Electric Chair Inventor in Horror of his Own Creation

The Man Who Helped Contrive the Instrument of Death With Which the Lives of Criminals Are Snuffed Out by the State Would Abolish It Altogether for Some Other Method of Capital Punishment

The death-dealing electric chair which many States employ to bring to a close the lives of those whom the law says must die, and which has a horror for not only the hardened, murderous criminals but also for those who have no fear of its shocking characteristics, also has a horror for the man who helped invent and perfect it.

Harry L. Tyler, formerly of Corning, N. Y., now a Brooklyn business man, whose ingenious brain and cleverness overcame burning of the victims, the stumbling block of electrocution, abhors electricity for inflicting capital punishment. “And this,” he says, “regardless of what I may have written some years ago in the dynamic assurance of ignorant youth.” He advocates a chemical to replace electricity.

His companion in the coinvention of the chair was the first State electrician — Edwin F. Davis, of Corning, who died several years ago and who for more than twenty years threw the switch that sent to eternity many of the State’s worst and most dangerous criminals.

Tyler’s life reads like genius and romance.

On July 16, 1885, there scrambled off a train at the local Erie station a freckle-faced youngster whose mother had brought him and his elder brother fresh from the farm to make the family home in Corning. The kid had a grin that extended back of his ears, a decided flair for music and an incessant, irrepressible spirit of deviltry, fun or humor (it all depends upon the point of view) that blew up from spontaneous combustion at every attempt to confine it. That was Harry L. Tyler.

Tyler had graduated from the task of picking potato bugs back on the farm at Tyler Hill, Wayne County, Pa. His first permanent job in Corning was as “devil” at the former Corning Journal office, and he was, in every sense of the word, widely divergent as were Tyler’s activities, when he concentrated he concentrated, and with intensity. He eventually left the publishing field for several years to devote his attention to electrical research and invention.

It was at this point in Tyler’s life that he sprang into prominence in connection with the perfection of the electric chair, about 1900. At that time General George J. Magee, of Watkins, and General Austin Lathrop, of Corning and New York, the latter State Superintendent of Prisons, were interested in electrical transportation in New York and other cities and were attracted by Tyler’s experiments at operating a trollyless car by means of harmless induction in the rails. The experimental equipment was made in the machine shop of the then Fall Brook Railroad in Corning, a mile of track in the local yards being electrified from a special power generator in the shop.

Tyler tells his story: “General Magee and General Lathrop, with everybody else in Corning supplying either meals or money, or both, had financed my ‘laboratory,’ where I was, in the serene indifference of youth, bent on jostling Edison, Westinghouse, Thompson, Tesla and the others aside on a pension and running the whole electrical industry as it should be run from my point of view, if I really had one.

“General Lathrop, then a member of the Governor’s staff, was Superintendent of Prisons in New York State when electrocution was legally established, and Edwin F. Davis, who had been working in telephone service, was placed in charge of the State’s electrocution program. Under his direction an alternating electric plant was erected in each of the three prisons — Sing Sing, Auburn and Dannemora.”

Mr. Tyler then disclosed that the electric industry was bitterly opposed to the employment of electricity for killing criminals, “it being feared that such use would prejudice the public against electricity as a safe household and commercial utility.”

“But how was that overcome?” Mr. Tyler was asked.

“Manufacturers of alternating-current generators,” he replied, “would not sell their machines to be used as instruments of death, so Mr. Davis found it necessary to have his equipment bought from the United States manufacturers by South American purchasers, to whom it was shipped, and then was promptly reshipped back to Mr. Davis in the United States.”

Newspaper censure and public condemnation of the electrocutions, because the crude electrodes first used left ghastly burns on the body of the victims, continued bitter, and General Lathrop, who was a friend of Tyler, was embarrassed by the criticism. Here is where Tyler entered the picture. In his own words: “And so I was ushered into the electrocution chambers to help Mr. Davis put a stop to that burning.”

“But how?” he was asked.

“It was easy,” replied Tyler.

“Mr. Davis was going through various kinds of experiments in electrocuting various kinds of animals and had built up elaborate theories on ‘killing with voltage.’ Nikola Tesla, of New York, and others had demonstrated conclusively that voltage in itself need not be deadly — might really be without unpleasant sensation, Tesla’s own body having repeatedly withstood 40,000 volts for long periods.

“Tesla had shortly before upset the electrical industry with his revolutionary polyphase power system, doing away with commutators and brushes. Westinghouse had bought his patents. The Niagara Falls powerhouse was built on the Tesla inventions, and the power supplied to Corning from Niagara Falls today is the outcome of Tesla’s genius.

“Tesla was one of the scientific world’s most spectacular figures. Following as best I could some of his easier experiments, I was convinced that Tesla was right, that voltage was by no means the one and only factor in causing death by electrocution.

“Mr. Davis was never so convinced, however, and we were always bitterly at odds over the subject.

“Up to the time the burning at electrocution was stopped, while a voltmeter was at the death chamber switchboard, there were no means whatever for measuring the real burning factor — namely, the amperage. And the electrodes, while the best known in principle and general construction, were too small to serve under the other conditions prevailing. The established voltage was 1840 volts, though it could just as well have been 2000 or 100 or an even 180 volts. It is really the amperage — not the voltage — that kills.”

“But why was alternating current preferred to direct current for electrocution?” Mr. Tyler was asked.

“Because alternating current was known to contract the muscles instantly and to a greater degree, assuming the same amount of power to be used, and to hold them rigid as long as the power was applied. The muscles between the electrodes being so stiffened, it seemed that the heart would be absolutely stopped throughout the shock.

“Wires were led into the death chamber where stood then, as now, the strong, high-backed chair for the subject to sit in while shocked. Popular fancy has always called this chair the ‘electric chair,’ but it is not electric in any sense of the word. It is made of nonconducting material, substantial wood, firmly fastened to the floor. Out of the floor extends the wire to be connected to the subject’s leg electrode; from the ceiling hangs the wire to be fastened to the head electrode.”

“But what is an electrode?” came the next question.

Apparently stocked with the scientific and detailed information, so much “Greek” to the average uninformed electrician, Mr. Tyler continued:

“To include a body in an electric circuit, the circuit ends or wires must be attached to the body. The connection must be made in such a way as to make a low-resisting contact, for two reasons — to facilitate flow of the current and to prevent burning at the contact surfaces. That is why the medical profession many years ago evolved the familiar flexible wire screen and lined with sponges to hold salt water.

“The wire screen presents a large contact surface to the salt water, the salt water being a low-resistance conductor, the water also presenting a large contact surface to the body. Such an electrode can be strapped to the body firmly enough to stay in place.

“It was natural, when electrocution came up, for Mr. Davis to employ a modification of the electrodes that were familiar features of the common medical ‘batteries,’ which he did by constructing one electrode as a flexible wire screen cap for the subject’s head and another electrode of the same kind in the form of a band for his leg, lining them with sponges to hold salt water.

“A necessary requirement of these electrodes was that they should present large enough contact surfaces to the salt water, hold enough cross-sectional area of water and present large enough contact surface of water to the subject’s body to keep the heat development low. In the absence of sufficient contact surface, the heat at that point will, from the first instant of shock, convert the water into steam and blow it out, create an arc, burn the flesh away and thereby seriously decrease the amperage (degree of electrification) or even open the circuit completely.

“With any degree of voltage and the same identical electrodes, saturated with the same salt water, no persons get the same amperage in electrocution. That is impossible, because the different cross-sectional area of body and the different skin conductivity automatically establish a different amperage, even while all other conditions remain unchanged. In other words, A, weighing 200 pounds, might, at 1800 volts, draw nine amperes; while B, weighing 150 pounds, might, at the same 1800 volts, draw only four and a half amperes. Thus at the same voltage the energy employed to kill B would, therefore, automatically be reduced to only half the energy expended in A.”

Continuing with the heat problem, as it affected electrocution, Mr. Tyler said:

“Now in any ordinary thing like a simple length of wire, or a coil, all the energy consumed is converted into heat. That is why an electric iron or an electric heater of any design gets so hot on really so little power. It is 100 per cent efficient — the only thing that I know of that is. The present cost of electric heating is not because the heater is wasteful. It does not waste a jot of the power it takes, but because the generating of electricity is still so wasteful, though it is the best the world knows how to do as yet.”

Getting back to electrocution, he continued:

“The same law of internal heat generation applies to the animal body under electrocution, which means that at 1800 volts and nine amperes (16,200 watts) more than twenty horsepower of heat is generated in A’s body during electrocution, while B’s body has — even with its reduction as outlined — something more than ten horsepower of heat.

“Hence, in the early days of electrocution arose the disconcerting experience that some electrocutions were speedily over with, while others, for no reason visible to the witnesses, were appalling.”

“Is electrocution by the State entirely free from sensation?” continued the inquisition.

“I believe so,” said Mr. Tyler. “The terrific electric intensity is instant in its stopping of the heartbeat, and therefore the blood circulation, which I know from personal experience to mean instant loss of feeling and consciousness. By the time the power is turned off, even if after a quarter or half a minute, it is difficult to see how any human body could survive the inevitable chemical and heat disruptions sufficiently to ever again approach even the slightest semblance to the blood function, the thought or the feeling of life.”

Here Mr. Tyler explained the change from hanging to electrocution which was brought about by the general revulsion against the tortures and ghastliness of many hangings, and what he calls the “spectacular novelty of electrical death.” Incidentally, from the outgrowth of accidental electrical deaths, it was popularly assumed that electrocution would be always instant and painless; but, as events subsequently proved, electrocution is not of necessity instant in its deadliness.

When asked as to the continuation or abolishment of capital punishment, Mr. Tyler said he was not competent to judge.

“I am, however,” he said, “opposed to electrocution as the means of inflicting capital punishment. And this regardless of what I may have written some years ago in the dynamic assurance of ignorant youth. Hanging, fortunately, is gone forever from New York State. But —

“Electrocution has not one solitary point in its favor. It should be abolished at once!

“The final last day’s ‘scrub-up’ of the subject to be electrocuted; his last meal, with the facetious comment on how he takes advantage of permission to ‘order what he wants’; the wise and merciful hypodermic of morphine to insure good behavior before company that, in ignorance of the cause, is afterward sure to marvel at his stony-hearted indifference to his fate; the filing of the witnesses into the death chamber, not there to do duty as citizens upholding the law but out of morbid curiosity to ‘see how he takes it’; the three-rap signal on the door and the fourfold personally conducted tour of the chair; the twenty-five-second eternity that passes while the departing guest is strapped into the chair and the electrodes are clipped and fastened on; the ‘jump’ and strap-straining of the subject’s body as the switch is thrown in, and his fall or else as the power is lowered or raised at the rheostat (this is caused by the contraction of the subject’s muscles by the alternating current, and bears no relation to the sensibility of life, because a dead man reacts the same to the alternating current before rigor mortis sets in); the steaming from the mouth as the moisture content is vaporized and the neck expands sometimes as much as two inches; and so on till the physician’s pronouncement of the end.

“What is achieved by all this 1927 rotisserie show?

“It means that society has put a positively permanent stop to one man’s murders. As to the propriety of that achievement, I have nothing to say.

“But I do say that if the death penalty is to be inflicted it can be and should be done by chemical means with the utmost simplicity; without physical pain; without the cumbersome ritual; without a dollar’s cost.

“The expense, one way or another, however, in a matter of such gravity, is, of course, not to be considered. Simplicity, though, is to be considered in the interest of safety from pain and swift certainty of result.”