the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 18
demonizing AC at a festive little gathering for seventy-five invited guests.
They met in a private lab at the Columbia College School of Mines in
Manhattan, and Brown, without forewarning the audience of electricity
experts and others, dragged a seventy-six-pound, part Newfoundland
dog onto the stage, muzzled and tied the creature, and placed it in a
wooden cage with heavy copper wire woven through the bars. “Sensing
their discomfort, Brown assured the audience that although the dog appeared
friendly, he was actually a ‘desperate cur’ who had already bitten
two people,” wrote author Richard Moran in Executioner’s Current:
Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric
Chair.
The crowd wasn’t much comforted as Brown administered an increasingly
powerful series of direct-current shocks to the frantic dog,
which at one point tore off his muzzle and nearly escaped from the cage.
Brown’s point was that while the DC shocks had hurt the dog, they hadn’t
killed him. One witness reported that “many spectators left the room,
unable to endure the revolting exhibition.” An animal lover in the audience
suggested that the dog immediately be put out of its misery, and that
was all the invitation Brown needed. He tied the dog down again, switched
to alternating current, and, after assuring the group that the dog would
experience far less pain with AC, promptly zapped it to death. The demonstration
horrified the gathered crowd, with a newspaper reporter asking
Brown to stop the “inhuman performance,” and a representative from
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals demanding that
Brown use something other than animal torture to promote DC electricity
over AC.
Brown, and presumably his patron, Thomas Edison, didn’t take
the hint. Four days later, Brown conducted a more elaborate demonstration
for a crowd of about eight hundred people. This time he decided not
to prolong the torture of the dogs. Using only AC electricity at what he felt
were lethal voltages, he quickly dispatched two smallish dogs. But the
third, a friendly Irish setter–Newfoundland mix, struggled for more than