When Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated his newly-invented phonograph to Henry Morton Stanley, the famous explorer asked him to name the historical figure whose voice he would most like to hear. Edison’s answer, “Napoleon,” shocked the devout Stanley, who responded, “I should like to hear the voice of our savior.” Unabashed, Edison explained, “Well, I like a hustler.”
Mark Essig’s engrossing tale of one of the less edifying episodes in the life of America’s greatest inventor, Edison and the Electric Chair (Walker & Co., $26, 368 pages) puts Edison’s achievements in the context of the development of electricity, discusses the history of capital punishment in America, and demonstrates that Edison himself was no mean hustler.
Born in 1847, and with less than a year of formal education, Edison became an expert telegrapher as a teenager, patented his first invention at 22, and before he was 30 had built his famous laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., where in 1879 he perfected the first practical electric light bulb.
His next major project was to illuminate New York City with an Edison-built electric system including generators and conductors as well as light bulbs. Unfortunately, Edison’s inventive genius let him down here, because his system was based on direct current.
Other companies, most notably one headed by George Westinghouse — another prominent inventor whose fame and fortune came from the air brake that tamed the locomotive — were pressing ahead with alternating current systems that were far better suited for large-scale power stations than Edison’s design.
Faced with this formidable competition, Edison decided to make a major issue out of safety, arguing that high-voltage AC was dangerous, whereas low-voltage DC was safe. To bring this point home, he became a strenuous advocate of electrocution — relying on AC power — as a means of inflicting capital punishment.
In fact, Edison himself regarded capital punishment as barbaric, but he decided he could fight Westinghouse by persuading the public that AC electricity was an efficient method of disposing of murderers, and therefore too dangerous for people to allow in their homes.
He carried out this campaign with his customary enthusiasm and zest, inter alia proposing that the electric chair be called a “Westinghouse.”
The comparatively esoteric technical debate over the relative merits of AC and DC became a subject of intense public concern as competing companies festooned New York with thousands of overhead wires. All too frequently, a lineman would make a wrong move and electrocute himself, which on occasion would result in a grisly scene as thousands of pedestrians on the streets of lower Manhattan watched his lengthy and agonizing death throes.
Meanwhile, New York state held legislative hearings to compare the merits of electrocution with other methods of capital punishment. After New York decided in favor of electrocution, the first man sent to the electric chair was William Kemmler, who was convicted of the brutal murder of his wife.
The new technology, however, did not perform with the promised efficiency, and the execution was a drawn-out, painful and messy affair as the operators struggled to make the process work. Writing from the viewpoint of the early 21st century, Mr. Essig tells us that although capital punishment is still practiced in America, the electric chair has been superseded by less violent methods.
The electric chair was adopted during the era John H. Lienhard discusses in his book Inventing Modern: Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers and Tailfins (Oxford University Press, $28, 267 pages). His title reflects his transformation of the adjective “modern” into a noun describing the environment of astonishing technological change from around the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.
This was a period when the public appetite for the new seemed never to be satiated, the inventor was the great American hero, and recklessness in the name of progress was the norm.
Mr. Lienhard was born in 1931 and is now an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston. He draws on the history of his own family and his personal experience to describe how dramatically and how rapidly technological progress changed life in America between the 1840s, when his great-grandfather arrived as a young man from Germany, through the 1950s, when Mr. Lienhard himself was beginning his academic career.
Illustrating his theme with examples encompassing art, architecture, poetry, science and technology, he introduces us to and/or reacquaints us with a host of people, devices and phenomena that made the 20th century unique in history.
Progress was not a single highway. Mr. Lienhard explores a number of ventures that involved massive efforts to perfect old technologies but were soon replaced by radically different alternatives that were far superior.
One blind alley was the steam-powered cable-car system, a relic of which still operates in San Francisco, but which generally proved unable to compete with the electric streetcar, which now itself is mostly a historical memory. More lasting changes to transportation were made by the automobile and the airplane, the quintessential symbols of the 20th century.
Mr. Lienhard gives us brief biographies of some of the men and women, daredevils all, who developed, raced and tested these ever-faster machines to their limit, reintroducing us to Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan as well as less famous figures such as Bessie Coleman, the first black American woman to fly.
The author tells us that the enthusiastic Modern era came to a gradual close in the 1950s as the public grew disillusioned with the negative side effects of technology. Today, boys no longer grow up with the untrammeled access to explosive chemicals and hazardous electrical devices that makes invention both exciting and dangerous.
Perhaps to show us that his thesis is not just a personal lament about the lost joys of his own boyhood, he ends on an optimistic note. He surmises that current unsolved problems of the universe, such as the nature of dark matter and superstrings, herald the beginning of a new era of unpredictable and invigorating advances in unforeseen directions.
Like John Lienhard, Henry Petroski is that rara avis, an engineer who writes well. Mr. Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, explains in his 10th book Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (Knopf, $25, 273 pages) how we all practice the art of design in all aspects of our lives, and why every design is an exercise in compromise, and therefore imperfect.
With subtle wit, historical erudition and an engineer’s keen eye for the hidden complexities of the mundane, Mr. Petroski provides us a plethora of examples from everyday life of how things came to be the way they are.
The reader will learn the answers to more questions than he had ever thought of asking about such matters as the construction of disposable paper cups and paper bags, the layout of supermarkets, the differing heights of doorknobs and electric wall switches, and the evolution of potato peelers and toothbrushes.
He will also nod in recognition as Mr. Petroski discusses such familiar phenomena as the tendency of the contents of plastic shopping bags to redistribute themselves to the farthest reaches of car trunks and the inability of dazzled drivers to escape the high-intensity headlights of following vehicles.
In conclusion, he tells us that “all technology is as imperfect as its creators” but that “we can, by practice and discipline, improve our own behavior … [and that] of our creations.” In the meantime, “we demonstrate our dominion over things by using and enjoying them in spite of their shortcomings.”
Jeffrey Marsh has written widely on scientific topics and public issues ranging from nuclear strategy to social policy.
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