Thomas Edison And George Westinghouse example essay topic

When Moran writes that he aims "to demonstrate how our most cherished social values can be manipulated to serve pecuniary interests: the way in which public policy is affected by behind-the-scenes maneuvering of powerful and often ruthless business interests", I think he is talking solely about the death penalty (xv ). There are various aspects within the death penalty that make it a much more dynamic issue. Throughout his book, Moran writes about the inhumanity of the death penalty, including the barbaric methods and public spectacle of the act prior to William Kemmler, and most importantly, the safety and efficacy of direct current versus alternating current in the eventually preferred method of the electric chair. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, along with a few others, were the players who manipulated how the public, and therefore the lawmakers, felt about this social policy.

As it is today, the death penalty was a big debate issue in the early part of the nineteenth century. I think it is interesting that, considering his major public role in this issue, Thomas Edison was initially against capital punishment. When Dr. Southwick solicited Mr. Edison's advice on the electric chair, Edison wrote "as a progressive and a free thinker, he was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty" (74). With further prodding, and deeper review, Edison realized how getting involved with this issue would help his personal business cause. Thomas Edison's light business was quickly losing ground to rival George Westinghouse.

He knew he was widely respected as an electrical engineer and claimed not to change his stance on executions, but acknowledged the necessity and offered a humane alternative with electricity. More specifically and strategically, he offered up George Westinghouse's alternating current dynamos as a possibility because he claimed, "the passage of the current from these machines... produces instantaneous death" (75). These statements made their way to the Elbridge Gerry, an Edison admirer and man appointed to head a review commission on the death penalty. Not surprisingly the focus of the policy soon changed to the barbarity and inhumanity of executions, especially hangings, and ways to make the process more civilized. Elbridge Gerry's commission report, influenced by Thomas Edison, Elihu Thomson (a future Edison business partner), and electric chair innovator Dr. Alfred Southwick, changed the way that executions were viewed and eventually carried out in the United States. Moran writes that the report "is considered the founding document for modern execution practice and protocol" (84).

The report eventually turned into a bill that changed the way executions were carried out. No longer were they to be a public spectacle. Executions would take place in a state prison, not in public, and media access and account of the act would be limited. Also importantly, although it did not initially make it into the law, electricity would replace hanging as the death penalty method.

With the current excitement surrounding electricity, Thomas Edison figured that he could focus the public's interest in the electric chair as the primary means of execution and at the same time boost his own direct current form of electricity. Furthermore he aimed to harm the reputation of rival George Westinghouse by asserting that Westinghouse's alternating current was extremely dangerous and therefore the best method to quickly and painlessly kill someone. Edison found a willing ally in Harold Brown. Brown, who had no formal electrical training, made a name for himself by performing very misleading studies on both types of current and scaring the public into believing there was extreme danger in alternating current. George Westinghouse saw the effect that Brown was having on people and finally took ads out in all the major papers discrediting Harold Brown's experiments and questioning his motives as an Edison associate. In return, Brown returned with a reply advertisement and paid an "extra fee of $275... for his ad to appear without the identification tag ADV" so it would look like an editorial (105).

Brown also outright lied to the public by denying that "he was working for Thomas Edison or any of the Edison companies" (105). George Westinghouse began to see the real damage that an electrical execution using a Westinghouse dynamo would have on his booming business. Rather than trying to prove alternating current's safety, Westinghouse changed his strategy and focused on William Kemmler, the first man who would be killed in the electric chair. Westinghouse indirectly hired exceptionally successful lawyer W. Bourke Cockran who argued for Kemmler that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment.

Westinghouse illustrated his own dishonesty when "Cockran repeatedly denied having received payment for his involvement in the Kemmler case", but never answered questions about who was paying his fees (160). In the trial, Cockran did harass and embarrass Harold Brown on the fact that he was not only not an electrical engineer, he was also not a medical professional and could not speak intelligently on how electricity kills. Cockran also questioned Thomas Edison hoping to get Edison to say something about Westinghouse. Moran writes, "but Edison was too shrewd a businessman, and too conscious of his reputation, to say anything negative about his rival" (179).

Ultimately Kemmler was re sentenced to die by electrocution. In conclusion, Thomas Edison knew his power and prestige and he saw the potential to remove his biggest competitor by manipulating how the public felt about the safety of alternating current. George Westinghouse hoped that he could save his reputation and business by appealing to the unknown regarding electricity. He manipulated the public's concern over the possible painful and ineffective electric chair.

Both were driven not by progress and humanity, as Edison claimed, or concern for the criminal, as Westinghouse claimed, but by power and money in the industry that both men were pioneering.

Bibliography

Richard, Moran Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair. (New York: Vintage Press, 2002), pp 74, 75, 84,105,160,179..