Electricity in the Gilded Age: A Time When Magic Could Become Reality . . . With a Price

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During The Gilded Age the American public had become mesmerized by electricity. The idea of light without a flame was almost like magic and scientists dazzled spectators at world fairs with brilliant light shows and experiments. It was a time of progress and the ability to harness electricity was something that suggested the future would be nothing less than magical . . . but with a price.  

Although people were scrambling for the new status symbol, they were also suffering common fires and blackouts. Loose wires and accidental generator malfunctions burned people to a cinder without ever being exposed to a flame. A single touch to an electrified element could end a person’s life in a moment and if anyone tried to save said individual, they too could lose their life. Not to mention the State of New York decided to use it to electrocute prisoners in a chair literally inspired by a dentist’s chair.

Electrical experiments began back in the mid to late 1700s, but it wasn’t until the late 1870s when Charles Brush and Joseph Swan invented the generator and incandescent light bulb although the bulb burnt out too quickly to be useful. Thomas Edison’s contribution came from founding the Edison Electric Light Company and the invention of an incandescent light bulb that could last 1,200 hours in 1880.

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Although the Brush-Swan Electric Company and others including Thomas-Houston began to light the streets, the big competitors were Thomas Edison who had been nicknamed “The Wizard,” and George Westinghouse, a shrewd businessman. Edison used direct current, an affordable and efficient current. It’s only drawbacks were that it was weaker and couldn’t travel long distances, but the weakness meant less danger. Still, long distance electricity was needed. Westinghouse used alternating current, which could travel long distances but was more expensive and more dangerous.

Still, Westinghouse was doing well, especially when he acquired a foreign scientist named Nikola Tesla who made alternating current viable in the first place. Tesla had originally worked with Edison, but the two men did not get along.

The battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse played a huge role in the ultimate use of the electric chair. Edison understood the media well and nudged certain key individuals to use alternating current in the electric chair despite the fact that Edison didn’t believe in capital punishment. Although Edison was right – that alternating current could kill a man more efficiently than direct current – historians are pretty certain his goals were not efficiency. He knew that if alternating current became the official state noose then the general public would come to fear it.  

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While this battle went on among scientists and politicians, the public ping-ponged back and forth between demanding electricity in their towns to condemning it, especially during The Electric Wire Panic of 1889. The panic occurred in New York City after a Western Union lineman named John Feeks was electrocuted and mutilated while trying to repair a telegraph wire. Several blocks away an alternating current wire had crossed the same telegraph wire Feeks ultimately touched. At the time, New York was webbed in telegraph wires and some alternating current wires. So when Feeks’ body went limp, it became tangled in the wires and hung there above the streets.

Thousands of people crowded underneath and on nearby rooftops to gawk. The lineman’s neck had come to rest on the live and eventually it burned through his flesh and blood showered the onlookers below. The body remained there for nearly an hour before a lineman wearing rubber boots and gloves tied a rope around Feek’s waist. A group of men below held the slack while the lineman cut the wires that held the body in the air. The wires snapped down toward onlookers causing the crowd to flee in horror of being whipped and electrocuted.

Thousands of people witnessed the bloody spectacle, and everyone else read about it in the papers. Suddenly, the public became paranoid that a random live wire could cause an accidental electrocution anywhere, anytime.

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One expert said: “Death does not stop at the door, but comes right into the house, and perhaps as you are closing a door or turning on the gas you are killed. It is likely that many of the cases of sudden death we hear of from heart disease may come about this way.”

Another expert warned: “There is no safety, and death lurks all around us. A man ringing a door-bell or leaning up against a lamp lost might be struck dead any instant.”

Although the real numbers showed that less than 1 percent of deaths were due to electrical accidents, the public panicked. Business owners began cutting down the wires near their properties and ultimately the city itself determined George Westinghouse’s alternating current wires had to go. New York’s Public Works Department formed groups to go around the city and cut the wires down and event take axes to the poles. Crowds cheered as the wires fell to the ground and the city went dark. New York allowed for the wires to be re-established but only underground.

Nevertheless, Edison still warned that putting them underground would only lead to deaths from manholes and underneath houses. His solution was to only allow a “safe” current in the city. The city still allowed for alternating current in the city but Edison’s efforts to further destroy Westinghouse only added to the public’s concern.

“Burying these wires will result only in the transfer of deaths to man-holes, houses, stores, and offices, through the agency of the telephone, the low-pressure systems, and the apparatus of the high-tension current itself.”

The Tribune also reported:  “Mr. Edison has since declared that any metallic object – a doorknob, a railing, a gas fixture, the most common and necessary appliance of life – might at any moment become the medium of death.

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The next year in 1890, the first death by electrocution occurred in Auburn Prison and turned into a huge spectacle when the ax-murderer William Kemmler burned to death causing the audience to run, scream, faint and vomit. Despite the initial horror and outrage, present doctors and scientists later proclaimed the electric chair a success and New York continued to electrocute prisoners in a few key prisons.

In the end alternating current became the official electricity of death and Edison had won the battle, but Westinghouse still won the war when Nikola Tesla used his Tesla Coil and generators to efficiently move alternating current over long distances efficiently. Westinghouse bought the patents and together they lit Chicago’s World Fair in 1893.

Meanwhile, Edison had become angry with his shareholders who had been demanding an alternating current system and Edison ultimately left the business, selling all his shares and going into the film industry. Interestingly enough, and again even though Edison didn’t believe in capital punish, one of his first films was of an official electrocution of a prisoner in the electric chair.

Quotes and information from the wonderful book Edison & The Electric Chair by Mark Essig.Read excerpts on the Google Books Edition of Edison & The Electric Chair by Mark Essig.

If you think this sounds interesting then you will probably love my second novel The Binding of Saint Barbara.


About Stephanie Carroll
Stephanie Carroll is the author of A White Room and "Forget Me Not" featured in Legacy: An Anthology. She blogs about magical realism, her research into the Victorian Era and Gilded Age, writing, and life in general at www.stephaniecarroll.net and at The Unhinged Historian. She also founded Unhinged and Empowered, a blog for Navy wives and girlfriends.

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