The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  Others disagreed. Not only was Brown being cruel, they argued, but his experiments proved nothing. In shocking some of the dogs with DC first, he’d battered and weakened them, making it impossible to determine how much each type of current had contributed to their deaths. Furthermore, dogs were small animals. If humans were shocked with AC, there’s no guarantee they’d react the same way.

  In response to these criticisms, Brown held yet another demonstration in December 1888, at Edison’s lab. This time he fried big animals, and used AC alone to do so. He started with a 124-pound calf, attaching an electrode between its eyes; 770 volts dropped it. A second, 145-pound calf succumbed to 750 volts. Then, to quell all doubts, Brown and Edison’s assistant wired up a 1200-pound horse they’d acquired for $15, attaching the electrodes to two different hooves so that the current coursed through its heart. Edison had previously promised reporters that AC killed beasts in one ten-thousandth of a second. In reality, the nag survived five seconds at 600 volts, then fifteen more seconds at the same voltage. Finally a twenty-five-second pulse at 700 volts dispatched it. Edison paid $5 to cart the carcass away.

  Depiction of the “experiments” to electrocute horses. Notice the doghouses in the background, where more animal victims await.

  In doing these experiments, Brown succeeded in his main goal: terrifying people about AC. Still, Edison’s team recognized that torturing dogs and horses wouldn’t exactly endear them to the public. In his private notebook, Edison’s chief electrician cringed at how much the beasts had suffered. In a magazine story printed shortly afterward, however, he nevertheless insisted that their deaths had been “instantaneous and painless.”

  Not everyone bought this propaganda. One critic dismissed Brown as a “lizard-blooded scientific promoter of murder.” Edison caught heat as well: Westinghouse more or less publicly accused him of hiring Brown to do his dirty work. Laughably, Edison denied this, claiming that Brown worked completely independently— despite the fact that Edison had loaned him lab space, equipment, and assistants.

  In response to the accusations against him, Brown challenged Westinghouse’s manhood and took out newspaper ads proposing that they engage in a duel—an electricity duel. If Westinghouse was so sure that AC was safe, Brown said, let’s wire both of us to generators, Brown to DC and Westinghouse to AC. They’d start with a zap at 100 volts, and move up in increments of 50 until someone cried uncle—or dropped dead. “To the regret of many in the industry,” one historian noted, “the duel never took place.”

  Eventually, Edison’s team would kill forty-four dogs, six calves, and two horses in their quest to discredit alternating current. Edison even sought out circus elephants to kill,1 and was crushed when the plans fell through. But none of these deaths did any good— Westinghouse continued to crush Edison in the marketplace. By the end of 1888, Edison’s company was building and selling enough equipment to power 44,000 lightbulbs per year. Westinghouse sold enough equipment to power 48,000 lightbulbs in October 1888 alone.

  Edison had one hope left. To salvage direct current, he’d need to make the connection between AC and death so stark that no one could deny it. He’d have to dispatch a human being.

  On the morning of March 29, 1889, in Buffalo, New York, a dipsomaniac fruitmonger named William Kemmler beat his wife Tillie to death with the blunt end of a hatchet. She’d been flirting with another man, he claimed, and deserved everything she got. After wiping the blood off his hands, the twenty-eight-year-old Kemmler strolled down the street to a bar for his morning eye-opener, where police arrested him. Even Kemmler’s lawyer called him “monstrous,” and Kemmler was inclined to agree: “I’m ready to take the rope,” he said. He didn’t realize that New York State had outlawed hanging, and that he was now slated to become the first person in history to die in the electric chair.

  The chair would be located at Auburn State Prison near Syracuse. Officials there—dazzled by the name of Edison—had enlisted his lackey Harold Brown to help construct it, and Brown naturally recommended they use Westinghouse generators. When Westinghouse refused to sell any to the prison, Brown paid a third party to locate some used ones and scratched off the serial numbers so no one could trace them. Edison’s minions then trumpeted the selection of Westinghouse equipment in the press. (Later, a stack of letters stolen from Brown’s desk provided strong circumstantial evidence that Edison had paid Brown $5,000 [$150,000 today] to build the chair. As for how the letters disappeared from Brown’s desk, no one knows. But some historians believe that Westinghouse—who could play just as dirty as Edison—arranged for the burglary.)

  To fight back, Westinghouse bribed members of the New York legislature to abolish the death penalty. When that tactic failed, he went to the courts. Given Brown’s torture of dogs and horses, there were serious questions about whether the electric chair would be cruel and unusual punishment. In fact, when Kemmler’s high-powered lawyer, Bourke Cockran, was asked why he took the case, he explained that his wife had heard about those poor dogs and couldn’t stand the thought of someone doing that to their family pooch. In reality, Westinghouse was secretly paying Cockran $100,000 ($3 million today); otherwise, Kemmler never could have afforded him. But Cockran did raise legitimate fears about electrocution.

  Alas, Cockran’s objections never had a chance. At a hearing about the cruel-and-unusual question, the state’s lawyers called in the smartest and most honorable witness they could think of to help decide the matter, Thomas Edison. Despite cheerily admitting that he knew nothing about anatomy or physiology, Edison swore that Kemmler would die instantly and painlessly in the chair—provided they used alternating current. In private, he and Brown had even taken to calling AC “the executioner’s current.”

  (This wasn’t the Edison team’s only attempt to bend the English language against his rival. The word electrocute hadn’t caught on yet, so journals and newspapers solicited proposals from readers about what to call death via electricity. The public responded in droves, suggesting electricize, voltacuss, blitzentod, electrostrike, and electrothanasia, among other words. Edison’s lawyer’s suggestion was more pointed: Kemmler would be westinghoused.)

  Thanks to Edison, Kemmler lost his suit to ban the electric chair. Two days later, on October 11, 1889, the world got a preview of what awaited him. Just after noon that day, an electrical repairman got tangled in the spider web of power lines above a street in downtown Manhattan and accidentally touched a live wire. He likely died within seconds, but because he was trapped in the wires, electricity continued to course through his body. Like some biblical demon, blue flames erupted from his mouth, and sparks burst forth from his shoes. Thousands of people gathered below to gawk and scream, despite occasional sprays of blood. But the incident apparently didn’t shake anyone’s faith that Kemmler’s death would not be cruel. Thomas Edison had promised, after all.

  The notorious first electric chair, at Auburn State Prison in New York. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

  Kemmler was finally scheduled to die just after dawn on August 6, 1890. He entered the execution chamber looking preternaturally calm, and spoke a few soft words to the gathered witnesses and reporters. He’d recently gotten his hair cut for his big day, but prison guards ruined it by shaving a tonsure and attaching an electrode to his skull. They also slit his shirt and attached another electrode to his spine. Kemmler then took a seat. (Aside from the obvious, the chair was reportedly quite comfy.) When one of the guards began fumbling with the leather straps that would hold his arms down, Kemmler cooed, “Don’t get excited, Joe. I want you to make a good job of this.” As a last step, the warden fitted a leather mask on his face. Then the warden rapped on a nearby door, the signal for the electrician in the next room to throw the switch.

  As the current bit into him, Kemmler snapped upright. His mouth curled into a mockery of a grin, and one of his fingernails dug so deep into his palm that he started bleeding. Seventeen seconds later, it was over. The electrician cut the current, and Ke
mmler slumped over like so many dogs before him. Doctors on hand pressed his face with their fingers and pointed out the mottled, red-and-white after-impressions—an unmistakable sign of death, they said. Among the witnesses was Alfred Southwick, the Buffalo dentist who’d executed the dogs from the pound. “This is the culmination of ten years’ work and study,” he announced. “We live in a higher civilization today.”

  The only problem was, Kemmler wasn’t dead. His palm was still bleeding, and one of the witnesses noticed that the spurts of blood were rhythmic—a sign of a heartbeat. “Great God, he’s alive!” someone shouted. As if on cue, Kemmler moaned like a wounded sow and convulsed, spitting up purple foam through his mask.

  The room was pandemonium. “Turn on the current!” someone screamed. Unfortunately, no one had considered the need for a second pulse, and it took the electricians a few minutes to get the generator going again. In the meantime, Kemmler continued to groan and quake.

  At long last, the current snapped on again. In the chaos, no one remembered how long the second pulse lasted; estimates ranged from sixty seconds to four-and-a-half minutes. But it was enough to kill Kemmler,2 and then some. An odor of burning hair and fried skin filled the room. One witness vomited. Another fainted. A third wept.

  During the autopsy, Kemmler’s body was so stiff that it remained in a seated position on the table. Doctors discovered that the electrodes had burned through his back into his spine, and that most of his brain had been carbonized into black embers. The physicians nevertheless had to wait three hours to declare Kemmler dead. The legal definition of death back then was the point at which the body could no longer produce its own heat. Kemmler’s body was so hot from being westinghoused that it didn’t cool down until mid-morning.

  As part of the price of admission, the newspaper reporters on hand had promised not to reveal anything about the death except the bare facts. But to hell with that—this was the hottest scoop of the year, and the headlines were screaming. Southwick gamely tried to claim that things had gone well. The death was so mild, he said, “A party of ladies could have been in that room.” Other witnesses were more honest. “I will see that bound figure and hear those sounds until my dying day,” said one. Westinghouse did not witness the death, but he summed things up aptly: “They could have done better with an axe.”

  Thomas Edison acknowledged there were bugs to fix, but predicted that the next execution “will be accomplished instantly and without the scene at Auburn today.” He was not a cruel man—he didn’t relish Kemmler’s suffering. But all was fair in war. Besides, what could you expect from a technology as dangerous as alternating current?

  It might be tempting to excuse Edison and Brown’s behavior on the grounds that theirs was a different era, a time when society simply didn’t treat animals well. But many people back then did protest cruel scientific research, and had been doing so long before Edison’s day.

  Voltaire sneered at “barbarians… who nail [a dog] on a table and dissect it alive.” Samuel Johnson seconded that, and added, “He surely buys knowledge dear, who learns… at the expense of his humanity.” Anatomist John Hunter was a frequent target of such attacks, since he often practiced new surgical techniques on shrieking dogs and pigs; he also did things like inject vinegar into a pregnant dog’s veins just to see if it would abort. (It did.) A few entomologists even protested sticking live insects on pins, since they squirmed in agony afterward, sometimes for days. These protests weren’t isolated voices, either. The powerful Hearst newspaper chain loudly condemned “vivisectionists” for abusing animals. Edison’s latter-day defenders can’t plead ignorance for him.

  Conditions have clearly improved since Edison’s time, but experiments involving animals remain controversial today, even among some scientists. This is partly due to the sheer number of animals that die. Medical research exploded in the second half of the twentieth century, and by the year 2000, American scientists alone were going through half a billion mice, rats, and birds per year, plus dogs, cats, and monkeys on top of that. The scale is staggering.

  The obvious rejoinder is that animal research saves human lives, through the development of drugs and other treatments. While that’s certainly true, there are caveats. However useful animal research was in the past, it often falls short of expectations nowadays. One survey of twenty-six known human carcinogens found that fewer than half also caused cancer in rodents; for predictive value, you might as well flip a coin. Things are even worse with new medicines. In 2007 the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services—not exactly an obscure source—admitted that “nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.” Such failures are in fact so common they’re almost cliché. How many times have we heard about some amazing therapy that miraculously stops cancer or heart disease or signs of Alzheimer’s in mice—only to watch it flop in human beings?

  Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. Evolutionarily, rodents and humans diverged 70 million years ago, back when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth, and we have notably different physiologies. Penicillin is actually fatal to that proverbial lab animal, the guinea pig; had scientists initially tested this drug on them, it never would have made it to market. Even our close evolutionary cousins have different biologies: HIV devastates the human immune system, but is a harmless, slow-growing virus in chimpanzees. Given these facts, some critics of animal testing have been scathing. One called animal research “an internally self-consistent universe with little contact with medical reality.”

  To be sure, animal research does still produce cures. If nothing else, it helps screen out poisonous drugs before they’re ever tried in humans, which is no small thing. But in the past few decades there’s been a movement to cut back on the number of animals used in labs and find alternatives. Possible alternatives include running tests on human organs grown in dishes (organoids) or using computer programs to estimate the efficacy of new chemicals by comparing them to known compounds. Some animals have also won low-level legal rights. The U.S. government no longer supports biomedical research on chimpanzees, and the requirements for using monkeys in general are strict. Similarly, the EPA recently announced that it will phase out toxicity tests with mammals by 2035 and severely curtail tests on birds. (Tests on amphibians and fish will continue.) Perhaps most surprising, the sheer brilliance of octopuses3 has convinced some international groups to require scientists to seek special permission to experiment on them. That’s especially significant since octopuses are invertebrates, animals we usually exempt from our moral codes.

  In all, life is vastly better for research animals today compared to the 1880s. But reports of abuse still pop up in labs around the world, and outré experiments (e.g., monkey head transplants) have not ceased. The howls of Edison’s dogs continue to echo today.

  Ultimately, not even the torment of William Kemmler could negate the advantages of alternating current. Before the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the General Electric company submitted a bid to light the grounds with Edison’s DC equipment for $554,000 ($16 million today). Westinghouse underbid them by $155,000 and won the contract instead. After that, the gap in quality and cost only widened. By 1896, an AC plant near Niagara Falls was powering Buffalo from the astonishing distance of twenty miles, a span that direct current never could have matched.

  Not long after the Niagara plant opened, Edison conceded defeat4 in the War of the Currents. Few people in history can match his record of innovations, but his beloved direct current played almost no role in the twentieth-century revolution in cheap electric power.

  Some historians have argued that Edison’s defeat wasn’t inevitable. Had he recognized the downsides of DC earlier, they argue, and switched to AC instead, his prestige alone would have been enough to win out in the marketplace. Perhaps. But without Tesla’s patents, he was at a big disadvantage, and Edison was nothing if not stubborn. The real shame was that he did
n’t bow out with grace, and spare those horses, calves, and dogs the pain and indignity of electrocution. Moreover, while William Kemmler would have been executed anyway, Edison helped put him through one of the most gruesome deaths in the annals of jurisprudence. Tellingly, in later interviews and memoirs, Edison omitted all mention of torturing animals and his role in developing the electric chair.

  However heated it was, Edison’s spat with Westinghouse and Tesla was just one of many scientific rivalries in history. In fact, another nasty feud between American scientists was also peaking in the late 1800s, and once again, animals were caught in the crossfire. Luckily, the spat between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh involved animals who were long past suffering: both men were paleontologists, fighting over fossilized dinosaurs. And unlike the destructive War of the Currents, the Bone Wars not only pushed their field forward but proved one of the most delightfully catty episodes in the history of science.

  Footnotes

  1 Elephant executions were surprisingly common. As wild beasts, elephants resented being locked in tiny cages at zoos or prodded into doing tricks for circuses. Some trainers were also needlessly cruel: one got drunk once and fed his elephant a lit cigarette. Unsurprisingly, these abused elephants sometimes lashed out and killed people, at which point they’d be executed. One scholar dug up thirty-six separate cases of pachyderm capital punishment. This included Topsy the elephant, who was killed in 1903 via electrocution. Understandably, given that Edison wanted to kill an elephant himself, and given that he did dispatch many other animals via electricity, many people today believe that Edison personally had a hand in Topsy’s demise. That isn’t true—the War of the Currents was long over by 1903. But Edison’s film company did record the execution, which makes for some brutal viewing.