Thomas Edison at Auburn Prison


New York's Auburn Prison, from an early 20th-century photograph.

The home of the influential "silent system" of prison discipline, Auburn Prison was also the first institution in the world to put convicts to death in the electric chair.

Recent histories have shown how the electric chair was invented and promoted by the great wizard of electricity, Thomas Edison. In the 1880s and 1890s, Edison's business interests were threatened by the competition of George Westinghouse’s alternating current machines. Edison hoped that the use of Westinghouse dynamos in the death chamber would scare business toward his own safer, direct current machines. Previously an outspoken critic of capital punishment, he became the most famous early champion of the electric chair. (See Mark Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair.)

As part of the publicity campaign, Edison and his collaborators staged the public electrocutions of rats, dogs, horses, and, in one spectacular case, of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant. In 1901, Edison’s crew sought permission to record the execution of Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who had assassinated U.S. President William McKinley. The authorities at Auburn refused to let them inside, so the filmmakers shot a panorama of the prison exterior, then staged their own version of the death scene. Blindfolded strapped into a wooden chair, Edison's actor pitched and heaved, slowly, for a few seconds, then collapsed. The result was one of the world's first pieces of dramatic cinema.

Posted by Imagined Prisons
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