The Electrocution of William Kemmler

After committing a brutal murder, William Kemmler was the first man to be put to death in the electric chair, at a time when a great deal of conflict and controversy swirled around the death penalty. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. If you
listen to the two parter that previous host Sarah and
Deblina did about the war of currents that played out

(00:23):
with Nicola, Tesla, Thomas Edison, and George Westinghouse at the
center of it, you may recall that it was a
very competitive rush to establish the current type that would
be adopted by cities to provide power. Thomas Edison was
pitching his DC direct current, while Tesla and Westinghouse were
championing Tesla's alternating a C current. One of the things

(00:45):
that comes up in the second part of that two
parter is the execution of William Kembler, But the execution
and what it meant to Edison and Westinghouse as well
as society, is only mentioned briefly because, to be fair,
it is completely outside the scope of that episode, and
it's one of those things that everybody talks about Tesla
and Westinghouse and Edison a lot, but two of the

(01:06):
other primary players in that story really don't get all
that much discussion. And that's Kembler and the man who
invented the electric chair. Uh So, I thought that we
would revisit that and focus on the invention, it's adoption
as a means of execution, and some of the legal
things that were happening around it, and the life of
William Kemler, who was the first man to be put

(01:26):
to death in the electric chair. And we're also going
to touch a little bit on public opinion of the
death penalty in New York in the late eighteen hundreds.
Heads up that this episode is a little more gruesome
than most we've done lately. It includes discussion of domestic violence,
animal cruelty, and of course execution. There's a pretty horrifying

(01:49):
murder in this one and that episode, the rivalry of
Edison and Tesla has talked about in detail, and they
mentioned that one of the ways that Edison was sewing
down about alternating current was by mounting a lecture tour
around the country where animals would be electrocuted using alternating
current really show how dangerous it was. One of the

(02:11):
things that's brought up as an example of this sometimes
is Topsy, the elephant who was electrocuted, but that was
significantly after the war. The currents was really over wasn't
really done as an example of how dangerous the current was,
but it is a central plot element on an episode
of Bob's Burgers. It is I will just say right
now my personal piece. I really don't understand why Kevin

(02:33):
Klein hasn't gotten eighty two thousand awards for that show.
And if you want to hear a hilarious musical version
of how this went down, you should absolutely watch it.
Keep in mind that all of this was playing out
when the average person was not really accustomed to the
idea of electricity in their everyday lives, particularly in cities.
Some people had certainly seen it in use, but really

(02:54):
as you got outside of metro areas, there was a
sort of nebulous sense that electricity was very powerful and
also somewhat scary. It was still associated for a lot
of people with things like lightning, which was of course
known to be destructive, and that's why it was so
important to improve the relative safety of having current run
through cities, and why Edison was able to play so

(03:15):
expertly on the fears of Layman in smearing Westinghouse in
Tesla and They're alternating current and the years leading up
to the specific events that we're talking about today, there
was a lot of discussion about the death penalty, which
at the time was being carried out by hanging in
New York and pretty much the rest of the United
States as well. Many critics thought that this was inhumane,

(03:38):
and there were hopes that the technological advances of the
day might eventually offer some kind of better alternative. Additionally,
there was a growing movement to abolish the death penalty
altogether in the United States. Enter Alfred Southwick. Southwick was
born in Ohio on May eighth. He attended high school

(03:59):
but was the last of his formal schooling. After moving
to Buffalo in the late eighteen forties, he worked as
a steamboat captain and then became chief engineer of the
Western Transit Company, which ran a large scale steamship operation
on Lake Erie. But in the late eighteen fifties, Southwick's
career trajectory changed completely. He became a dentist's apprentice. He

(04:20):
went on to start his own practice in eighteen sixty two,
which was well respected but not hugely lucrative. To move
up in the dental field, he started to specialize in
oral surgery, eventually becoming an expert in cleft palate reconstructions
and innovating in the field through his introduction of artificial
implants and a new surgical approach to that. Yeah, it's

(04:42):
one of those things where it was not uncommon for
people to learn dentistry through an apprenticeship rather than what
would need to happen today, which should be a whole
lot of dental school. So while that to modern ears
maybe like, wait, how did he become a dentist completely normal?
At the time, Southwick was also completely fascinated by electricity.
He got a few scientifically minded friends together in the

(05:03):
early eighteen eighties so that they could begin their own
experiments with it using a small generator. In short, they
wanted to test currents on stray dogs that they captured,
with mixed and often brutal results. Once they had their
system refined to the point that it consistently worked, though
this was framed as performing a public service, they were

(05:23):
ridding the city of its stray dogs in a humane way,
and of course Southwick got to thinking about how inhumane
being put to death by hanging was, and he wondered
if electricity might offer a better option. This idea did
not go over that well at first, but as he
wrote articles about its viability that appeared in various scientific
journals over the years, other scientists started to become curious

(05:45):
about it. Southwick started sketching out exactly how an electrocution
apparatus might work, and he eventually settled on the idea
of a chair. Yeah, he had had tried out sketches
where the person was standing on a conductive play and
some other options, but one of the books I read
about this kind of hinted that because he was a dentist,

(06:05):
the chair, of course, would seem like the most natural
way to manage something like this, since he did all
his dental work with a patient in a chair. On
January six five, David B. Hill, the new Governor of
New York, made the following statement in a speech quote,
the present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come
down to us from the dark ages, and it may

(06:26):
well be questioned whether the science of the present day
cannot provide a means for taking the life of such
as are condemned to die in a less barbarous manner.
I commend this suggestion to the consideration of the legislature,
and this was in line with a lot of the
thinking at the time that there had to be a
better way to handle death sentences and that science was

(06:46):
the answer. In eighteen eighties six, the stories of botched
hangings were becoming more and more common in the press.
Governor Hill set up a commission quote to investigate and
report upon the most humane and practical method known to
medical science of carrying into effect the sentence of death
in capital cases. On that commission were Southwick, alberde t Garry,

(07:07):
the one who investigated Mummler, not his grandfather who invented gerrymandering,
and the legal scholar Matthew Hale. There were no actual scientists. Yeah,
you could get into semantics about whether or not you
could consider Southwick a scientist, but there was nobody that
had really, like spent their entire life studying science. A

(07:28):
lot of the reports that they were putting together kind
of laid out an assortment of other potential options, including
like clubbing people to death and stabbings and very strange
ways that people might die, and whether that could be
somehow codified into being an official means of death in
the death sentence. It's a lot to take in. But
as part of the Commission's investigation into the matter, Southwick,

(07:51):
who of course already was into this idea of electricity
for it, sent Thomas Alva Edison a letter. That letter
was dated November eight, eight seven, and it asked Edison
for his thoughts as an expert on the best way
to execute a human using electricity, and Edison wanted no
part of it. He was against capital punishment and he
certainly did not want his knowledge about electricity used to

(08:14):
end a human life. But Southolk wasn't dissuaded. He continued
his correspondence with Edison, requesting again in December any insights
that the famous inventor had about how one might put
a man to death using electric current. Southolk made the
case that he was trying to find something more humane
than hanging, and that Edison's expertise could help get that

(08:36):
needed legislation passed. So a month after Southwick had initially
reached out to Edison, he finally got the information that
he desired from the inventor, who wrote, quote, the most
suitable apparatus for this purpose is that class of dynamo
electric machinery which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of
these are known as alternating machines, manufactured principally in this

(09:00):
country by George Westinghouse. The change of heart was born
of a desire to end this rivalry with one swift blue.
If Westinghouses Company and it's alternating current became associated with
execution covered by the press across the country, Edison's direct
current would take the day and become the standard. Yeah,

(09:20):
we're not digging deep into that rivalry beyond this, since
that was covered in that two parter by Sarah Dablina.
But this is just like to explain why suddenly Thomas
Alva Edison was like, oh, yes, you could do this,
absolutely use Westinghouses current. We're going to talk about the
commission's report that came to Fruition after this reply from
Edison in just a moment, but first we will pause

(09:41):
for a sponsor break. So this commission, which is sometimes
called the death Commission in literature of the day, discussed
their findings after researching all of these different alternatives to hanging,
including electricity, and taking into account Edison's comments on it.

(10:04):
Southwick and Hale favored current. Gary thought that poisoning was
actually the way to go, but conceded that getting a
doctor to administer poison was obviously problematic because it went
against their oaths to take care of people. On January,
the commissions submitted their final report to the New York
State Legislature. Southwicks electric chair was the recommended replacement for

(10:26):
hanging the Builds Update. The law was introduced that very
week by Senator Henry Koggleshall. From the moment it became
part of the public record, there were endless opinion articles
and editorials about capital punishment, whether electricity was a humane
way to carry it out, and how a new law
like this could be implemented in terms of infrastructure and

(10:47):
responsibility for its use and maintenance. Yeah, whether that suddenly
fell to the prison to manage or to the government
to manage became a big issue of debate as well,
even though their worst amountlines for how that could happen
in this recommendation report. But in a lot of ways
this offered a strange sort of compromise to people who
thought that hanging was outdated. A lot of the debate

(11:10):
around capital punishment at this time was carefully worded so
that most people who were kind of middle of the
road on the issue could say that they were not
against the death penalty necessarily, but they just didn't think
that the system of hanging was really working, and so
for a lot of them, electrical current offered a solution
to their moral dilemma. This debate went on and on

(11:30):
in the press and in the court of public opinion,
but the end result after all the legislation was done,
was that the Electric Chair Bill was signed into law
on June to take effect on January one, eighteen eighty nine.
Chapter four eighty nine of the Laws of eighteen eighty
eight of New York made the change to the law
regarding how death sentences should be carried out, switching them

(11:52):
over to electrical current as the means of death. This
amended section five oh five of the Code of Criminal
Procedure of New York to include the allowing passage quote.
The punishment of death must in every case be inflicted
by causing to pass through the body of the convict
a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death,
and the application of such current must be continued until

(12:14):
such convict is dead. So that brings us to William Kemmler,
and Kemler's early life is not especially well documented. We
know that he was the son of German immigrants, born
in Philadelphia on May ninth, eighteen sixty and his parents
had a total of eleven children, but William and four
of his siblings three sisters and a brother, were the
only ones to live to adulthood. Kemmler spoke English and German,

(12:37):
but he never had any formal schooling and didn't learn
to read or write. He helped his father in the
family butcher shop, as well as taking on other side
jobs to help keep the family afloat. William's mother died
of tuberculosis when he and his siblings were young, and
his father developed gang green after being injured in a
brawl when he died when William was still very young.

(12:58):
At seventeen, Kemla started working in a brickyard and he
saved his wages over the next two years so that
he could set himself up in a trade where he
could be his own boss. And so at the age
of nineteen, he purchased a cart and a horse, and
he became a vegetable peddler, and he bought vegetables from
country farmers and then he would bring their produce to
the city fill up his cart and then he went

(13:20):
about the streets of Philadelphia selling his wares. So he
had a promising start, But Kemmler was also an alcoholic,
and that ultimately doomed him. The peddler who did well
managing his business and was good at his job, became
a totally different person when he drank, and he became
violent and unpredictable. It was allegedly during a time that

(13:40):
Kemmler was black out drunk that he got married to
one of his neighbors. Sober Kemler was not interested in
this relationship at all, and he attempted to disentangle himself
from the whole thing. He already had a young woman
that he cared for in his life. When you read
stories of this, it's often framed very much as his
neighbor being like this sneaky tricks woman who dragged him

(14:01):
to the courthouse when he was drunk and made him
do the vows. We don't really know, that's just how
it's often reported. But Kemmler's new wife wanted to stay married.
The woman that Kemler loved, Matilda Ziggler, who went by Tilly,
was also married to further complicate things, but her husband
of eight years was unfaithful and she was very unhappy.
So William and his paramore, Tilly, both skipped out in

(14:24):
their spouses. They left Philadelphia together. In before they left,
Kemdler sold everything he had for a total of twelve
hundred dollars, and he, Tilly and Tillie's daughter Emma, went
to Buffalo. Kemmler started going by the name John Hort
so that his wife couldn't track him down. He started
up the same business, selling vegetables in a new city. Initially,

(14:45):
everything seemed to be going well. William's brother saw the
two of them the following Christmas and reported that they
were happy. It's interesting that name John Hort appears on
legal documents that Kemmler filed, like as part of his
business license and whatnot, but he didn't seemed to actually
go by it in his day to day life, like
everyone knew his real name, but it was just the
way that he couldn't be traced should anyone from Philadelphia

(15:08):
come looking for him through the legal record. The room
that William and Tilly rented at five South Division Street
was small, and their bliss turned sour in those tight quarters,
particularly when William drank. According to neighbors. Tilly also had
a volatile temper, and the two of them could often
be heard arguing loudly. On the morning of March nine,

(15:30):
neighbors heard the usual yelling, and there had long been
some suspicion that these arguments would become physically violent, and
while that was the subject of neighborhood gossip, nobody had
ever tried to confirm it or to see if Tilly
might need help. After the particularly loud argument that took
place on March twenty nine, subsided William Kimbler walked into

(15:50):
the kitchen of their landlady Mary read, and he said
to her quote, I've killed her. I had to do it.
There was no help for it. I'll hang for the deed.
Either one of us had to die, and Mrs Reid
was initially unbelieving until Kemmler brought her Tillies daughter, Emma,
who was four years old at the time, and she
told Mary Reid, Papa has killed my mama. So the

(16:13):
police were immediately summoned, and while Mary Reid was at
a neighbors asking for help, Kemmler went to a saloon
nearby and ordered a drink. He was arrested soon thereafter
he didn't resist. A doctor Blackman entered the room that
William and till He shared to examine the body and
found eggs still in a skillet on the stove, potatoes

(16:33):
in the oven, and otherwise a brutal crime scene. Blackman
later described it as the worst thing he had seen
in the course of his work. Yeah. Clearly they had
been making breakfast, or till he was making breakfast when
whatever happened took place. Their table was overturned. Tillie was
lying in a pool of blood. She was covered all
over in blood. Her heart surprisingly was still beating, so

(16:56):
an ambulance was called for and her examination at the
hospital that she had been hit in the head with
a hatchet twenty six times. Her skull was fractured in
five places, and her right arm had also been chopped
at with the hatchet. She was taken into surgery, where
seventeen broken fragments of her skull were removed from her
brain tissue. Despite all efforts to save her, Tillie died

(17:20):
at one am on March and her daughter Emma was
then placed in the care of Mary Reid. Kimmler was
still intoxicated when he was taken into custody and initially
refused to speak to police. Then he confessed to the crime,
saying that he was not sorry and that quote, I
wanted to kill her and I am ready to hang
for it. There were the next several days his attitude changed.

(17:41):
He wanted the modest amount of money to his name,
which was five hundred dollars, to be used for Tilly's
funeral expenses. And we're about to get into the details
of Kemmler's trial and how this whole thing turns out.
But before we get into that next phase of rather
heavy stuff, let us pause for a little sponsor break.

(18:06):
During his time in jail and during his trial, which
began on May seven, William Kemmler shared more details of
what had happened. In the morning of March nine. Kemmler
had believed that Tilly was having an affair with his
business partner, and he had become violent when he was
drunk and confronted her about it. During the trial, District
Attorney George T. Quinby made his case pretty quickly, pointing

(18:28):
out that Kembler had repeatedly confessed. He then said, quote,
there is getting to be a frightful number of homicides
and the punishment meted out to the murderers does not
seem to check the crime. It is time that such
a salutary lesson should be taught, as we'll have a
deterring effect. So he was asking for the steepest penalty
available for Keimbler, which would have been death. The jury

(18:50):
was given all the details of the crime scene. The
surgeons who worked on Tilly were called as witnesses and
even produced the skull fragments that had been removed from
her brain as evidence. The defense focused largely on how
pretty Tilly had been, how completely believable it was that
she might have had an affair. Even the testimony of

(19:11):
Mrs Reed was a little dicey for the prosecution, as
she said that Tilly started most of the fights with
Kemmler and used quote unladylike language. The defense also made
the case that because of his drunkenness, Kemler should only
be charged with manslaughter instead of first degree murder. They
didn't wish for acquittal because they knew he had confessed,
but they wanted an acknowledgement that someone with a drinking

(19:33):
problem as chronic as Kemmler's, which they evidenced by describing
a series of other events that had exhibited his poor
judgment couldn't premeditate anything. They called all of his drinking
cohorts to the stand to talk about their binges together,
which often started first thing in the morning and went
on all day, even as they worked. There was also
a testimony from a doctor who examined Kemmler that said

(19:56):
he was an odd man even when sober, and that
quote he had suffered from private diseases. Presumably that meant
some sort of sexually transmitted infection. This witness Dr Cruther's
mostly pronounced Kembler quote morally irresponsible. Yeah, that phrase came
up again and again in his testimony. Ultimately, after requesting

(20:17):
that some testimony be read back to them for additional deliberation,
the jury returned their verdict guilty of murder in the
first degree. When the judge said that he would issue
his sentence later that week, it started to dawn on
people who knew about the new law regarding capital punishment
and electrocution that Kembler was the first person in New

(20:38):
York found guilty of murder since that law came into effect.
And suddenly his trial, which at that point had been
reported in the papers, but kind of as like the
sensational type headlines about a grizzly murder trial took on
all new meaning and importance. If the judge handed down
the death sentence, Kemmler would be the first man purposely
killed with electricity. On May thirteenth, that death sentence was announced.

(21:03):
Westinghouse covered the cost of a very good attorney for Keimler,
and he knew that if Kemmler was electrocuted with alternating current,
as South Looks Chair had been designed to do, it
would be difficult, if not impossible, for him to recover from.
And this one all the way to the Supreme Court
thanks to that funding. On May five nine, Roger M.
Sherman filed a petition on behalf of Kemmler with the

(21:25):
Supreme Court, and that petition read, in part quote, the
petitioner is under sentence of death in the Northern District
of New York under a Statute of New York, which
imposes the punishment of death by the passing through his
body of a current of electricity sufficient, in the opinion
of the warden of the State prison, to cause his death,
which current is to be continued until it kills him.

(21:47):
The statute also leaves it to the warden to fix
the day and hour of his death, and contains other
features which he here asserts are in violation of the
fourteenth Amendment. These features abridge his privileges and immunities as
a citizen of the United States and deprive him of
his life without due process of law. After a quick
initial hearing, this petition was denied, but Associate Justice Samuel M.

(22:11):
Blatchford had also received an application for a writ of
error regarding Kemmeler's case. That's a request to have the
superior court review the case and make sure no legal
error happened that might require a correction. Blatchford put forth
that the application for appeal should be made to the
full Court, and a hearing was scheduled from May nineteenth
of eight nine. This sort of seemed like a ray

(22:32):
of hope, and that hearing didn't actually begin until May twenty.
Their docket had some other stuff that pushed it back
a day, and Kemler's legal team argued that he had
been sentenced to cruel and unusual punishment, making it unconstitutional
and outside of due process. In response, Charles F. Durston,
Warden of Auburn State Prison made his statement that nothing

(22:55):
involved in Kemmeler's case was outside of due process and unconstitutional,
and that the center was in line with the new law.
Durston and his team also submitted as evidence of due
process copies of Kemmeler's indictment, judgment, sentence, and execution warrant.
The warrant read, in part, quote, Now, therefore, you are
hereby ordered, commanded, and required to execute the said sentence

(23:17):
upon him, the said William Kemmler, otherwise called John Hort,
within the walls of Auburn State Prison, or within the
yard or enclosure adjoining there too, by then, and they
are causing to pass through the body of him, the
said William Kemmler, otherwise called John Hort, a current of
electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, And that the
application of such current of electricity we continued until he,

(23:41):
the said William Kemmler, otherwise called John Hort, be dead.
The petitioner's response was a death by electrical current quote
is a cruel and unusual punishment within the meaning of
the Constitution, and that it cannot therefore be lawfully inflicted.
And to establish the facts upon which the Court can
pass as to the character of the penalty. At the

(24:02):
conclusion of the appeal hearing, the court, headed by Chief
Justice Melville Weston Fuller, gave its opinion, which was not
what Kimmler's team wanted. In an earlier appeal, the Court
System of New York had issued an opinion with the
following as its conclusion quote. We have examined this testimony
and can find but little in it to warrant the
belief that this new mode of execution is cruel within

(24:24):
the meaning of the Constitution, though it is certainly unusual.
On the contrary, we agree with the court below that
it removes every reasonable doubt that the application of electricity
to the vital parts of the human body, under such
conditions and in the manner contemplated by the statute, must
result in instantaneous and consequently in painless death. On reviewing

(24:46):
the previous hearings involved in Kimmeler's case, the U. S.
Supreme Court did not find anything legally erroneous in the
previous verdicts. Their opinion outlines that the New York courts
did concede that the manner of death could be said
to be unusual because it was new but that there
was every reason to believe, based on the scientific evidence
and information available, that it would not be cruel, and

(25:09):
that they trusted the new law adopting this method had
been made based on that information. The Supreme Court's opinion
concluded with quote, in order to reverse the judgment of
the highest Court of the State of New York, we
should be compelled to hold that it had committed an
error so gross as to amount in law to a
denial by the state of due process of law to

(25:29):
one accused of crime or of some rights secured to
him by the Constitution of the United States. We have
no hesitation in saying that this we cannot do upon
the record before us. The application for a writ of
error is denied, and with that, Kembler's fate was sealed.
August six was scheduled to be the day that the

(25:51):
first person would be executed by electric chair. That morning,
Kembler woke up, got dressed, and was escorted by the
prison warrant to his end in the Auburn State Prison,
and it was required by law that the date and
the time of the execution be secret. Everyone found out anyway, though,
because Auburn was a pretty small town. Yeah, it was
a small town and this was huge news. The last

(26:13):
thing that Kemmler said was, gentleman, I wish everyone all
the good luck in the world. I believe I am
going to a good place. The papers have been saying
a lot of stuff that ain't, so that's all I
have to say. He was prepared with electrodes that were
attached to his head, which was then covered with a
black cloth. He was strapped down and then the execution began.

(26:35):
Current ran through his body for seventeen seconds, and at
that point two doctors who were in attendance as consultants,
who were E. C. Spitzka and Carlos McDonald, both believed
him to be dead, so the current was cut off,
but then Kemmler groaned. He had a pulse and a heartbeat.
Newspapers reported that someone yelled, great, God, he is alive.

(26:57):
A second round of current was immediately called for to
end Kemmler's suffering, but there was a problem. The apparatus
had to have power restored to it to run again,
and that cycle took another two minutes before the current
could be turned on that second round. Once they did
get it turned on, the current stayed active for a
full two minutes, and after that point Kemmler was indeed dead.

(27:18):
So this entire event was, as you might expect, reported
with revulsion and horror at how it had played out.
This was incidentally illegal, but the sensational nature of the
event meant that newspapers took the risk and went to
print with their accounts. Anyway, The New York Times ran
a story with the headline quote far worse than hanging Yeah.

(27:39):
It was illegal for them to report details of this
whole affair. They could report like the basics of like
when it happened and what he said, but not sort
of the gory details. And they all did exactly that,
just the same. Naturally, both Edison and Westinghouse were asked
for their thoughts on the matter by members of the press.

(28:00):
Edison commented that this first time had been bungled, likely
because of the excitement of the situation, but that he
believed that subsequent efforts would lead to instant deaths. He
also suggested putting the sentenced man's hands in water and
running a current into the jars as an alternative approach
to it. Westinghouse simply replied, quote, it has been a
brutal affair, they could have done a better job with

(28:23):
an axe. An autopsy was performed on Kemmler and the
results indicated that he had lost consciousness instantly, and the
problems in the execution had come from poor contact or
a voltage that was set too low. Durston, the warden
at Auburn was raked over the coals in the press
as a consequence, and while this very first, poorly handled

(28:44):
use of the electric chair led a lot of people
to believe that this was never going to be used again,
in July of the following year, New York put foreman
to death by electrocution on the same day, July seventh. Today,
electrocution is still authorized as a means of carrying out
capital punishment in nine states in the US, although all
of those states have lethal injection as their primary method.

(29:07):
William Kembler, it's a weird story with lots of gore.
We did not go into the gory details. If you
are wildly curious, I want to read them. A lot
of those newspaper reports are pretty readily available online. Yeah,
I have way more upbeat listener mail. Okay, good, This
is from our listener, Timothy uh. He writes, Dear Tracy

(29:28):
and Holly. I caught up with your January SI podcast,
Jones Struther's Current and Radar Countermeasures several days before a
visit to the Smithsonian's Udvar Hazy Air and Space Museum
near Washington, DC's Dullss Airport. Among the exhibits, which include
the Discover Space Shuttle fighter jet, a Blackbird spy plane,
and a Concord supersonic passenger jet, I found a display

(29:49):
of World War Two radar chaff. Attached our photos along
with the display signage. Your podcast put the significance of
this small display into context and highlighted it's important. Thanks
to keep up the great work. Thank you so much. Tim.
That's so sweet. I'm glad that um that that's kind
of added a little extra layer of of knowledge and

(30:10):
enjoyment and engagement for that for you. I actually have
not seen that exhibit. I did not know it was there,
So now I have another thing on my museum list.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can find us everywhere on social media as Missed
in History, and you can subscribe to the podcast on
the I heart Radio app. At Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(30:31):
it is that you listen. Stuff you missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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