Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Thus, as October brought pleasant fall weather to the clamorous streets of Manhattan and society prepared to whirl into high gear with the Patriarchs’ Ball at Delmonico’s, Edison could feel happy about the drop in copper prices, his clear-cut light bulb patent win in the courts, and Tesla’s humbling in the real world of making things work. There was also the unexpected appearance of a new and powerful player. All through the War of the Electric Currents, both Edison and Westinghouse were continually in the public eye, whether through their proxies or firsthand. Notably absent from this very public fray was the other major AC company, the Thomson-Houston Company of Lynn, Massachusetts, which had expanded from arc lighting into AC incandescent central stations. But Charles Coffin of the Thomson-Houston Company, ever the mover and the shaker, was yearning to enter the fray.

  An early electric chair

  CHAPTER 8

  “The Horrible Experiment”

  As the streaked gray sky lightened on Friday morning, March 29, 1889, one John Hort drunkenly sauntered forth from the noisy warmth of a bar on Buffalo’s tough waterfront into the morning cold. A bantam of a fellow with a dark bushy beard and heavy-lidded eyes, Hort, twenty-eight, was a successful huckster, a seller of fruits and vegetables. A habitué of the port’s many lowlife saloons, Hort often passed whole afternoons bellied up to one polished bar or another, drinking morosely. Sometimes he would stumble out, perch himself on the barrels in front of a nearby mission house, and spend hours staring vacantly and twiddling his thumbs. Thursday night had been just another hard night of drinking. For hours John Hort had swilled buckets of stale beer and slung back cheap whiskey with John “Yellow” DeBella, his boarder and employee. Through the rowdy noise of the saloon, Hort had been unusually loquacious, haranguing all those around that his wife, Tillie, was a wanton whore.

  Hort, thoroughly drunk and in vile humor, walked home through the cold, misty dawn. A little before 8:00, he reached his ground-floor apartment at 526 Division Street, a big run-down cottage, and flung open the door to the dingy rooms. There in the small kitchen stood Tillie, thirty-one, an attractive enough woman still in her morning wrap, and her four-year-old daughter, Ella. The warm kitchen smelled of baking potatoes and frying eggs. Hort fixed Tillie, who was standing at the stove holding the frying pan, with a drunken stare, yelled at her that she was a harlot, and then staggered out to the barn, where his six workers were loading his fruit and vegetable wagons and hitching up the restless horses. Hort’s young peddlers knew to steer clear when their boss was soused and simmering mad. One noticed him walk across the hay-covered stable floor, grab an ax off its holder on the barn wall, and head back to his apartment. Soon the cool morning was rent with curdling shrieks, shattering dishes, a rhythmic whacking, then silence and low moans.

  The landlady, Mrs. Mary Reid, rushed to the Horts’ front door and called, “Mrs. Hort,” several times, but she heard only the gurgled groans. Then she ran around to the side, there to see Hort staggering forth from his back door, his hands, his arms, his very beard, smeared with blood. “Mr. Hort,” she asked wildly, “what have you done?”

  “I have killed Mrs. Hort.”

  She looked terrified. “No, you have not.”

  Coolly he answered, “Yes, I have, and I’ll take the rope for it.”

  As Mrs. Reid ran to get help, Hort returned inside. A man visiting his father in a nearby house put on his hat and came running in response to Mrs. Reid’s tearful shouts for help. Later, he would recount, “I opened the door of the kitchen and looked in. A woman was upon the floor on her hands and knees, blood all over her and her hair hanging down, her body swaying backwards and forwards. I shut the door.” He steadied himself and then opened the door again. “A man stood before me. He was wiping his hands on something. They were bloody. He stepped over the body.” The horrified visitor said to Hort as he walked out, “This is brutal, man. Let us go for a doctor.”

  But Hort was continuing back toward the barn. One of his young peddlers was standing there petrified as he saw his bloodied boss. “Go for a policeman,” Hort instructed him dully, “I have killed my wife.” When the peddler boy hesitated, Hort said again, “I’ve done it and I expect to take the rope.” Then Hort wobbled slowly off to Thomas Martin’s saloon, where he was demanding whiskey when a police officer arrested him. “I want the rope,” said the dazed Hort, “the sooner the better.”

  Back by the barn, a horse-drawn ambulance had clattered into the yard and the unconscious, bloodied Tillie Hort, her head etched with ax wounds, was carried out and taken to Fitch Hospital, where the efforts of surgeons accomplished little. She expired half an hour after midnight. By April 2, The Buffalo Evening News was able to report that Hort “laid it all to jealousy and bad temper. He said he went into the house from the barn with the hatchet in his hand, and without any words hit her on the head.”1 But in fact Hort was not John Hort, but William Kemmler, and Tillie was not really his wife, but his paramour, and her last name was Ziegler. The two had run away from their despised mates in Philadelphia with little four-year-old Ella and sought a new life in booming Buffalo. Instead of a new life, the man the local press quickly labeled the “South Division Street hatchet fiend” was about to achieve invidious notoriety with a new death. Within a week of Tillie’s vicious murder, The Buffalo Evening News blared on page one the strange and terrible fate awaiting this fiend: ELECTRIC DEATH. THE HORRIBLE EXPERIMENT WHICH MURDERER KEMMLER WILL HAVE TO SUFFER IF CONVICTED.

  The Buffalo police electrician waxed most philosophical and skeptical: “These so-called experts say they know that they can kill a man instantly. I would like to know how they can tell that…. Sometimes you will notice that a man or woman is killed by electricity by accident. Then again they will only be shocked. How do you account for that? … They may put a murderer in a metallic chair and when the circuit is turned on it may only paralyze him. What a horrible death that would be. So what will they do if the shock does not kill?”2

  Through William Kemmler’s four-day trial in early May, the “hatchet fiend” sat hunched over and silent. A jury convicted him on May 10, and in the midst of a thunder-and-lightning storm on May 13, 1889, the judge sentenced him to die by electricity, a coincidence duly observed by the local press. The case attracted much attention nationally purely because of the unique form of death awaiting Kemmler. Back in New York City, Harold Brown, now the official New York State expert on electrical execution, was alerting his allies that “a conviction under the new law was reached at Buffalo on Friday—a brute who chopped a woman into bits with an axe.”3 Brown had long since taken to calling AC “the executioner’s current.” It was an odd coincidence that the first victim of the newfangled electric chair was to be from Buffalo, for that was also the home of Dr. Alfred P. Southwick, the dour dentist and thanatologist so instrumental in replacing the hangman’s rope with the electric current. It was also the first city where Westinghouse had installed an AC central station to light up the four floors of fancy goods offered by the luxurious Adam, Meldrum & Anderson department store.

  Now, at last, in the spring of 1889, Edison and Brown had their official human victim. With that, the War of the Electric Currents entered its most ghoulish and macabre phase. Arrayed on the DC side were, of course, Harold Brown and Thomas Edison, both delighted that a human being was to be officially and specifically electrocuted with the “man-killing” Westinghouse generators. This would be a stupendous public relations coup, indelibly linking alternating current to death and criminality. On the other side, naturally, stood George Westinghouse, equally determined to thwart the ignoble defilement of his machines, whose whole purpose was to bring lovely light and clarity into the daily lives of men and women.

  At the time of William Kemmler’s trial in Buffalo, all the money the accused ax murderer had in the world was about $500 from the selling of all his vegetable wagons and horses. But Kemmler said very definitely he would not spend any of that on lawyers, because he intended to turn over this sum for Til
lie’s burial—in a silver-handled casket, no less—and for the future care of Tillie’s little girl, Ella. Yet soon after Kemmler’s death sentence, one of the era’s rising legal stars, former New York congressman W. Bourke Cockran, materialized as Kemmler’s champion. Cockran would forcibly argue that death in the electric chair was a violation of federal and state constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. Were his handsome fees as William Kemmler’s champion paid by Westinghouse? It was widely assumed so, but never definitively proven.

  For this most cold-blooded of all the DC versus AC battles, it would be Cockran, not Westinghouse, who led the public attack. Cockran, thirty-five, was already well seasoned in battles political and legal, a celebrated orator of the Gilded Age who would soon return to Congress to serve another decade. A top-level sachem in New York’s Tammany wigwam, Cockran had landed up in Manhattan at age seventeen, an Irish immigrant with the unlikely advantage of an elegant French education. Tall, commanding, with a leonine head, deep-set eyes, and a clean-shaven, expressive face, Cockran was always a firm friend of the down-and-out. But he was also a highly paid corporate lawyer, acting, for instance, as counsel to Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the fabulously successful and influential New York World newspaper. Cockran’s later legal clients included many of the great corporations of the day—railroads, utilities, steamship lines. Yet the ardent opposition of this silver-voiced attorney (who spoke still with an Irish lilt) to capital punishment led him to represent a number of murderers during his illustrious legal career.

  Even as Cockran was preparing his appeal of Kemmler’s electrocution, Harold Brown was pushing forward with the grisly practical details of the electrocution apparatus. Every step of the way, he required, and received, Thomas Edison’s all-important support. First in early March, when Brown had had to perform a few demonstrations for the New York State prison authorities, an Edison official aiding Brown wrote desperately to his boss, Thomas Edison, “I have been trying for the past week to buy, borrow or steal a Westinghouse dynamo but have been unsuccessful. I am afraid therefore that we shall have to trespass again upon your good nature…. Would it be possible to rewind your Siemens alternating dynamo so that we can get at least 1000 volts?”4 It all went smoothly, and the state said it would order three dynamos for Auburn, Sing Sing, and Dannemora Prisons, and it would purchase them from Brown, but the terms were quite strict: The state would pay the estimated $7,000 cost of the dynamos only when “the first execution proves that the plant is suitable for the purpose.”5 From his new prestigious Wall Street address, Brown wrote a wheedling letter to Edison on March 27, stating he would need $5,000 to be able to afford to proceed and “the people at 16 Broad Street [Edison corporate headquarters] do not feel like undertaking the matter unless you approve of it. Do you not think it worth doing, as it will enable me, through the Board of Health, to shut off the alternating current circuits in the State?”6

  At this critical moment, the wheeling-dealing Charles Coffin of the Thomson-Houston Company quietly stepped forward. At first glance, the firm’s surreptitious entry into the fray was decidedly odd, since Thomson-Houston had been an AC proponent and for two years the firm had paid a licensing fee to Westinghouse. But that all had ended the previous year when Westinghouse lost a patent suit over the Gaulard-Gibbs transformers. Freed from the licensing alliance with Westinghouse, Thomson-Houston was engaged in active talks about a possible merger with Edison Electric. So Coffin began secretly helping Brown to buy used Westinghouse alternators for the three prisons. This was a critical logistical victory. The DC forces now had their “man-killing” AC machines—manufactured by Westinghouse. On the Fourth of July, while others were enjoying patriotic speeches and parades of Civil War veterans, Brown was devoting himself to electrical death, informing Coffin defensively, “I have withstood tremendous pressure and tempting offers to use other machines for that purpose but have nevertheless kept my agreement to the letter.”7

  When on May 23 a fully sober Kemmler was led off the Buffalo train at Auburn, he was escorted straight across the tree-lined street. Before him loomed Auburn Prison, a gray stone fortress surrounded by a thick twenty-foot-high wall with manned guard towers. The prison’s grim and ominous appearance had been softened somewhat over the years by a luxuriant covering of green ivy alive with gaily twittering brown sparrows. Located in the small town of the same name on the heavily traveled Erie Canal halfway between Buffalo and Albany, Auburn Prison was the second built in the New York State system and had opened in 1817. Aside from the busy chirping and twittering of the sparrows, the prison was unnaturally quiet, even though it housed 1,200 inmates. All were garbed in its famous black-and-white-striped uniforms, and all were subject to the prison’s much admired system of extreme regimentation. “Absolutely no communication was allowed among the men,” writes Thom Metzger. “Their eyes were to be downcast at all times. They did the ‘Auburn’ shuffle marching in lockstep with one hand on the next man’s shoulder wherever they went.”8 Amid the habitat of more than one thousand men, one heard only the muffled sound of lockstep movement. Oddly, William Kemmler, as a condemned man, was exempt from this regime. In his tiny cell, he was allowed to wear regular clothes and hear human voices. The guards who kept him under continual watch read Bible stories and popular novels aloud, perhaps comforted by the sound of a human voice in that grimly silent place.

  As June turned to July in that summer of 1889, attorney Bourke Cockran’s constitutional appeal of Kemmler’s death in the electric chair slowly moved forward. Cayuga County judge Edwin Day authorized Buffalo attorney Tracy C. Becker to serve as a referee, taking testimony to determine whether death by electricity would be less painful than the traditional hangman’s noose or if electrocution was more cruel and unusual and therefore unconstitutional. Harold Brown was scheduled to testify, of course, which created some uneasiness in the Edison camp. A fortnight before the hearings were to begin, the Englishman Arthur Kennelly, Edison’s chief electrician, contacted Brown. “At Mr. Edison’s instance,” Kennelly advised, they wanted Brown to be aware that “the only argument of any weight which can be urged against electrocide on the score of a cruel punishment is that its application may burn the flesh of the criminal at the points of contact, and that the amount of current which can be given without such mutilation is not yet known.”9

  The first day of hearings was Monday, July 9, in Bourke Cockran’s well-appointed offices at the prestigious and splendid Equitable Building. Through the open windows, for it was summer, came the muted cacophony of Broadway below, newsboys yelling the day’s headlines, hawkers tempting passersby with corn on the cob, teamsters lashing their horses forward. For the next two months, the silver-tongued Cockran would hammer pleasantly away at two fundamental questions: Were the various electrical experts genuinely knowledgeable in the aspects of electricity at issue here? and How could anyone guarantee instant and painless death, death that was not cruel and unusual, to William Kemmler when there were so many instances of people subjected to huge amounts of electricity who had survived? Like any great orator, Bourke Cockran understood the power of humor and public fun. So while a major part of his legal strategy was to produce a stream of people who questioned the certainty of quick, painless death from electricity, they themselves often having personally survived great shocks from lightning and wires, he also introduced as evidence (and comic relief) the amazing dog Dash.

  The first witness was, fittingly enough, Harold Brown. Once on the stand, Brown received a thorough grilling, albeit delivered with Cockran’s silvery Irish lilt. Cockran began by establishing that Brown, who described his professional status as an electrical engineer, was not particularly well trained in that field or well regarded. He was not, Brown conceded, a member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, nor did he have any schooling beyond high school. Brown asserted that his thirteen years working for such companies as Western Electric and Brush Electric were equal to any degree. He had been on his own for five year
s. “My particular business at present is designing apparatus for people who require it, or standing as an expert between the purchaser of electric apparatus and the company supplying them … or as an expert in advising in matters in which electricity is used.” He insisted that “I at present am entirely independent of any company.”

  Brown seemed quite pleased when Cockran began inquiring about the dynamo machine for Auburn Prison. “That is actually there?” Oh, indeed, Brown said smugly, and it was a Westinghouse alternating current dynamo. Through two days of questioning, Brown conceded little. He did have to admit that there was one dog, Ajax, who refused to die during Brown’s dog-killing experiments despite numerous electrical jolts. But generally Brown remained adamant that he was well enough versed in practical electricity to guarantee Kemmler a quick, painless death. All in all, reported The New York Times, Brown “underwent the ordeal” of testifying “without being disconcerted.”10 Certainly Brown’s own fortunes had risen considerably since he’d appointed himself to lead the anti-AC battle. His offices had moved from the unfashionable boondocks of West 54th Street to the golden precincts of 45 Wall Street. And he was now a recognized ally of America’s most prominent inventor and electrician.

  On Monday, the hearings recommenced in Cockran’s offices. That day’s witnesses served Cockran’s purposes well. Daniel Gibbens, one of the feckless commissioners from the New York City Board of Electrical Control who had watched Brown’s dog killings, turned out to be skeptical of quick and certain electrical death. He grimaced just remembering the dog trials. “It was one of the most frightful scenes I have ever witnessed. The dogs writhed and squirmed and gave vent to their agony in howls and piteous wails.” As for electricity itself, Gibbens said, it was so unpredictable in its effects on different animals and people, “just as the effect of whisky varies when used by different men.”11