The Electric War

by Mike Winchell

  The American public, though, balked at Southwick’s invention: this “chair of death.” The science of electricity, after all, was so new and temperamental. Why trust a dentist, even if he was a member of the “Death Commission”?

  The first electric chair, used in 1890, in the execution of William Kemmler

  The Gerry Commission wasn’t enough to win over the public. Southwick needed an expert to back him and lend credibility to the chair.

  He needed Thomas Edison.

  * * *

  Thomas Edison was the oxidizing agent—the missing third ingredient needed to create a combustible combination in the form of the functional electric chair.

  Just over a decade earlier, Edison had wowed the world with his invention of the phonograph, launching him to instant celebrity status. The man who became known as the father of invention, along with his team of like-minded inventors at his lab in Menlo Park, didn’t stop with the phonograph but instead introduced other inventions, including the invention he’d become synonymous with: the light bulb.

  An early patent on the design of an incandescent light bulb in 1878 had staved off competitors, but Edison and his team at Menlo Park could not perfect a cost-effective, long-lasting bulb for practical use, despite focusing all efforts on the invention. It wasn’t just a bulb that was needed—it was a system of powering it. Finally, two years after the initial bulb prototype and patented design, Edison had designed and mass-produced a long-lasting bulb, one that utilized his own patented system of electric current: direct current.

  Direct current (DC) is essentially a one-way street for electricity. The power source, like a battery, gives off power, called electrons, and sends it in one direction. This direction of electron flow is called its circuit. The electricity follows its unidirectional circuit until it reaches the utility, like a light bulb, and it receives power. With direct current, the circuit continues on to the next utility, like an outlet connected to a toaster, and then on to the next utility and then the next. On a large scale, a power generator sends electrons through its circuit to one residence and then the next and the next. The problem with direct current is that the amount of power—the strength of the electrons—weakens the farther away from the power source it gets. Therefore, the farther away a house is from a large generator, the weaker its power will be. This means direct current requires more power sources spaced out from block to block of a big city in order to supply power to everyone. Even so, the residence farthest away, like one on the outskirts of town, would receive less power than those closer to town.

  This means direct current was expensive and required a lot of wiring, machinery, and generators that had to be distributed every few city blocks. Costs piled up, and electric light became less for the masses and more for the elite class. Still, parts of New York were lit up by Edison’s direct current, and progress was shining down on society.

  Thomas Alva Edison

  Competition also surfaced in the form of alternating current (AC), a system that was designed and patented by Nikola Tesla, a former employee of Edison’s, and then bought and mass-produced by inventor and businessman George Westinghouse, who became the public figure in direct opposition to Thomas Edison. Alternating current was less expensive and much more aesthetically pleasing than direct current. It required only one large dynamo located on the edge of town, and current traveled back and forth along a single wire.

  Alternating current involves a power source, like a generator, that gives off electricity that reverses—or alternates—direction multiple times. This current alternates direction sixty times per second in American AC systems. Alternating current fed through a transformer allows the strength of the electricity to be adjusted, which means the voltage can be tailored specifically for the device being powered. Another key difference between AC and DC is that AC’s bidirectional current makes it more suitable for long-distance transmission than DC electricity, so that a residence on the edge of town will receive the same amount of power as one directly next to the power source. This means the AC system needs far fewer power generators than the DC system.

  Edison had engaged in battle with his competition, and he was losing in the court of public opinion. Edison was a savvy businessman, and he knew that not just light would rely on the most effective and commercial system of electric current—everything would. He was desperate, willing to do anything to prove his system was the logical—and safe—choice.

  Enter Alfred P. Southwick and the electric chair.

  On behalf of the Gerry Commission, Southwick had written to Edison twice to seek advice and his endorsement of the electric chair. At first, these letters went unanswered. Until, finally, Edison ran out of ammunition to fight off his competition.

  The electric chair, Edison determined, was the artillery he had been waiting for. In 1888, Thomas Edison endorsed the use of electricity as a more humane method of execution, but only if alternating current—since he claimed it was so deadly—was the method of electric current employed. Edison would even recommend that the act of electrocution as capital punishment be termed “being Westinghoused,” directly stamping his main competitor’s name into the consciousness of the public. Doing so would make it unmistakable that alternating current was a killer—an instant killer.

  Edison allowed his name to be tied to the creation of the electric chair. It was a bold move. But this man, Edison, had always been a gambler.

  3 WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE …

  Thomas Alva Edison, known as “Al” in his early years, had always possessed a burning sense of curiosity that mixed, often dangerously, with a blind willingness to take risks.

  Born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio—a burgeoning town thanks to the Milan Canal, built to make traveling the twisting, turning Huron River manageable for the many ships carrying wheat—young Al Edison’s curiosity nearly killed him a few times over. Like a cat, Al seemed to have nine lives, and his inquisitive, reckless nature did its best to use up each life quickly.

  Young Al was amazed at the sights and sounds all around him. And like many children who find themselves confused, Al turned to asking “Why?” and “How?” And ask he did, so much so, in fact, that his father admitted to being embarrassed by his son’s silly questions. But when no answers satisfied Al’s inquiring mind, the small boy took to personal inspection to find his own answers. Firsthand experience was his solution to the myriad unanswered questions.

  Just before he turned five years old, Al was so curious about a grain elevator that he crept closer and closer until he fell in. Luckily, he was snatched by an alert worker and yanked out of the quicksand-like grain after being submerged for a few moments. If the worker had been a second slower, that lifesaving hand would have been unable to help young Al.

  Al also spent some of his nine lives falling into the Milan Canal, like many boys his age had done. But unlike the other boys, who just wanted to get near the water or were carelessly playing too close to the water’s edge, what drew Al dangerously close was the canal’s construction and practicality, along with the complex and varied ships that used the man-made waterway.

  Young Thomas Alva Edison

  When he was six, Al noticed a goose resting atop its eggs. The boy pondered the goose’s egg-rearing practice and the eventual end result. He desperately wanted to see the eggs hatch, but just as curiosity served as a weakness, so did impatience. If only there was a way to make those eggs hatch sooner. Al became lost in introspection and developed a theory. The next day, Al’s mother, Nancy Edison, found him sitting atop the eggs. His mother beckoned him to get off the eggs, grabbed his arm, and pulled him away from the mother goose, who was honking loudly in protest. Mrs. Edison—amused but concerned—asked her son why he was doing such a thing. Al’s reply was one of logic. If the heat and mass of the mother goose’s rump helped to hatch the eggs, surely a larger rear end—like his own—would expedite the process? Mrs. Edison could only shake her head at her son’s naive but intuitive sense of reasoning.<
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  While Al’s early inquisitive urges threatened his own well-being, as he grew older they became more dangerous to those around him as well. In the family’s final year living in Milan, Al decided he wanted to know how hay burned. Is it quick-burning? How does it smell? Does the flame jump to neighboring objects once it has used up the hay, or does it peter out and extinguish itself? He knew asking his father these questions would, as usual, lead to both his father’s frustration and an ultimate dead end, so Al decided to light some hay on fire in his father’s barn. The blaze grew so quickly and spread so expansively that the barn was a total loss. Al had the answer he’d craved, but it had cost his family dearly in the form of a barn. If that weren’t enough, Al was dragged to the village square by his father and publicly whipped as a lesson to him and other youths.

  When Al was seven, the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. The growing and endlessly branching limbs of railroad tracks had expanded to Ohio and the Huron River and had taken over as the primary means of commercial travel. The Milan Canal and the town itself had outlived its usefulness—run over by the modern railway.

  Port Huron promised more opportunities for the Edison family and offered Al a chance at a formal education. His public schooling was fleeting, though, and came to an abrupt end a mere three months after it had begun when his teacher Reverend G. B. Engle described Al as “addled” and claimed he was unteachable. Mrs. Edison, having been a teacher in Canada before the family’s move to the US, promptly took to homeschooling her son. Nancy Edison recognized her son’s unique mind and knew how to tap into and make use of his individual learning style. In fact, an adult Thomas Edison would later conclude about his mother, “If it had not been for her appreciation and her faith in me at a critical time in my experience, I should very likely never have become an inventor.”

  With his mother’s encouragement, Al questioned and experimented. Questioned some more. Experimented some more. It was a way of life for Al, who was growing both physically and intellectually. Around the age of ten, Al became particularly curious about chemistry, his cellar serving as a laboratory. This made perfect sense for young Edison, for although he read widely and enjoyed the process of learning through the written word, he learned early on that “doing the thing itself is what counts.” With that in mind, Al quickly built up a collection of nearly two hundred bottles and containers, which he painstakingly shelved, each labeled “Poison” to scare others from handling his prized ingredients. Mrs. Edison allowed her son to experiment in the cellar but worried about the results and therefore kept a close eye on Al’s undertakings. Perhaps the smoke from the burning barn in Milan had followed the family and had not quite lifted high enough to clear the air.

  It seemed the older he got, the more Al’s curiosity impacted others. Just before his eleventh birthday, Al convinced his childhood acquaintance, a boy by the name of Michael Oates, to do an experiment with Seidlitz, a powdery chemical that turns to gas when mixed with water. Seeing the powder + water = weightless gas reaction, Al instructed Oates to ingest a large quantity of Seidlitz, theorizing that the powder would turn to gas when it came into contact with water in the boy’s stomach, which in turn would result in the boy floating into the air like a balloon. The Human Balloon Experiment, of course, didn’t pan out as Edison had planned. Instead, the failed experiment resulted in a very sick Oates and (after Mrs. Edison had taken a switch to him) a very sore Al Edison.

  Experimenting with chemicals also had another consequence: cost. These chemicals and essential ingredients weren’t free. If Al wanted to keep up with his experiments, he needed to make money. Eleven-year-old Al Edison soon gained the opportunity to use a horse and wagon to run a relatively large market garden for the Edison family. After doing his share of hoeing corn and working the land, Al would load the wagon with corn, lettuce, and other vegetables to sell to people around town. The enterprise was a success. In fact, Al even took on an employee, Michael Oates, that same boy who had agreed to become the first human-balloon guinea pig. Along with Oates, Al took to business kindly and made a steady profit, though he had no interest in saving any of his money. Instead, every penny was put into his experiments.

  With a taste for business but a disdain for physical labor in the hot sun, Al looked around and noticed everything was turning toward the railroad. Grand Trunk Railway was carving its tracks all around him, putting down roots not just in Port Huron and neighboring areas but all over the world. Things were moving quickly. Change was a wildfire. And Al knew he had to hop aboard and go in the direction the world was moving or else he’d risk being left behind.

  So at the age of twelve, Al begged his mother to allow him to become a newsboy, selling papers and other goods on the Grand Trunk train that traveled from Port Huron to Detroit. When she said no, he begged some more. She said no again. He begged again. Al was relentless. When Mrs. Edison finally gave in, each day Al traveled the local train’s sixty-three-mile route from seven in the morning to nine at night. For the next two years, Al sold newspapers, vegetables, butter, and anything that could help turn a profit. Al also worked as a candy butcher, selling sweets to passengers on the train. During this time, he developed his skills and natural abilities as a salesman and entrepreneur. Making use of his experience with Michael Oates, Al took on other boys as employees and improved his profits, which, all told, resulted in around eight to ten dollars a day, most of which went directly toward his chemistry obsession; he moved his laboratory from his cellar to an unused baggage-car compartment on the train.

  When the Civil War broke out, Al saw the market of the written word become prosperous, especially on the Grand Trunk Railway, so he gave up his vegetable store and focused on the newspaper business. People were hurrying their way through life; spare time was a commodity. The train ride was a small amount of time for passengers to, in whatever way possible, “catch up” with the chaotic world around them. Al sold newspapers as fast as he could acquire them and developed a method of reading and judging the news in advance to decide how many papers to buy and sell.

  On April 6, 1862, the Battle of Shiloh had a direct and extreme impact on his business. When Al arrived at the stop in Detroit, a large crowd surrounded the station bulletin board, where a message explained that thousands had been killed and wounded. The savvy newsboy “knew that if the same excitement was attained at various small towns along the road, and especially at Port Huron, the sale of papers would be great.” Al moved quickly, working his contacts so that he—with the help of a bribe of free papers for the next three months—talked the telegraph operator into posting the news on the blackboard at each station. This meant that right alongside the arrival and departure times, passengers saw the brief news report teasing them with information about the Battle of Shiloh. Edison then went to the Detroit Free Press and convinced them to give him one thousand copies instead of his regular amount of one hundred, even though he didn’t have the money to pay for all the papers. Traveling from station to station, he sold the papers quickly. So quickly, in fact, that as the supply dwindled he charged more for each paper, going from the initial amount of five cents up to ten, reaching a pinnacle of twenty-five cents for his last few copies. Business boomed for the young newsboy.

  During those negotiating sessions at the Detroit Free Press, Al had observed the newspaper trade and had grown fond of it. He had become so enamored that he decided to create his own periodical. Al secured old parts and spare materials from his visits to the offices of the Detroit Free Press to make the equipment he needed. He then turned part of his baggage car into a printing press, starting the Grand Trunk’s very own Weekly Herald, which featured local news and gossip that was written by Al himself. He sold a generous number of what was considered a substantial periodical for three cents a copy, or eight cents for a monthly subscription. He was not even fifteen years old at the time.

  Eventually, his mobile laboratory would spell disaster when a shoddy section of track resulted in a jostling train, which ended i
n a stick of phosphorus falling to the floor and bursting into flames. Al was banished from the train at the next stop by an irate conductor, who Edison claims gave him a severe whack on the side of his head that resulted in his loss of hearing. Though, in truth, Edison’s hearing impairment was present from an early age and got progressively worse over time.

  This deafness, regardless of whether it was a direct result of the enraged conductor or had been present at birth, was viewed by Edison as a “great advantage … in various ways.” He’d attribute his deafness to helping his future success with telegraphy, the vocation of choice that followed his newspaper business, and with his invention of the phonograph later on.

  Meanwhile, a constant throughout Edison’s childhood and teenage years was reading. He was a regular at the library, and according to Edison himself, “I started with the first book on the bottom shelf and went through the lot, one by one. I didn’t read a few books. I read the library.” While his father wasn’t supportive of his dabbling in chemistry or his new obsession with telegraphy, he did support his son when it came to reading. In fact, he paid Al a penny to read books of “serious literature,” starting with Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason.

  Al’s laboratory moved back to his cellar, and although his occupational efforts continued with the Weekly Herald for a short time afterward, they soon gave way to telegraphy, the long-distance transmission of electromagnetic waves through the air to communicate text and symbols. It was a natural progression for Al, for in his long time on the train as a candy butcher and newsboy, he had become enthralled by the machine shops that peppered the railway stations. He loved the gears in motion, the valves, and the levers that controlled various apparatus, and everything related to the locomotive’s design and inner workings. Along with this machinery, Al noticed that everywhere he went he saw the telegraph at work. This invention, he knew, was something to invest in—both with time and money.