It Happened Here -- "The War of the Currents"

                       

Main Gate, Auburn Prison  Auburn Prison NYSHM is on the Left Tower


AUBURN PRISON
ERECTION COMMENCED 1816
FIRST PRISONERS 1817
ASSISTED IN CONSTRUCTION
FIRST ELECTROCUTION
IN THE WORLD 1890
 

Events moved rapidly after the New York State "Death Commission" made its report in the summer of 1888. The New York Legislature declared that electrocution by AC, alternating current would henceforth be the mode of execution for convicted criminals in New York.  The Commission had been formed to study alternative methods of execution after several horribly bungled hangings had outraged public sensibilities. (In one, the victim had slowly strangled to death; in another, the noose had literally ripped off the victim's head!) The crusade for electrocution and  to get AC current designated as New York's "executioner's current" was largely the inspiration of one man, a rather obscure independent engineer, and electrical consultant, Harold Brown, as part of his efforts to discredit AC. He would also advocate for legislation that would limit the voltages that could be produced with AC.  Along the way, Brown attracted powerful friends, including Thomas Edison, and his organization.  Edison would allow Brown to use his West Orange laboratories for research and eventually it would be revealed he provided Brown with regular financial support.  Brown would also attract powerful enemies, in the person of George Westinghouse and his Westinghouse Electric Company who fumed at having one of his dynamos used for the purpose of killing a man and attempted to get an injunction against its "misuse".  Westinghouse Electric would also appeal the electrocution of William Kemmler  through the New York courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds of "cruel and unusual punishment," which ultimately refused to hear the case.

In August 1890, at Auburn Prison convicted axe-murder William Klemmer was strapped into a specially constructed wooden chair and received 1000 volts through his body which stiffened and appeared dead after seventeen seconds but then, to the horror of the assembled witnesses,  continued to breath. The voltage was stepped up to more than 2000 volts and reapplied. Again Klemmer's body stiffened as the repugnant smell of burned flesh filled the chamber.  After eight minutes the horror- strickened witnesses poured out of the room. Almost immediately the debate began. Was Klemmer's death, for all its ghastliness, relatively painless?--as proponents maintained, or was the whole procedure from the shaving of the condemned man's head, through the attaching of wires, to strapping him in, itself, emotionally cruel?--as opponents maintained.  Harold Brown, for his part, deeply affected, dropped from public view,  while some engineers in the Edison camp congratulated each other and publicly suggested execution by electric current be called "Westinghousing."  New York State's official mode of execution continued to be electrocution.

Thomas Edison began work as a telegraph operator during the Civil War.  He produced several improvements to telegraph technologies including the stock ticker and a quadruplex system that allowed for four signals to be sent over a single wire simultaneously. Selling this invention to Western Union, he was able to establish his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey where he would direct a large group of craftsmen and engineers to work on various projects. Edison gained world renown  for his invention of the phonograph in 1877 and two years later began research into creating a practical incandescent light that could be used to illuminate indoor spaces, and replace gas lighting.

With the creation of a practical incandescent lamp, Edison needed to build facilities to generate and distribute electric power.  Moving into an old boat-building plant in Manhattan, he constructed the Pearl Street Power Station which generated D.C., direct current and served 59 customers. Edison believed Direct Current was safer than Alternating Current,  and at the time was the only type of power which could be used in electric motors. But there were problems with D.C.  The main problem was that Direct Current could only be transmitted about a mile without a disastrous drop in voltage.  Edison imagined an electric system made up of multiple independent steam powered power plants in cities across the United States, with larger cities having perhaps several power plants, and wealthy individuals, perhaps installing their own steam powered dynamos.  And with these parameters he began marketing his power systems, presenting proposals to half a dozen cities and offering to illuminate the houses of banker J. Pierpoint Morgan and William Vanderbilt. (Mrs. Vanderbilt put her foot down when she discovered her husband was preparing to allow workman to build a steam engine in the basement of her house!)

George Westinghouse was born in Central Bridge, New York and during the Civil War enlisted the Union calvary and then in the Union navy, serving aboard the gunboat USS Muscoota.  After the war, he worked in his father's machine shop in Schenectady where his father built farm reapers.

The young Westinghouse built a rotary steam engine, before designing a device to run derailed railroad cars  back onto the tracks and a switching device known as a reversible frog, his first commercially successful inventions.  Because the frog required extremely hard, high quality steel, Westinghouse moved to Pittsburgh in 1867, where he could obtain such steel, and where he sensed there were better opportunities for young inventors, such as himself.

 In Pittsburgh he witnessed a train collision that both engineers saw coming but could not avoid because the brakemen who hopped from car to car, manually setting all the car brakes had insufficient time to set enough brakes to stop the trains. Westinghouse devised a system in which springs automatically pushed brakes against train car wheels unless held back by pistons supplied by air pressure generated by an air compressor at the engine.  When an engineer wanted to stop his train he simply reduced the air pressure in the system allowing the spring powered brakes to come in contact with all the car wheels, at once. In the burgeoning railroad industry of the post civil war era, Westinghouse became an instant success. His interest in railroad safety soon led him to his invention of new signaling devices and the creation of his Union Switch and Signal Company which built and marketed them.

 Westinghouse's work in railroad switches and signals introduced him into the broader fields of electric power and lighting and soon he was looking into developments in electrical engineering in both the United States and Europe. He instantly recognized the shortcomings of Edison's D.C. systems and at the same time was intrigued by the European's development of A.C. generators used in arc lighting and the work of Gaulard-Gibbs in producing transformers to step down the hi-voltage A.C. to voltages that could be used in residential incandescent lighting. Obtaining samples of Siemen's generators and Gaulard-Gibbs transformers in the fall of 1885, with his team of engineers, Westinghouse began examining them, re-engineering them, and working out their bugs. In January 1886 Westinghouse Electric Company was incorporated.  In a short time Westinghouse Electric had twenty seven orders from municipal customers!

The years 1886 and 1887 were  difficult years for Edison and his company.  Westinghouse provided Edison with his first serious challenger.  Though he had had other competitors, mostly small arc-lighting companies using imported dynamos, and patent-infringing incandescent lamp "pirates," Westinghouse was his first major competitor with the resources and engineering talent and products to create municipal power systems that could rival Edison.

Secondly, 1886 was a year of intense labor activity.  Edison won a strike in his New Jersey lamp manufacturing plant by designing new equipment that automated some of the most labor intensive parts of the process, effectively eliminating many strikers jobs. That year he moved his machine works for building power systems to Schenectady, (ironically, the town his competitor, George Westinghouse, had left, a decade before.)

Near the Amtrak station, State St., Schenectady

Schenectady was well situated on a railroad hub and the Erie Canal which effective connected Schenectady to U.S. and world markets, but it was also a quiet little town of one and two family homes. Edison fervently hoped he would find or create a labor pool there more resistant to labor organizing.

Main Campus, G.E., Schenectady

And thirdly, 1886 saw a sharp rise in the price of copper. In Europe, speculators attempted to organize a world-wide copper trust. (The effort only narrowly failed, in part,  because there was enough scrap copper that could be recycled, which the trust could not control.)  Though the whole electrical industry was effected, Edison's DC  based power systems were more adversely effected because they used more copper.  The only way to extend the range of DC systems was to substantially increase the diameter of wire to customers. DC systems could use as much as two thirds more copper, than AC!

It is not surprising, then, that when Harold Brown began his campaign against AC current he would find a ready ally in Thomas Edison.

Bldg. 32 (1892) The Lighting Lab, Erie Blvd.. Schenectady

George Westinghouse went on to achieve other signature successes. In 1892 Westinghouse won the contract to electrify the Chicago Colombian Exposition. When the fair opened, a year later, 180,000 incandescent lamps lit up the nighttime sky. Westinghouse Electric  built the first power generators at Niagara Falls beginning operation three years later,           using clean hydro-power and sending the electric some twenty six miles to illuminate the city of Buffalo.  (In the future, Mrs Vanderbilt could illuminate her house, without having a steam engine in her basement.)

At the Chicago Exposition Nikola  Tesla's AC motors were prominently featured.  The brilliant Serb had conceived their design more than a decade before, but only gradually worked out their problems and convinced a skeptical electrical community of the necessity of creating generators that would produce A.C. power at 30 and 60 cycles/sec needed for their operation,  instead of 133 cycles/sec that was typically used.

Another obstacle was overcome when Westinghouse engineers developed a device to convert A.C. to D.C.  With cities all over the world becoming electrified, the dominant form of municipal transportation had become streetcars and streetcar manufacturers had followed Edison's early successes by equipping them with D.C. motors.

In the "War of Currents" A.C. was plainly winning in the marketplace. By 1891 Westinghouse Electric and the smaller firm of Thomson-Huston had produced almost 1000 electrical power systems for municipal customers and large companies; General Electric had installed only 202 D.C. local central power stations.  When the bids were opened for the Niagara Falls power project, Westinghouse won with a two phase Alternating Current system. G.E finished a close second with a three phase system A. C. system.  Clearly the engineers at G.E. had seen the light.



Time for A Break!  My regular readers know it has been a full three weeks since my last post. (Thank you for your loyalty in checking back, perhaps, several times.) This summer has been a lot busier than I expected, and I admit after some 60+ weeks of weekly posts I am suffering from a bit of writer's fatigue. So I am taking the summer off.  I will be doing some traveling, and of course, taking pictures of NYSHMs. From time to time I may write a post about some of my discoveries. I will return to regular weekly posts on September 1st. I will be sending out an Email reminder with a list of upcoming posts at the end of the summer. If you would like to receive it email me at 
tba998@gmail.com  Have a great summer!