“Oh, man.”
‘The War of the Currents’ and the first execution undertaken by means of the electric chair.
As Jacob Sullum reports in Reason magazine’s article, A Lethal Injection of Reality, the words “Oh, man” were uttered by Clayton Lockett — supposedly while unconscious — during his botched execution in Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
The haunting simplicity, the sheer ordinariness of those words, uttered in such extraordinary circumstances, are a terrible coda, a phrase into which you can pour such meaning as you will.
Sullum goes on to add that “lethal injection, first adopted by Oklahoma in 1977, is supposed to be “the most humane form” of capital punishment.”
Well, indeed.
In fact such ideas are not new, and the notion of ‘humane’ execution is an old, sad tale in American history. A tale of hope and technology—and hucksterism.
In my forthcoming thriller, The Tesla Revelations, among other shenanigans, I revisit the first execution by electric chair. It’s a tale that includes an elephant called Topsy, Nikola Tesla — the geek’s geek — and Thomas Alva Edison.
This, too, is a story that ended unpleasantly.
In writing it, I found a plethora of firsthand sources, and very little fictionalisation was needed. I have perhaps made a few more people vomit, and created the fictional Jim Clench, but otherwise this is more or less what happened.
John McCain, not unacquainted with the notion, called the recent two hour long execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood, in Arizona, “torture”, and a “bollocks-up situation.”
’Twas ever thus…
AUBURN PRISON, NEW YORK: AUGUST 6, 1890
At any moment they’d come walking in and speak to him nice as pie, like they always did. Then they’d be walking him down the corridor to the special room, The Death Room.
And the end would begin.
When they woke him up, they’d pulled him from his dream, face wet from crying in his sleep. For the first time in a long while it wasn’t the red dream. This dream was about when he first met Tillie and her happy-go-lucky gap-toothed smile, back in that bar in Buffalo. She’d looked good enough to eat.
Billy wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, still half-asleep. He needed to wake up, he thought, if they were going to put him to sleep.
“Putting you to sleep.” That was what one of them lawyers called it, the one who could never quite meet his eyes.
More people arrived, but their faces were awful quiet, strained in the deathly silence.
Billy Kemmler smiled a little, tried to put them at their ease. He wasn’t clever or book-learnt but he had a rough, plainspoken straightforwardness, a beguiling lack of side and artifice, which often charmed.
He also had a temper, he’d admit that, and it usually blew up when he’d put a few under his belt. He liked his drink, just like his ma and pa before him. And he liked his wife, well, his woman. They never got the paper from the man in black, but called themselves husband and wife often enough to make it so.
Boy did Tillie have a tongue on her, though, specially after they got into the moonshine whiskey, bathtub gin, whatever cheap hooch they could lay their hands on.
Then the late nights would descend into a loop of kinetic madness. Words and tempers feeding on each other until the energy flowed hot and, inflamed by drink, one of them would lash out.
Wanting it to end, or begin.
Because by silent agreement, somewhere on the other side of the violence lay the passion to make up. Equally violent, but this time a wild sparking of sexual currents connecting them before the inevitable lapse into drunken exhaustion. It passed for intimacy. Something they could call their own.
Mostly it was Billy who erupted first, usually with his fists. There were always bruises, often black eyes, and then one day there was a sticky hatchet in his hand and — there, at his feet, washing the kitchen floor with claret — the bloody shambles of her mutilated corpse.
The cops at the murder scene, finding a distraught drunk weeping over his lover, were moved to be gentle.
The trial was swift; the verdict foregone; the date of execution signed, sealed, and delivered.
Then the game got too complex for Billy to follow.
Sure, he nodded along to the fine gentlemen, with their fine shiny words and smooth pigskin briefcases. Something about how they wanted to do it, they said. A new method, a kind of scientific advance on choking your last at the end of a rope.
Billy didn’t really understand and didn’t much care. He knew he was not long for this world. But they were gentlemen, and it seemed polite to agree to their earnest pale faces. Besides, they worked for Mister Westinghouse and Billy had heard he was something big up in the big city.
The lawyers were locked into the nearest thing to mortal combat such a bloodless profession ever gets, guerrillas in a war between two of the great bruisers of the day. And Billy was a key front in what the Yellow Press, then everyone else, called The War of the Currents.
At stake: ownership of the electrical energy to power a vast new world. Fuel for a slumbering giant just awakening, stretching, and setting about the dawning American Age. As ever, it was all about Power: physical, economic and political.
In one corner: the undefeated heavyweight technician of the United States, Thomas Alva Edison. The man who lit the darkness with his light bulb, who had captured human voices on rotating wax cylinders with his Phonograph.
An ornery scrapper with a knack for inventive tinkering, Edison was the kind of guy who found it amusing to secretly wire up the shithouse washbasins to give his workmen random electric shocks.
Dressed like a Bowery bum, gobbing tobacco-brown saliva at the nearest spittoon, he loved to entertain the press and the public in his warren of laboratories at Menlo Park. But the cussing ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’ had a secret: his money was running out.
His torrent of “better mousetraps” needed power, power, and more power. Edison put his money and prestige behind continuous — or Direct — Current. But DC had a problem: voltage drop meant it drained away; power stations would need to be built every couple of miles.
In the other corner: George Westinghouse, cavalry boy and naval engineer in the Civil War. Westinghouse’s first fortune came from inventing train airbrakes. Lithe and powerful, his pug nose sat over a mouth obscured by a vast walrus moustache.
Both men knew that the future — and its huge riches — would belong to the power barons.
Lighting, streetcars, factories of desire for a growing nation, all of them and more would need a constant chug of energy. Energy patented, directed and controlled; energy created, dispensed and sold.
And Westinghouse was backing Alternating Current — the AC motor invented and patented by Nikola Tesla.
This was not a war about technology. It was a war between oligarchs.
A war for the future.
Then along came H.P. Brown, and Edison got exactly what he needed — a viscous dollop of something dark and spicy to add to the propaganda war: death by electrocution.
An electrical engineer of moderate distinction, Brown was distraught at the deaths in his field — dozens so far — as colleagues were electrocuted by this imperfectly understood new power. He sought out an enemy and lit upon Alternating Current, deducing incorrectly that AC and not DC accounted for their jerky deaths.
And so, as you do, he began to manufacture electric chairs.
These he planned, helpfully, to operate himself.
In order, it seemed, to prove his point.
When New York City announced a commission to find “the most humane method of capital punishment”, Brown formalised his new calling and acquired a spurious neutral-sounding guise: ‘Chief Spokesman for the Medico-Legal Society of New York.’ He secretly obtained some AC polyphase motors from the Westinghouse Electric Company, and started electrocuting a menagerie of animals with unseemly relish.
Edison let Brown use Menlo Park to “Westinghouse” dozens of dogs, a couple of calves, even a horse. Most magnificent of all was Topsy, a fully-grown African elephant. She was drugged and then led out onto an iron grid and fed great gouts of the new electricity. Edison had her filmed in her death throes; when she collapsed the pads of her feet had fused to the metal.
Spectators ate peanuts, two cents a bag.
The experiments were gruesome enough but Brown wanted more. He wanted a man to be taken hence to the prison in which he was last confined and from there to a place of execution where he would be electrocuted by the chair until dead.
And in William “Philadelphia Billy” Kemmler, illiterate alcoholic hooligan and hatchet-murderer, Brown had found the perfect guinea pig.
As is the American way, The War of the Currents became a skirmish in the courts. In open court, Edison was asked if, after several minutes of the current “working on him”, Kemmler would be carbonized.
“No,” he said with a smirk. “He would be mummyized.”
The War of the Currents exerted a dark allure in the morbid mind of the public.
Here was an experimental procedure, in which current would be poured into Kemmler’s body for a length of time yet to be determined. The details of the method sounded to uneducated ears, well, detailed.
The wrists to be manacled; the hands placed in jars of caustic potash solution into which a thousand volts of Alternating Current would be poured; the black cap switched on at the appropriate and legally-mandated moment, thereby closing the circuit; the shock to run through the arms and to the heart and brain; the entire death to be instantaneous and painless.
There were hearings, affidavits, papers, briefs, articles, campaigns, and delays. Billy Kemmler waited. And waited.
A year passed.
The fine gentlemen gave up explaining the details. Billy knew he wasn’t the brightest kid on the block, but the lawyers were kind and friendly and treated him right. And even when they spoke down to him, he still liked to break up the boredom of Death Row with visitors.
And now they came.
* * *
Hundreds of people had gathered beyond the prison walls, many crowded around the temporary office set up by the Western Union Telegraph Company.
The witnesses arrived early. Important men like District Attorney George P. Quimby, who had sent many to The Death House but had yet to watch an execution in person. He was predicted to do as he usually did: slip away before the penultimate reckoning.
A sanatorium’s worth of medical men were in attendance, for a great interest had been whipped up among the medico-legal community. More than a dozen — a prescription of doctors, one might say — including Doctor H.E. Allison, Superintendent of the Auburn Asylum for Insane Criminals. They were ushered into the witness room to join the reporters and ministers and others. Including, of course, a large expense of lawyers, who seemed to increase in number and wear ever-finer clothes every time they appeared.
“It’s time, Billy,” said Warden Durston with a look of genuine concern. Ever since this whole business had started it had stolen his sleep or stalked it with terrible dreams. Billy smiled back. “Time to go.”
Billy sat on the edge of his bunk as the Warden read the death warrant. He didn’t listen to all the long words: they made his brain ache. Durston finished and looked up.
“All right, I’m ready,” said Billy.
There was an awkward shuffling in the small room as the Warden went off to greet the witnesses and two religious men came in to lead a prayer. Then Billy sat down to a good breakfast with his old keeper, Joe Veiling from Buffalo Prison. Billy wasn’t educated — he never got no reading and writing — but he knew intuitively that it had somehow fallen to him to keep spirits up. He essayed a joke or two, and the mood lifted a notch.
Joe asked, most politely thought Billy, if he had any objection to having his head shaved; he had not, and the locks fell away onto the floor. Joe was nervous and made a hash of it. Billy was reminded, for some reason, of Samson, but thought it best not to say anything, what with the religious men standing nearby.
“They say I am afraid to die, but they’ll find that I ain’t,” Billy said. “I want you to stay right by me, Joe, see me through this thing. I promise you I won’t make no trouble.”
The Warden returned. “Come, William.”
The solemn procession worked its way through the quivering silence. Auburn was in lockdown, the inmates silent with loud feeling. In a few moments the line of men had reached the corridor leading to the death chamber. Patting Billy on the shoulder one last time, Durston gulped. No one had done this before in the history of mankind. Thank God the doctors were in charge.
The Warden went first, then Billy, then two prison bulls trailed by the men of God intoning a prayer.
The death chamber was small; the press of witnesses large, the sense of occasion larger: giving the whole a quality of bilious tension that sucked the air from the room.
“Gentlemen, this is Mister William Kemmler,” said Durston.
Billy, not sure of the right thing to do in the circumstances, settled on giving a small bow. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I wish you all good luck. I believe I’m going to a good place, and I’m ready to go. I only want to say that a great deal has been said about me that’s untrue. I’m bad enough. It’s cruel to make me out worse.” Again unsure what a man should do in his position, Billy gave another little bow to the room.
After his modest performance, Billy walked over and sat on a chair next to The Chair. Durston eased him into the correct seat, and then had him stand again to check his clothing. He needed to make sure it was cut away at the back, in order that the electrode could make direct contact with the base of the spine.
The outer clothing had been seen to, but not the inner. Durston took a small penknife from his pocket and cut away two small triangles of cloth, exposing the flesh.
The room was bathed in a dreadful nervous energy and Billy, again, felt the need to play his part. Touching Durston’s arm he said, “Now take your time and do it all right, Warden. There’s no rush. I don’t want to take no chances on this thing.”
Durston stepped forward and started strapping Billy’s head into the contraption — which is what he called it in the privacy of his mind. The leather bindings muzzling his forehead and chin made Billy look less than human. Maybe that was the point, thought the Warden.
Billy asked that the straps be made tighter. “I want everything done right.”
Billy’s arms, legs, and body were tied down. Twelve leather straps in all. As each was fastened, Billy strained against it, checking it would hold.
It was a fearful sight and some of the audience thought of Doctor Frankenstein and his Creature. In one of those strange faded loops strung through history, the husband of its author Mary Shelley, the poet Percy, had a deep fascination with electricity.
Percy Bysshe Shelley had wired up the brass door handles on his set of rooms at University College, Oxford: a little surprise for unwary visitors, not unlike the electrified washbasins in Menlo Park.
Jim Clench was Edison’s personal representative among those watching with appalled fascination. He was masquerading as a friend of the deceased, Matilda Ziegler. Like the other witnesses, he had been waiting for almost an hour, by turns enthralled to be in the presence of history and then irritated by the delay.
The stench of body odour in the hot, packed witness room was as palpable as the anticipation.
Satisfied at last, The Warden stepped away from The Electric Chair.
The last minute had arrived.
“All ready?” said Durston. “Good-bye, William.”
‘Good-bye’ was the signal. The fateful current launched into Billy’s body. He heaved against the straps, every muscle straining.
Billy’s eyes were still looking straight ahead, as if he were concentrating.
The only sign of something more than strain was Billy’s index finger, which curled back on itself until his nail cut into the fleshy pad of his hand.
Blood dripped onto The Electric Chair.
Doctors Spitzka and MacDonald stood close, watching the man die. Next to them was Doctor Daniels with his stopwatch.
The convulsions ceased but still the current continued.
Twelve seconds.
Thirteen seconds.
Fourteen seconds.
Fifteen seconds.
Billy’s body slumped back, movement ceased. A bone-white pallor and, spreading across his skin, what physicians are wont to call “death spots”.
The room was hushed.
It was 6.42 a.m.
“He is dead”, said Doctor Spitzka.
Warden Durston signalled the hidden operators of the dynamo to cease operation.
The room gave a collective sigh, relieved that the awful spectacle was over.
Then: a great commotion.
“He breathes.”
“Great God, he is alive.”
“For God’s sake, kill him and have it over.”
“Turn on the current.”
District Attorney Quimby, gagging and groaning, fled the room.
One of the doctors hurried up to The Electric Chair, checking the vital signs, but unprepared to risk touching the body. Some saw shame on his face; others, fear.
The doctors conferred with a nod and a word and asked for the current again, with no delay. The Warden gave two bells to signal the men at the lever to start over.
The click.
The current.
The convulsion.
But the dynamo was struggling now, cracking as it worked its power into Billy’s body.
Blood vessels under the skin began to rupture.
There was no rapture.
Billy’s hair under the cap was singeing, the flesh burning at the base of his spine where the electrode had contact.
A hideous stench assailed the nostrils.
Billy’s skin blackened, the flesh beneath it yellowed and the inner tissues baked.
Foam poured from his mouth.
In the witness room, a journalist — hardened to hangings — fainted.
Nausea rushed through the room. Someone vomited.
To the terrible stink of burning human skin and hair was added an acrid new stench: the half-digested remains of a solid breakfast of greasy bacon, fatty lamb cutlets, cooked kidneys, fried eggs (over easy), and hash browns.
As the world’s first “electro-thanasia” came to its grisly (and gristly) conclusion, a chain reaction ensued.
Witness after witness retched in the humid room.
