Experiments
As Brown was beginning his career as a salesman, Edison and his direct current system was competing with the Westinghouse electrical company, which used alternating current. Since Brown's work at the Brush Electric Company depended on DC, he became a leading critic of AC. In a June 1888 letter to the editor of the New York Post, Brown made his views loud and clear:.
The only excuse for the use of the fatal alternating current is that it saves the company operating it from spending a larger sum of money for the heavier copper wires which are required by the safe incandescent systems. That is, the public must submit to constant danger from sudden death, in order that a corporation may pay a little larger dividend.
A few years prior to Brown's article, New York State in 1886 established a committee to determine a new, more humane system of execution to replace hanging. Neither Edison nor Westinghouse wanted their electrical system to be chosen because they feared that consumers would not want the same type of electricity used to kill criminals in their homes. With Brown increasingly spearheading the claims about the dangers of AC, he also thought the claims could be used as cudgel against accepting the economic advantages of using AC for common consumption.
In order to prove that AC electricity was better for executions, Brown and Edison killed many animals, including a circus elephant (Topsy), while testing their prototypes. They also held executions of animals for the press in order to ensure that AC current was associated with electrocution. It was at these events that the term electrocution was coined. Most of their experiments were conducted at Edison's West Orange, New Jersey laboratory in 1888.
Though the campaign to discredit the alternating current system failed, the AC electric chair was adopted by the committee in 1889.
Read more about this topic: Harold P. Brown
Famous quotes containing the word experiments:
“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together, and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science their labour bore fruit.”
—George Mikes (b. 1912)