Uncertain to Declare High Voltage as More Dangerous than Low

Whatever the law, humanity would be served by permitting Dr. Gibbons of Syracuse to attempt the resuscitation of Murderer Wilson, soon to be electrocuted. An electrocution permits the best possible test of the question whether electricity kills or merely suspends animation. If Dr. Gibbons should be successful he would open the way for saving many lives. Daily workers with electricity are shocked to apparent death. Dr. Gibbons’ experiment on Wilson would show whether prompt efforts at restoration would save them. A French physician, Dr. D’Arsonval has long maintained that the shocks do not kill. The Philadelphia Record shows how has suggestions have saved at least one life. Superintendent James E. Cullen, of a Pittsfield, (Mass.) manufactory, in October last grasped by mistake the two terminals of a current with the high pressure of 4,000 volts. This force completely paralyzed him; and if his companions in the room had not hastened to apply the D’Arsonval method of artificial respiration he might now be lying in his grave instead of rehearsing the story of ‘how it feels to be killed by electricity.’ One instinctively wonders what fate might otherwise have been that of the surcharged victim, and whether he would have been practically buried alive. The voltage which Mr. Cullen sustained was far more powerful than that which flows through the wires of death to the chair of electrocution. Nikola Tesla has rendered it most uncertain to declare high voltage as more dangerous than low. The young Hungarian has suffered incredible electric force to enter his body, until his system has been actually electrified and has become to a certain extent phosphorescent. The alternating current of high degree has been pronounced harmless. The lesser voltage of the electrocution current might, twice repeated and lingering, produce disintegration of tissue and destruction of vitality while a higher alternating current would not. The mystery of electricity has not as yet been solved; but there is certainly cause for hope that the day is not far distant when the accidental electric shocks of daily happening will not be regarded as fatal in nature, and electricity will be robbed of one of its most dreaded features.