The Last Days of Night(76)

The current again entered Kemmler’s body. The prisoner raged against the leather straps with such force that his skin began ripping off. His mouth and eyes grew black from char. Blood no longer dripped from his hand, but rather poured in a bright gush. Dark smoke rose from his head.

And then, quite suddenly, blue fire shot from Kemmler’s mouth. Paul watched as the same blue hellfire he’d seen above that street in Manhattan incinerated Kemmler’s skull, lit his hair on fire, and then washed across his body. It stripped the skin from his bones.

The guests jumped to their feet as the blood flew across the basement. Paul was among the men sprinting for the door.

In the prison yard, the first thing Paul did was vomit. Without food in his stomach, what came up was just a bitter clot of bile. He knelt in the dirt, spitting the taste from his lips.

Paul looked up at his fellow witnesses. He wasn’t the only one being sick. The physicians, more accustomed to gore, had lit cigarettes. They were talking animatedly, trying to figure out what they had just witnessed. They’d never seen a body do that before. Their personal horror was tinged with professional curiosity.

The reporters were scribbling in their notebooks. Paul realized that within minutes they would file reports of what they’d witnessed, a scene they would paint for the many newspapers across the country. The Westinghouse system of alternating current had just proven itself to be a spectacularly poor instrument of murder. If Edison and Brown had wanted to demonstrate the stubborn safety of alternating current, they could have done no better job.

Paul still felt ill. But for the first time in a long while, he also felt like his side had won something.

Paul turned to see Brown exiting quickly through the prison gates. He thought he could make out dark stains on Brown’s linen jacket. And on his hands as well.





An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN



GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE WAS in his shirtsleeves when Paul burst through the double doors of his private study. Paul felt a little bashful about his excitement, considering the previous day’s events. And yet an unrepentant axe murderer had been punished, and his death had exposed to the public the extent of Edison’s lies about alternating current. No one could now believe that alternating current was particularly lethal. The question was already being asked in the papers: Had Brown been simply mistaken? Or had he been lying? And if the latter, why?

Paul had not often been able to relay such good news to his client.

“Mr. Cravath?” Westinghouse checked his pocket watch.

“Sir, I telegrammed. The news from Buffalo—surely you’ve seen it?”

Proudly, Paul removed the day’s New York Times from his coat pocket. He slapped the paper down on Westinghouse’s desk.

The headline blared in forty-eight-point type across the top of the thin broadsheet: ELECTRICAL ATROCITY IN BUFFALO—IS EDISON TO BLAME?

“The papers are all looking into Edison,” said Paul. “They all are reporting that Brown was a fraud and someone had to have put him up to it.”

Westinghouse said nothing. He looked down at the newspaper, taking it into his hands and giving the headlines a long, hard stare.

“This is good,” said Westinghouse.

“Yes, this is good,” said Paul. This wasn’t quite the reaction he had hoped for. “Your current is too safe to be of any use in executions. They could barely kill a man with the stuff when they tried. Every newspaper in the country is reporting the story in the same terms: A/C is too safe. The scandal is no longer about the worrisome dangers of your current—it’s about your current’s worrisome safety.”

“We’ll sell more units.”

“We’ll sell a lot more units.” Paul was perplexed by his client’s muted response. Sales of A/C systems had been slowing of late. This was just the thing to reinvigorate buyers. This should have been a long-awaited moment of triumph. But Westinghouse looked as if the two men were at a wake.

“We’ll need to,” said Westinghouse as he set the paper down and sat back in his chair. “We’re bankrupt.” He said it so abruptly that Paul wasn’t quite sure what he meant.

“What?”

“Well, not quite yet. But soon. Very soon.”

“I don’t understand…” Sales had slowed, but they hadn’t slowed enough for that.

“Perhaps you’ve been reading the wrong papers,” suggested Westinghouse as he took a folded paper from under some letters on the other side of his desk. He placed the thin newspaper down on top of Paul’s New York Times. It was The Wall Street Journal.

WHEN LONDON TREMBLES…NEW YORK QUAKES. The subheading was less sensationalistic and more descriptive: “Rumors Spread Across Atlantic of Baring Bros. Collapse.” The second subhead then added helpfully: “Banking House Among World’s Oldest May Fall on Argentine Bond Loss—What Does This Mean for U.S.?”

“It is the damned Argentines,” said Westinghouse. “Everyone thought it was a solid bet at the time.”

Paul took The Journal from the desk and quickly scanned the left-hand column. From what he could gather, the reporting was nothing more than hearsay. Unidentified and unsourced rumors. Certain “suggestions” had “grown louder” in recent days. And these suggestions were that the Baring Brothers bank in London might soon crash. Since this was an institution that had withstood 120 years of financial turmoil, if Baring Brothers had a problem, it was likely not alone. “If the Bank of England itself were to be questioned,” the article said, “it could not carry a more severe shock.” There was more technical information about the nature of the Argentine deal—a South American recession, a bubble in Brazil, a ripple on one continent that would become a tidal wave when it reached another.