The Last Days of Night(57)
Brown was now taking his campaign a step further. He was set to launch a traveling road show. He would demonstrate to the public just how deadly Westinghouse’s current would be.
On New Year’s Day, 1889, Paul took the train to West Orange, New Jersey.
He found a crowded lecture hall. He guessed there to be almost a hundred other attendees besides himself, comprised of city safety officials, lighting company representatives, assorted engineers, and a healthy contingent of reporters. Brown’s tour was being advertised all along the East Coast. He was to perform in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. Edison country, Paul thought. Though on such trips Brown would have to travel on trains with brakes designed by George Westinghouse.
Harold Brown entered the lecture hall. To Paul’s surprise, he looked more like an actuary than a huckster. He was small, mild of demeanor, soft voiced; if he wasn’t the man of the hour, he would have disappeared into the crowd. Brown began his lecture by explaining that he had no “financial or commercial interest” in the nationwide debate over A/C versus D/C; his involvement in this scientific dispute was motivated only by his commitment to the truth. He then directed his audience’s attention to an animal cage. It was constructed from wood, but strung with copper wires between the bars. Inside, Brown had placed a generously sized black retriever. An assistant attached wires to the animal’s legs. One on the front right, the other on the rear left. The unsuspecting retriever did not bark as the copper pressed against its fur. Brown then showed his assembled crowd a direct-current generator. It was of “the type manufactured by Mr. Edison,” he explained. With the flick of a switch, Brown sent what he described as three hundred volts through the dog. The animal emitted a small yelp and briefly struggled to shake free. But of course the shackles wouldn’t budge.
“You see,” Brown intoned, “the direct current hurts no worse than a pinprick.”
He then turned the generator to four hundred volts and reapplied the current to the unhappy retriever. The barking grew louder.
Next it was seven hundred volts of D/C. The dog bellowed violently, banging its head against the bars of the cage. The poor thing shook until managing to loose the electrical wire on its front paw. Brown’s assistant dutifully reapplied it.
Shouts of protest erupted from the audience. Surely, a few men yelled, this was too much. Paul placed his head in his hands. He had a terrible feeling.
“Even up to seven hundred volts,” Brown explained, ignoring his audience’s pleas for mercy, “this direct current is quite simply incapable of doing lasting damage to the animal.
“But,” he then added, “let us see how alternating current compares.” His assistant replaced the D/C generator with a different one, bigger and newer. Brown described it as an alternating-current device, identical to the variety produced by Mr. Westinghouse.
“We return to a humble three hundred volts,” he said as he flicked a switch on the new machine and alternating current poured through the dog. It took only seconds of thrashing and an unholy screech before it slumped to the floor of its cage, dead. “Terrible thing,” said Brown as he shook his head ruefully. The crowd was too shocked to move. “I am sorry for having to show you such terrors. But if you have concerns, I suggest bringing them up with Mr. Westinghouse. He is the one attempting to string this current up to every thoroughfare in the country. If this is what it does to a dog, imagine what it might do to a child!”
—
Despite a note of official protest from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Brown performed a nearly identical demonstration the following day. A Newfoundland work dog was electrocuted by A/C for a full eight seconds before it died. The next night it was an Irish setter, with identical results.
The following weeks brought a pattern of newspaper coverage of these demonstrations that was almost comical in its predictability and its absurdity. Paul had assumed that the controversy surrounding such grotesqueries would be to his advantage. Surely no one could take seriously the scientific claims of a man who had literally taken to burning animals alive?
Paul found himself in the wrong. Every report went like this: First there was a throat-clearing denunciation from the newspaper editorial board about the moral abomination of animal killing. But then, a breath later, the same paper would reluctantly suggest that if Brown had perhaps gone too far to make his point, that did not invalidate his message. And based on the horrors witnessed, his message was both sound and vitally important.
“While Brown might find a wider audience for his arguments if they were not posed in such an unchristian manner,” declared The Philadelphia Inquirer, “there can be no denying the dangers he so successfully elucidated by the frying of a Labrador.” The controversy itself begat more ink, which in turn brought more attention to Brown’s cause. It seemed that in the circus of public opinion, no act was too extreme. Brown’s villainy had been successfully painted as Westinghouse’s.
—
“Mr. Paul Cravath,” said Tesla as Paul entered his upstairs bedroom two weeks later. “You are looking more pale even than I.”
Paul had to smile. Tesla had rarely greeted him by name since the accident. “I’m not getting as much sleep as I might.”
Tesla didn’t respond. Instead, he turned to the window and stared at the shapes being formed by the ice outside the glass. Geometric paintings in slow-moving frost. Paul spent another twenty minutes trying to re-engage him in conversation, but it was no use. This brief flash of lucidity was all that Paul would get that night.