by Jill Jonnes
“Don’t you think we ought to say something against these slanders and false statements?”
Heinrichs would always remember how Westinghouse eyed him for a few seconds, the wooden wall clock above the mantel ticking through the silence. Then Westinghouse smiled.
“Heinrichs, they tell me you are quite a Whist player. Is that so?”
He admitted a fondness.
“Well, then, you know the meaning of the expression, ‘Don’t play the other fellow’s game.’”
Heinrichs found this thoroughly puzzling. What did whist (which was akin to bridge) have to do with Edison and his calumnies? Westinghouse explained, “Now seriously speaking, all this opposition to the Alternating Current is doing our business a great deal of good. We are getting an invaluable amount of free advertising…. As a practical, commercial proposition the Alternating Current system is so far superior to the direct current that there is really no comparison…. By keeping up this agitation about the deadly Alternating Current, they are playing our game and we are taking the tricks…. They hope that by their power, their influence, they can accomplish the arrest of the march of progress. This, by the very laws of nature cannot be done…. As to the attacks made against me personally, of course they hurt, but my self respect and conscience do not allow me to fight with such weapons. Besides, I feel that my moral reputation and my business reputation are too well established to be hurt by such attacks. However, I am preparing an article for the North American Review in answer to Mr. Edison’s charges against the Alternating Current system, but beyond that I shall have nothing to give you for publication…. By letting the others do all the talking, we shall make more friends in the end than if we lower ourselves to the level of our assailants.”24
The December issue of the North American Review could have done nothing to improve Edison’s venomous feelings toward Westinghouse, for his adversary had penned a blunt and steely “Reply to Mr. Edison.” The AC-DC battle was just the latest in a long “struggle for the control of the electric light business [that] has never been exceeded in bitterness by any of the historical commercial controversies of a former day. Thousands of persons have large pecuniary interests at stake, and, as might be expected, many of them view this great subject solely from the stand-point of self interest.” Westinghouse tried to put it into perspective with the following: In the year 1888, sixty-four people in New York City were killed in streetcar accidents, fifty-five by omnibuses and wagons, twenty-three by illuminating gas, and all of five by electric current. This was not exactly an orgy of wanton and careless killing. The bold Westinghouse described Edison’s cherished DC central plant as “regarded by the majority of competent electrical engineers as in many respects radically defective; so defective, in fact, that, unless the use of alternating currents can be prohibited, it seems destined to be wholly supplanted by the more scientific and in all respects (so far as concerns the users or occupants of buildings) far safer inductive system.”
The by now familiar arguments were lobbed back and forth about copper costs, transformers, who had or had not survived shocks of what amounts. But Westinghouse ended his counterattack with two new and terrible strikes to the Edison forces. The first was quite self-inflicted by the Edison soldiers and therefore all the more painful. At the annual August meeting of the Edison Illuminating Companies, held in the water-cooled environs of Niagara Falls, New York, Westinghouse reported, the manager of the Detroit Edison Station had introduced a resolution, which passed. It asked the parent company to provide “a flexible method of enlarging the territory which can be profitably covered from their stations for domestic lighting by higher pressures and consequently less outlay of copper than that involved by the three-wire system.” Edison’s own troops were breaking ranks and asking for AC! Westinghouse’s final and rather devastating salvo was simply that “for three years past the purchasers of apparatus for electric lighting, who are at perfect liberty to buy from any company, have, for the most part, preferred to use the alternating system, so that today the extension of that system for central station incandescent lighting is at least five times as great as that of direct current.”25
Having emerged from the shadows, Thomas Edison did not retreat again. He now proceeded to use the full force of his monumental fame and prestige to persuade the public and politicians that there was safe electricity, which was his—low-voltage DC, whose transmission lines were safely buried—and dangerous electricity—high-voltage AC, which was carried on open wires. His goal: Such public fear of AC that it would be legally banned from use in the United States. He would thereby eliminate Westinghouse from the field and recover his own company’s primacy, which was faltering. Predictably, the next battlefields for the escalating War of the Electric Currents were the state legislatures, where Edison and Brown hoped to ruin Westinghouse by governmental bans against high-voltage electricity.
The first clash was at Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Old South. Westinghouse hired powerful lawyers and one of Edison’s longtime enemies, Professor Henry Morton of the Stevens Institute of Technology, to serve as an expert. On February 12, 1890, Edison himself appeared as the first witness to testify before the Virginia State Senate. The hearing room was packed with many men and women craning for a glimpse of America’s most beloved inventor. Edison’s worsening deafness made it hard for him to hear and, thus, to answer the committee’s questions. The famously witty raconteur was not as eloquent as hoped. Edison was followed by Professor Morton, who long ago had very publicly pooh-poohed Edison’s invention of the light bulb. Now, Morton denigrated his old enemy on new grounds, asserting that AC was, contrary to Edison’s alarmist views, a perfectly benign force when handled responsibly.
But the most compelling witnesses turned out to be the local arc-lighting men, who rushed to defend their flourishing businesses from these battling Yankees. Some were even sons of the old Confederacy and thus gained instant sympathy. “The first of these gentlemen who was called upon had but one leg and used a crutch…. He expressed himself fluently and with great force…. In closing, he derided the suggestion that 3,000 volts was dangerous and exclaimed, ‘Why gentlemen, the pennyroyal bulls of Fairfax County are far more dangerous than that current.’”26 The Westinghouse men quickly saw that here were their best allies, far more persuasive to state representatives than eminent northerners such as Thomas Edison or Professor Morton. The Edison people had failed to take into account the powerful arc light lobby, for almost every American city of any size now had some sections with arc lights. Those local companies would be destroyed by a high-voltage ban. The Edison DC forces would lose in Virginia, but this did not deter Edison and Brown from pressing on, presenting their case—sometimes illustrated by Brown’s ghoulish dog shows—in other states and Canada, determined to shut down AC via state legislatures.
As 1889 turned to 1890, Judge Dwight of the Supreme Court of New York had rejected Kemmler and Cockran’s appeal, seeing nothing cruel or unusual in death by electricity. Cruel punishments, he wrote in his opinion, included such deaths as “burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, being fired out of a cannon, hanging in chains to die of starvation, or disemboweling and crucifixion.”27 When Cockran heard the disappointing (but not unexpected) verdict, he immediately announced, “It will be taken to the Court of Appeals.”28 By spring of 1890, Cockran had once again lost. This time the court pointed out that the question of cruelty had been thoroughly addressed by the New York State Death Commission when it chose electricity over the hangman’s rope. By late April, the newspapers were having a field day, churning out stories preparatory to the nearing electrocution, describing Kemmler’s efforts to make a will, his sagging spirits, and the construction by “stripeds” of his plain pine coffin. Kemmler passed the time in his small cell reading simple children’s Bible stories, playing a pigs-in-clover puzzle (marbles tilted into holes on a small board), and laboriously scrawling his signature on small cardboard cards that he gave to the warden’s wife and favored g
uards. These were much sought after by autograph collectors.
After Cockran’s appeals had come to naught, the prison issued a statement said to be from Kemmler: “I am ready to die by electricity. I am guilty and I must be punished. I am ready to die. I am glad I am not going to be hung. I think it is much better to die by electricity than it is to be hung. It will not give me any pain. I am glad Mr. Durston is going to turn the switch. He is firm and strong. If a weak man did it, I might be afraid. My faith is too firm for me to weaken. They say I am not converted. I don’t care what they think. I know what I’ve got. I am happy to die. I have never been so happy in my life as I have been here.” Rampant rumors that Kemmler had gone stir-crazy under the strain of waiting for his electrocution may have prompted this report to show Kemmler’s state of mind: resigned but sane.
And what of “The New Instrument of Execution”? In the same November 1889 issue of the prestigious North American Review that featured Thomas Edison’s high-minded crusade urging that AC be outlawed, Harold P. Brown was describing (in an article with this very title) what the electric chair would do and how it would work. He imagined the coming event: “The condemned criminal’s cell is visited by the prison authorities and his hands and feet are saturated with the weak potash solution which so rapidly overcomes the skin’s resistance; during this space of thirty seconds or less the electrical resistance may be measured…. Shod in wet felt slippers, the convict walks to the chair and is instantly strapped into position, his feet and hands are again immersed in the potash solution contained in a foot-tub connected to one pole and in hand-basins connected to the other. With this perfect contact there is no possibility of burning of the flesh and thus reducing the effect of the current upon the body.
“Dials of electrical instruments indicate that all the apparatus is in perfect order and record the pressure at every moment. The deputy-sheriff closes the switch. Respiration and heart-action instantly cease, and electricity, with a velocity equaling that of light, destroys life…. There is a stiffening of the muscles, which gradually relax after five seconds have passed; but there is no struggle and no sound. The majesty of the law has been vindicated, but no physical pain has been caused.”29
In late April, the twenty-five witnesses to the state’s first official electrocution began to gather in Auburn. Harold Brown was conspicuous by his absence. Almost certainly, his unmasking a year earlier by the Sun as an Edison/Thomson-Houston corporate lackey had diminished his usefulness to those parties. When his original contract as the state’s expert on electrical execution had expired on May 1, Brown did nothing to extend it. Perhaps the warden banished him. In any case, after all his eager, relentless pursuit of electrical death by Westinghouse AC, Harold Brown now made a great about-face, claiming to reporters, “You may rest assured that I am glad to be relieved of the unpleasant responsibility.”30 Dr. Alfred P. Southwick, the Buffalo dentist and chief instigator of the electrical death penalty, was naturally present at Auburn as an enthusiastic witness. A big man with a fringe of white beard, he, like many others, was taken aback by the malevolent appearance of the chair itself, a brutish-looking oversize oaken armchair with wide, flat arms, a crude footrest, and a perforated wooden seat. There were numerous thick leather restraint straps—and most disturbing, a heavy leather mask that enveloped and covered the criminal’s face, pressing it back into a neck brace that would have a saturated sponge. Southwick explained, “I am opposed to so much paraphernalia, but the present arrangement will have to do, because we cannot afford to suffer failure. The whole world is watching the result of this experiment, and if we neglect any precautions there might be a slip and the system would therefore be condemned. I am fully convinced that Kemmler’s death will be instantaneous…. I anticipate no disfigurement at all.”31
Just as all the preparations were being completed, a law clerk showed up in Auburn. Kemmler’s case had been further appealed! A new lawyer, Roger Sherman, who specialized in appeals, was taking up the cudgels. He came to the prison to see Kemmler but was not allowed a visit. He left more legal papers and swiftly departed back down to Manhattan. Sherman denied he was in the pay of George Westinghouse, but he would not say who was paying his handsome fees. When Dr. Southwick and the other witnesses, including referee Tracy C. Becker, also from Buffalo, heard the electrocution was off for the moment, they were thoroughly chagrined. To assuage them and provide some sort of event preparatory to Kemmler’s death, Warden Charles Durston authorized the killing of a calf with the electric chair apparatus. Within the next month, the Kemmler case had reached the U.S. Supreme Court, with Sherman once again arguing that death by high voltage was cruel and unusual. But once again, in early August 1890, the Kemmler-AC forces were turned down. Chief Justice Melville Fuller said the death planned would have to be “something inhuman and barbarous—something more than mere extinguishment of life.”32 Meanwhile, at the Edison headquarters, gloating executives proposed that from here on in, “as Westinghouse’s dynamo is going to be used for the purpose of executing criminals, why not give him the benefit of this fact in the minds of the public, and speak hereafter of a criminal as being ‘westinghoused,’ or (to use it as a noun) as having been condemned to the westinghouse in the same way that Dr. Guillotine’s name was forever immortalized in France?”33 The Edison officers were savoring this most monstrous and momentous of victories in the ongoing War of the Electric Currents.
In the stifling August heat, Auburn’s best hotel, the four-story Osborn House, began to fill up with out-of-town reporters, mainly from New York City. The grimy railroad freight depot across from the high-walled prison proved convenient for a special Western Union office, equipped with fourteen lines just to New York City. With each arriving train, more people debarked and surged toward the grim, walled fortress of Auburn Prison. Tellingly, the warden’s wife was seen to leave the prison and board a train out of town. She had a certain fondness for this condemned man she had taught to read and preferred not to be present at the prison when he died. She had also departed in late April when execution appeared imminent. On August 5, there was mounting excitement amid the oppressive hot and humid weather. All day, subdued crowds gathered outside the prison walls, pushing forward and clinging to the heavy iron bars of the entry gate. Young men shimmied up telephone poles and the tall leafy trees and peered over the twenty-foot prison walls toward the vine-covered prison building. Nearby rooftops and windows were lined with solemn spectators and reporters. That evening at 7:00 P.M., as the air cooled, many of the official state witnesses, serious men of medicine and law, bearded and clad in lighter summer suits, walked importantly from the Osborn House through the silent assembly of curious townfolk and in through those heavy barred gates. Some arrived by train and hurried across to the prison. And so, on that evening of August 5, some believed that the arriving witnesses were gathering for the long delayed execution. It was but a test, however, with one of the physicians volunteering to sit in the chair and experience the low-voltage run-through. The official witnesses then emerged and strolled back to the hotel in good spirits, asking to be awakened very early.
August 6, 1890, dawned the palest of blues in Auburn, and a cooling breeze riffled pleasantly through the city’s many trees. It looked to be a glorious sunny summer day. Shortly after 6:00 A.M. the official state witnesses could be seen walking in straggling groups through the quiet village streets toward the fortress-style prison. They threaded through the hundreds of curious waiting townspeople and pacing newspaper reporters gathered outside the heavy iron gates. Today, finally, William Kemmler, the “South Division Street hatchet fiend,” would become the first man in history to die in an official state electrocution. Each witness presented his pass and walked into the prison yard. Inside the prison itself, Warden Charles Durston looked distinctly distracted and unsettled. He had already been in earlier to see Kemmler, whose thick bushy beard and mustache had been neatly clipped. The murderer had been sitting on his cell bunk, attired for electrical death in new da
rk gray sack trousers, vest, and jacket, suspenders, a white shirt, and jaunty black-and-white-checked bow tie. He had spent a great deal of time combing his hair, carefully arranging a Hyperion curl on his forehead. Durston, who had often expressed distaste at his assigned role of electrocution overseer, now entered Kemmler’s cagelike cell for the second time that early morning and read him the state death warrant. “All right,” said Kemmler, “I’m ready.”
Then his jailer from Buffalo appeared to say good-bye and was invited to eat breakfast with the condemned man. Just then, two ministers walked in who had visited frequently in the fourteen months that Kemmler’s case had dragged through the labyrinthine appeals process. They all knelt now on the hard stone floor and prayed quietly. Breakfast was then served to the subdued group. Before they could leave Kemmler’s tiny cell, the Buffalo jailer had the awkward task of cutting a slit down the seat of Kemmler’s pants so the electric chair’s electrodes would make ideal contact. For the same reason, he also nervously shaved a big patch atop the condemned man’s head. As the jailer manipulated the razor, Kemmler spoke to him: “They say I’m afraid to die, but they will find that I ain’t. I want you to stay right by me, Joe, and see me through this thing and I will promise you that I won’t make any trouble.”34 With Kemmler’s hair razed away on top, Warden Durston descended with him to the electrocution chamber at 6:32 A.M. For reasons unknown, the previous day Durston had moved the heavy wooden electric chair from its original site in an upstairs room to an isolated basement room. Now, the dynamo was a thousand feet away in the prison marble shop, and all communication with its operators would be based on bells.
