The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Edison was also more than happy to give thought to devising a new word for this new form of capital punishment. One associate suggested a new verb for execution by electricity, “to westinghouse,” and also a new noun, as in “such and such a man was condemned to the westinghouse.” Dr. Guillotin had been so honored; why not give Mr. Westinghouse “the benefit of the fact in the minds of the public”? To his credit, Edison was not so crass and instead favored “ampermort,” “dynamort,” or “electromort.” The New York Times did not spell out which word it favored, but expressed emphatically its opposition “to ‘electrocution,’ which pretentious ignoramuses seem to be trying to push into use.”

  By the time George Westinghouse had entered the electric light business in 1886, he had already made his first fortune from his invention of the air brake for railroads, and he was no slouch himself in piling up hundreds of patents as an inventor. In Edison’s view, however, Westinghouse did not pose a serious threat in the power-and-light business because he used the relatively more dangerous alternating current, certain to kill one of his own customers within six months.

  Edison’s conviction that direct current was less dangerous than alternating current was based on hunch, however, not empirical scientific research. He, like others at the time, focused solely on voltage (the force that pushes electricity through a wire) without paying attention to amperage (the rate of flow of electricity), and thought it would be best to stay at 1,200 volts or less. Even he was not certain that his own system was completely safe—after all, he had elected to place wires in underground conduits, which was more expensive than stringing wires overhead but reduced the likelihood of electrical current touching a passerby. Burying the wires could not give him complete peace of mind, however. Privately, he told Edward Johnson that “we must look out for crosses [i.e., short-circuited wires] for if we ever kill a customer it would be a bad blow to the business.”

  The Edison system was spared the scandal of causing accidental deaths, which gave Edison all the more reason to feel confident that customers would very soon see the differences in systems. He coined an infelicitous slogan to describe his own: “High Economy, No Risk.” Surely customers would reject Westinghouse’s and embrace his. But it did not happen. The accidents involving alternating current were not frequent enough, nor was responsibility for the deaths publicly pinned on Westinghouse or any single company.

  Westinghouse’s alternating current was superior to Edison’s direct current if considered from a strictly business perspective. Alternating current could be distributed much more economically, and to greater distances from a generating plant, than could direct current. This gave Westinghouse’s company the ability to undercut Edison’s prices; by 1887, it was expanding quickly all over the map, as if no competition stood in its way.

  Cooperation between rivals was another possibility, one that occurred to George Westinghouse. Antitrust restrictions did not exist—this was two years before the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was enacted and many more years would pass before the federal government began to enforce it. In June 1888, Westinghouse took the initiative and wrote Edison a warm letter, exploring the possibility of rapprochement. He said that it must have been others who had sought to drive a wedge between Westinghouse Electric and Edison Electric. He, for his part, was most appreciative of the hospitality that Edison had shown him when Westinghouse had paid a visit to Menlo Park, shopping for a power plant for his own house before he had entered the business himself and even before Edison Electric had formally launched its own service. It would be a pleasure, Westinghouse wrote, if Edison would visit him in Pittsburgh where “I will be glad to reciprocate the attention shown me by you.” Edison turned down Westinghouse’s overture, however, claiming that his work in the laboratory forced him to turn over all business matters to others. He would later say to a colleague that Westinghouse’s “methods of doing business lately are such that the man has gone crazy over sudden accession of wealth or something unknown to me and is flying a kite that will land him in the mud sooner or later.”

  Westinghouse’s invitation had arrived just as Edison was directing lab experiments whose purpose was to undermine Westinghouse’s reputation, namely, how much electrical current was needed to execute a human being? Stray dogs were used as surrogates at the lab, which offered to boys in Orange a bounty of twenty-five cents for each hapless dog delivered to its gates for the advancement of science (and intercompany competition). Edison told the Brooklyn Citizen how the effect of direct current left the dog subjects unchanged in appearance, and then, after a minute, they would tumble over dead. Alternating current, however, killed in as little as one-tenth of a second. This impressed the lab assistants, who took care to wear rubber gloves even when writing in the lab’s notebook, Edison said “with a grin.”

  Edison’s bounty offer was so successful that soon no more canine volunteers could be had. The very day after he had curtly turned Westinghouse away, Edison wrote to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to augment his local supply. Anticipating that mention of capital punishment was unlikely to elicit the desired cooperation of the SPCA, Edison blandly explained that he was looking into determining the exact quantity of electricity required to kill dogs, work that would incidentally help to safeguard the lives of linemen in the electric power business. Would the SPCA be so kind as to supply some “good-sized” animals as soon as possible?

  Henry Bergh, the society’s president, could not understand how Mr. Edison, whom he regarded as a “genius” who had “conferred such great and lasting benefits upon humanity,” could have so misunderstood the mission of the SPCA. The dogs placed in Edison’s care would be subjects in experiments that entailed suffering, not instantaneous death. And the great scientist had to be told that any data that he collected at his lab would have no value for his avowed purpose, saving the lives of linemen, given the disparity in electrical force required to kill humans compared with small animals.

  Such was his celebrity and presumed expertise that no one pointed out that it was strange that Edison was experimenting with small mammals months after he had spoken with such certainty about the effects of electrical currents upon humans. It had been his letter—the one recommending generators made by “Mr. Geo. Westinghouse, Pittsburgh” to “inflict the least amount of suffering upon its victim”—that had persuaded one member of the New York commission to shift his support from morphine executions to electrocution, making the panel’s recommendation a unanimous one. Its report, in turn, led directly to passage of a new capital punishment law in New York State, changing the method of executing criminals from hanging to electrocution.

  Perhaps the state had acted a bit too hastily. The first person to be sentenced under the new law was one William Kemmler, a Buffalo resident convicted of murdering his female companion with an ax. He lacked sufficient education to do more than mark an X on his confession, but the world took notice of the case when he was sentenced to death by electrocution, making him a human guinea pig. His plight drew attention and a new attorney who volunteered to press his appeal, arguing, “We hold that the state cannot experiment upon Kemmler.”

  The judge who heard the appeal understandably blanched at upholding the constitutionality of the new law without assurance from the scientific community about the humaneness of electrocution. Hearings were ordered up, and the leading experts were deposed. The star witness was the world-renowned authority on all matters electrical. “How long have you been engaged in the work of an inventor or electrician?” Edison was asked. “Twenty-six years.” What would happen if current—not that from Edison’s system, but the competition’s—were applied to Kemmler for five or six minutes? Would he be carbonized? Edison was asked. “No,” he replied, “he would be mummyized. All the water in his body would evaporate in five or six minutes.” The tone of peerless authority, which was Edison’s public style, remained intact even when he was cross-examined. The Wizard, who was chewing an unlit cigar, received a light and was
dismissed; Kemmler’s initial appeal was not successful. New motions were filed, but the appointed day of execution neared.

  Edison’s campaign to link in the public’s mind alternating current with fatal consequences, whether accidental or intentional, was gaining momentum. George Westinghouse stepped forward to counterattack, his words thrown against those of Edison’s and the other proponents of electrocution.

  Westinghouse wielded a variety of arguments in defense of alternating current. Its low cost brought incandescent lighting within the reach of the multitude, and its low voltage within the house—lower than Edison’s—made it safer, he claimed. The package also included his own pseudoscientific theory, with no more substance than Edison’s, that an alternating current was inherently less harmful because its momentary reversal of direction “prevents decomposition of tissues.” No discussion was complete without argument by anecdote, and Westinghouse was not remiss. A lineman had accidentally grabbed hold of a live wire with one thousand volts of alternating current and held on for three minutes. Yes, the man was shocked insensible, but not only had he lived, he “in fact was able to go on with his work after a short period.”

  This was a reassuring tale, uncomplicated with details that would permit it to be independently verified. Westinghouse could not provide such a comforting coda to another accident involving a lineman, however. On 11 October 1889, John E. H. Feeks, thirty-two, was engaged in cutting down dead telegraph and alarm wires on a pole in downtown Manhattan for Western Union when the accident occurred. The time and location made it visible to many people: just after one o’clock in the afternoon, near Chambers and Centre Streets, in the shadow of the city offices, with hundreds of people hurrying below on the sidewalk. Astride a crossbar, Feeks was reaching out for a wire that he intended to cut when he appeared to shiver and tremble. Putting out his right hand, he seized another wire as though to steady himself—and sparks and blue flames shot out of his hand. He fell forward, and was held aloft by the dense bands of wires that ran across lower crossbars, suspended some forty feet above the ground. With flames seen coming from his mouth and nose and feet, and blood dropping and pooling on the sidewalk below, this tableau could not have been more ghastly. The crowd swelled, and police had difficulty clearing space for the rescuers. It took thirty long minutes before the body could be brought down.

  Court officials and members of the Board of Aldermen were among the witnesses, and the very public nature of Feeks’s death brought impassioned calls for swift action to bring the company responsible to account. Responsibility could not be easily assigned, however. The pole upon which he was working did not have any wires that belonged to an electric light company. The United States Illuminating Company ran wires elsewhere on the street, but though it was reasonable to assume that one of its wires was improperly insulated, the fatal current could not be traced with certainty to a particular point of contact. Without question, moving all power lines to underground conduits, as in Edison’s system, would eliminate the danger in running them overhead amid tangles with others. Demands for requiring electric light companies to move their lines underground became conspicuously louder following Feeks’s death.

  Edison did not add his support to these proposals, which he faulted for not going far enough in addressing the danger posed by alternating current’s relatively higher voltage. He told a reporter that insulation on wires buried in the ground provided no measure of safety—the current would burn through the insulating fibers, and then “the dangerous current will creep into your house, and will come up the manholes.” In October 1889, he urged the readers of the New York Evening Sun to press the mayor and the Board of Health to enact regulations that would curtail “deadly currents” within the city’s boundaries. He reasoned, “Is there not a law in New York against the manufacture of nitro-glycerine?”

  The only purveyors of “deadly currents,” of course, were Edison’s competitors. The battle of the currents was so important to Edison that he made publicly disparaging comments about his rivals as persons, not just as vendors of inferior technology. This, in turn, left his competitors wondering why he had cast off the restraint expected in civilized competition. When George Westinghouse read in the newspaper that Edison had called him a “shyster,” Westinghouse’s feelings were “very much hurt,” or so he said when he bumped into Edison’s attorney.

  Westinghouse faced a genuine crisis. Feeks’s death, the calls for burying power lines, and Edison’s personal attacks added up to a public relations mess for his company. Rather than remaining quiet and hoping that this bad weather would blow over, Westinghouse decided to speak to the press and try to put a better face on his business than Edison had drawn. He could not avoid talking about Feeks, so he argued that direct current, which was used on telegraph wires, was fully capable of inflicting the horrible burns suffered by the unfortunate lineman. The danger came not from the particular form of current but from inadequate insulation. If properly shielded, overhead wires were perfectly safe, he said. The public had been stirred up by “the active work of the managers of the Edison Company and of Mr. Edison, who have sought to turn the present situation to their advantage.”

  The defensive position that Westinghouse found himself in is illustrated by the way he contradicted himself as he tried to defend overhead wires. The wires that were supposedly safe were also the same wires that he had to admit, yes, posed dangers, yes, but dangers of various kinds had to be accepted throughout the modern city. Westinghouse said, “If all things involving the use of power were to be prohibited because of the danger to life, then the cable cars, which have already killed and maimed a number of people, would have to be abolished.” Say good-bye to trains, too, he added, because of accidents at road crossings.

  Westinghouse was not able to form these few off-the-cuff remarks into a fully developed response. Edison, however, seized an opportunity to further strengthen his position with a long article titled “Dangers of Electric Lighting” that was published under his name by the North American Review, which had invited the piece. It repeated the same arguments that he had been making and is notable as the zenith of Edison’s influence in the battle of the currents. At that point, he was fully justified in believing that he had the ear of the world and could make everyone understand the superiority of his system of power and light.

  His apparent mastery of the debate was short lived, however. The next month, the North American Review gave Westinghouse an opportunity to respond. Having gained some experience in public combat, and with some time to do a little research, he brought new material and fresh counterarguments to the debate. Statistics bolstered his case. In 1888, sixty-four people were killed in streetcar accidents in New York, and twenty-three in gas-related accidents—and only five by accidental electrocution. He pointed out that within an individual’s own home, “there is not on record a solitary instance of a person having been injured or shocked from the consumers’ current of an alternating system.” Don’t underestimate the power of direct current, he warned readers; he had personally “witnessed the roasting of a large piece of fresh beef by a direct continuous current of less than one hundred volts within two minutes.” He invited readers to connect a tin pan to the electrical wires of a home supplied by Edison’s company and reproduce the experiment for themselves.

  Westinghouse also dredged up an old interview with Edison and found this quotation: “I don’t care so much for a fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.” Westinghouse suggested to readers that it was this, not the supposed merits of Edison’s own system, that drove Edison to exaggerate the dangers inherent in the systems of others and to minimize them in his own.

  The most damning argument against Edison’s system was what the marketplace said about the relative merits and shortcomings of the two rival systems. Those customers who had a choice were voting in favor of alternating current, the less-expensive option. In only three years of operation, Westinghouse’s company had five times as many customers as
Edison’s older company, testimony to the public’s view that Westinghouse offered lighting that he described as “safe, cheap, efficient.”

  American consumers ignored the question of whether alternating current was truly “safe.” As historian Mark Essig points out, the public simply became blasé about the accidents that continued to occur. Even in the 1920s, when electricity finally became widely available in homes, “about 1,000 Americans died annually from electric shock.” Notwithstanding, the appeal of “cheap” electricity was powerful, and alternating current was considerably cheaper because Edison’s direct current required progressively more expensive investments in copper wiring the farther the system extended out from the generating plant. In 1889, customers were voting every day, and the results showed a landslide victory for Edison’s new competition.

  It is probably not mere coincidence that 1880 was also the year that Edison began to withdraw his own financial stake in the industry he had founded. Starved for cash, he was receptive to an offer to gain liquidity, selling his stake in the electric light to a syndicate of investors led by Henry Villard and financed largely by German concerns. What the public saw was a newly formed company, the Edison General Electric Company, which consolidated into a single organization the Edison Electric Light Company and Edison’s various manufacturing companies that supplied the industry.

  For his stake, Edison was given shares valued at $3.5 million. In his official biography written decades later, Edison depicted the episode as coming about from being too successful; orders had simply swamped his undercapitalized company. Insull had suggested that they might run into difficulties because of lack of capital, so when the offer to be bought out came, “we concluded it was better to be sure than be sorry, so we sold out for a large sum.” When Insull had his own turn to talk about the same events in his own memoirs, he termed the value of the shares granted to Edison as “a small amount compared to the great value to the world at large of the work done by Mr. Edison” in the field.