Noon at Chambers Street
The electrocution a city stopped to watch was a lineman on a telegraph wire. The picture that lasted was a chair built for a punishment.
This counter is 30,000 deaths a year: contact with live current, faulty wiring, downed lines. It is the smallest card in the column, and it is the one without a WHO fact sheet of the kind the road, the falls, the drowning and the burns can lean on. Treat 30,000 as a rough order of magnitude, not as a counted total. Lightning is not in it. Lightning is a different cause, and a smaller one, and it sits in the rare column.
The pole
Just after noon on 11 October 1889, John E. H. Feeks, a Western Union lineman, was working the wires at Centre and Chambers Streets in Manhattan, New York City, in the United States. He was cutting out telegraph lines that were not supposed to be able to kill him. An electric-light wire had crossed one of them. He was killed on the pole. His body stayed in the wires, in sight of a lunchtime crowd, until the current was shut off and he could be brought down. His funeral was reported in the New York Times four days later, which is enough to fix the name and the week. The papers that week were already discussing other electrical deaths that year. He was the one the crowd saw. He was not the first.
The chair
The following August, the state of New York, in the United States, used electricity to kill a prisoner, William Kemmler, in a chair built for the purpose. That is the picture that lasted. It was a punishment. It is not this card.
What the card is, where it can be described honestly, is contact with a live conductor: a line on the ground after a storm, a cable in a wall, a job done while the power was still on. Feeks thought the wire in his hand was a telegraph wire. A lot of the counter is that same mistake, at a voltage the person did not believe was there. A substance taken by mistake, rather than a current, is the poison card.
This is not safety advice. It is a story about a population statistic. It says nothing about any one person's risk from a wire.
Sources
- The New York Times, 15 October 1889, reporting the funeral of John E. H. Feeks.
- The annual figure used on the counter is the Ledger's own rounding, set out on the methodology page. No WHO fact sheet currently publishes a global electrocution total to set beside the 30,000.