After much experimentation killing a series of dogs, Brown held a public demonstration on July 30 in a lecture room at Columbia CollegeHoward B. Rockman, Intellectual Property Law for Engineers and Scientists, John Wiley - 2004, page 469 where he demonstrated that up to 1,000 volts of DC would not kill a dog while 300 volts of AC would kill. He went on to support legislation to control and severely limit AC installations and voltages (to the point of making it an ineffective power delivery system). The legislation was unsuccessful but another bill to move AC lines underground in New York City, put forward before Brown's campaign, passed in 1889 after a further series of highly publicized deaths that year caused by alternating current.
