above, where he tormented a Newfoundland mix at Columbia. The newspaper coverage was outraged, and any normal man would have slunk away in shame. Brown, in contrast, staged another demo a few days later, killing three more dogs with alternating current and allowing doctors to dissect them afterward. All in all, he reported to Edison’s assistant, the experiments were a “fine exhibit” about the dangers of AC.