November 11, 2019 • 43 mins
At the end of the 19th century, it seemed like there was nothing electricity couldn't do. So could it be used as a way to humanely carry out the death penalty? We learn about the invention of the electric chair and the dentist who dreamed it up.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
our Heart Radio and I love all things tech. Once again,
I have to to couch my loving of all things
(00:26):
tech because today's topic is a dark one that I
do not love. It's the electric chair, the method of
execution that has a history dating back more than a century.
This is a particularly grim and grizzly topic and there
will be some discussion of pretty gruesome stuff in this episode,
(00:47):
So if you are sensitive to such things, I gently
suggest you stop listening now. I think this is an
important topic, but I also love you guys, and I
never want you to regret listening to one of my episodes.
And I completely understand it if this really turns you
off and you think I can't listen to it. But
(01:08):
if you're fascinated by it and you want to learn
more about the history of the electric chair and how
it came to be, which has more to do with
politics and social morays than it does with technology, keep listening.
And before I dive into the history and talk about
the development of the electric chair and what goes on
(01:29):
with it. I wanted to address my own bias on
this matter because I'm very much against the death penalty.
I do not believe executions are effective as a deterrent
in a best case scenario. In my view, each execution
removes just one person from the possibility of ever doing
(01:49):
direct harm to someone else. That's the best case scenario,
and there are a lot of bad scenarios. Executions in
an electric chair or otherwise. They're expensive procedures, largely because
of the legal processes that typically exist to make sure
the execution is in fact approved and is the appropriate measure.
(02:14):
And most importantly for me, there remains the possibility that
the state could put someone to death who is innocent
of any crimes it has happened before. Our desire for
justice sometimes feeds bad decisions in which we need to
have someone to pend the blame on, even if that
someone isn't absolutely certain to be the one at fault.
(02:37):
And that means even if you view capital punishment as
being a just punishment, you could still end up with
a case of state sponsored murder of an innocent person.
And because of those reasons, I'm anti death penalty. However,
I will do my best to cover this topic without
too much personal commentary for them that bias. I just
(03:01):
wanted to put it on the table right up front
and be transparent about it. All right, let's get started.
Although the word electrocution came into use specifically for the
description of being put to death via the electric chair,
since that time, we've used it to describe any death
due to being exposed to an electric shock, and there
(03:24):
were plenty of cases of injury and death from electricity
before anyone thought of the electric chair. For one thing,
lightning has been around longer than people have, so it
stands to reason that there have been deaths in the
past due to lightning strikes, either directly or indirectly, but
we're not going to focus on those. That really isn't
(03:45):
the realm of tech stuff. Now. While there was a
lot of experimentation with electricity in the nineteenth century, it
wasn't until the late eighteen seventies that we get what
might be the earliest electrocution due to an accidental exposure
to electricity. Now, this is likely in part because much
of the early work with electricity for many decades was
(04:08):
with electrostatic generators. Now, these can discharge very high voltage sparks,
but they tend to be of a low amperage, and
without it being a high voltage and uh sufficient average,
you're not going to cause death or serious injury to somebody. Now,
if you listen to my previous episode about the basics
(04:31):
of electricity, you will remember that while both voltage and
amperage are important, most folks will say it's the amps
that will get you. But I have a bit more
to say about this. In a second, voltage is similar
to water pressure, right, It's how hard the electricity is
being pushed through a circuit, whereas amperage or current is
similar to the amount of water flowing past a specific
(04:54):
point within a given amount of time. It's the amount
of charge going through. It doesn't take much current to
pose a danger to humans. You can feel a shock
of current of just ten milli amps, So a milla
amp is one of an amp. So if you were
to grab a wire with a current between ten and
(05:17):
twenty mill amps running through it, of alternating current in particular,
you'd find yourself unable to let go as your muscles
seized up around that wire. The current would need to
be broken for you to regain control. If you encountered
between one hundred and two hundred milli amps, you're in
the fatal zone. At that amperage, the electric current causes
(05:39):
the heart to go into ventricular fibrillation, meaning the heart
begins to spasm irregularly. You get a rapid, irregular heartbeat.
Above two hundred million amps, you actually have a better
chance of survival, though you could suffer some pretty nasty injuries,
including burns and possibly image to internal organs. Why would
(06:02):
you survive at a higher current then? Why is one
to two hundred the deadly zone. Well above two hundred milliamps,
your heart tends to seize up, just as your hand
would have seized up around a wire with twenty amps
running through it. Miller apps, I should say apps would
be way too much, But Miller amps your hand would
(06:23):
just seize up around it. Your heart would do the
same and around above two hundred milli amps. Uh. This
means that you would not go into ventricular fibrillation. Your
heart would just stop. So if someone were to cut
off the current that was running through you and then
a minister resuscitation, you could recover, assuming you hadn't experienced
significant damage to other organs like your small intestine or
(06:47):
more uncommon, but it is possible something like your liver.
So does that mean voltage is not important at all? Well, no,
that's not true either. You also remember from that previous
episode that I talked about the concepts conductivity and resistance.
This describes the ease or the difficulty if you if
(07:08):
you prefer at which current can pass through a given substance.
So something that has got a high conductivity facilitates the
movement of electricity through that substance, something with high resistance doesn't. So,
assuming your skin is dry, your body's electrical resistance is
relatively high, which means there needs to be a sufficient
(07:31):
amount of voltage. You need to have a sufficient amount
of pressure to get the current to run through the
human body. Higher voltages have that pressure. So it's really
the combination of the proper voltage and current that leads
to a case of electrocution. Okay, so back to historical accounts.
One of the earliest types of electrical lights used ever
(07:54):
in the history of humans was the arc lamp. Now,
these preceded the incandescent bulbs that were made famous by,
but not invented by Thomas Edison's labs. In fact, they
preceded it by decades. They were first developed in the
early eighteen hundreds. However, it wasn't until the eighteen seventies
(08:15):
and the evolution of direct current dynamos that these arc
lamps became a practical technology for widespread use. The arc
lamp worked on a different principle from incandescent lamps. Actually,
I should just say works, because there are still arc
lamps in use today for very specific applications. So incandescent
(08:36):
bulbs work by running a current through a very thin
wire and the thin wire heats up and it gives
off light. It literally it incandescence. The arc lamp generates
light in a different way. It creates a sustained spark
or arc between two carbon rods that are spaced apart
at a particular distance. Other materials besides carbon can be used,
(08:59):
but the early arc lamps were carbon arc lamps. The
gap between the rods is important. If the gap is
too wide, then the spark or the arc won't be
able to sustain itself. It would fire off and starts
and stops, so you would get a flickering light and
sort of a sputtering noise that would come along with it.
(09:21):
If the rods are too close to each other, then
you would get a sustained spark, but you would get
a limited amount of light. You want to maximize the
light you get while minimizing the chance of the lamps sputtering.
So what's actually going on with these arc lamps. Well,
it gets a bit technical, and I don't want to
take too much time away from the actual focus of
(09:43):
this episode, but I'll give a very quick overview. The
rods act as electrodes and a voltage is applied between them. Now,
remember a voltage is a difference in electric potential between
two points. These two rods are then brought into contact
with one another. Typically they're inside a lamp bulb structure
that actually has air in it, so it's not a
(10:05):
vacuum bulb like an incandescent bulb would be, and this
causes current to flow between the two rods. Some of
the carbon atoms in the rods ionize, they become charged particles,
and some of these ionized carbon atoms vaporize off of
the tips of the rods. So you get this ionized
carbon vapor between the two rods and the vapor can
(10:29):
conduct electricity very much like a wire would, So an
electric current can flow from one electrode to another through
the air due to this carbon vapor, and you get
a very bright light as a result. In fact, it
was so bright that the lamps became popular for very
specific applications such as lighting up streets at night, rather
(10:51):
than using gas lamps. They were also used in theatrical
lighting for stages, and this leads us to the first
recorded case of a electrocution that I could discover. The
account is in a report titled Injury Mechanisms and Therapeutic
Advances in the Study of Electrical Shock that was written
by two members of the faculty at the University of Chicago.
(11:13):
In their report, they mentioned that the earliest recorded case
of artificial electrocution as opposed to electrocution by lightning, happened
in eighteen seventy nine. A carpenter working at a theater
touched a wire connected to a two hundred fifty voult generator,
producing alternating current. Now, considering that work in electricity had
(11:35):
been going on for decades before that tragedy, I suspect
there may have been other cases, but this is the
earliest documented one that I could find. Arc lighting began
to replace gas lamps in many cities. It provided brighter light,
and it was also less expensive to operate than gas lamps,
which also depended upon stuff like oil from whales, and
(11:58):
that whales were being hunted to near extinction. So the
switch to electricity, pun intended, would mean whale hunting began
to decline and while populations began to recover. But it
also paved the way for more accidents with humans, of
which there were more than a few. The people who
died from electrocution appeared to do so nearly instantaneously, and
(12:22):
frequently they had no external signs of damage. And this
brings us up to eighteen eighty one in Buffalo, New
York and a man named Alfred P. Southwick d D
s yep. The story of the electric chair hinges upon
a dentist. And I could make a lot of jokes
about dentists here, including referencing the film and stage play
(12:44):
of Little Shop of Horrors, but those are easy jokes,
so I'll just acknowledge it and move on. Southwick witnessed
an accident in eighty one that led him to consider
the possibility of electrocution as a means to carry out
capital punish ment. He witnessed a man who was deep
in his cups that means he was drunk, and that
(13:06):
man touched a live generator terminal. He suffered a fatal
shock as a result. Now, Southwick's perception was that the
death was swift and apparently painless. Now, at the time,
the typical method of carrying out capital punishment in the
United States was hanging. The nineteenth century had seen some
(13:27):
pretty dramatic changes in the US when it came to
capital punishment until the middle of the nineteenth century, so
the eighteen forties and fifties, public hangings were common, and
there was a long list of crimes for which capital
punishment could be brought to bear, and in many cases
it was a mandatory sentence. Now, these were holdovers from
(13:49):
the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, but there was a
growing concern about the ethics of the death penalty and
the effects it could have on a crowd. There had
actually been pets at a few of these public hangings,
and that meant that many states had either moved to
private hangings out of the public view, or they were
abolishing the death penalty outright. Another perspective was that such
(14:14):
widespread application of the death penalty was acting as a
deterrent for juries to deliver a guilty verdict on a suspect.
Juries were aware that if they gave a guilty verdict,
the sentence would lead to an execution. Therefore, many people
on a jury were reluctant to deliver a guilty verdict.
They didn't want to be responsible for the death of
(14:34):
another person. So there were some people who wanted to
abolish the death penalty, not because they thought it was
inhumane or it was wrong, but because they felt that
guilty people were being set free because Juries were too
squeamish to condemn someone to death. So they said, well,
we should get rid of the death penalty so we
can lock these people up, because right now the options
(14:57):
are a mandatory death sentence or are letting them go free.
And then there was the curious case of John Babbacomb Lee,
a man accused of having murdered a woman by the
name of Emma Keys. Now, despite Lee's proclamations of innocence
and a lack of really compelling evidence, there was a
(15:17):
lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing that directly tied lead
to the murder. Lee was actually convicted of the crime
and he was sentenced to hang. But things did not
work out quite as planned. When it came time to
drop the trap door out from underneath Lee's feet, the
door remained in place and Lee did not budge. The executioner,
(15:41):
James Berry, reset the scaffold and attempted to hang Lee
three times. All three times the mechanism failed. The experience
must have been a pretty dramatic one. Lee's sentence was
then commuted to life imprisonment. He would eventually be released later.
It appeared as though the scaffold had a misaligned bar
(16:03):
that was blocking the trap door, and then this probably
happened when it had been relocated from a different spot
not long before the scheduled execution. I can only imagine
what Lee must have gone through to believe, not once,
but three times his life was about to end, only
for nothing to happen. The psychological toll was another cruelty
(16:25):
cited by critics. Now, it doesn't take much imagination to
summon up how barbaric a hanging can be, particularly public hangings.
In some cases, the hanged would live for up to
half an hour before dying of asphyxiation. In other cases,
if the drop were long enough, the force of the
sudden stop coupled with the noose tightening could reportedly result
(16:48):
in a decapitation. Southwick apparently believed in the death penalty,
but also felt a more humane approach to ending a
life was called for, and he was not alone in
this belief. There were countless doctors, politicians, intellectuals, and others
who shared his beliefs. He thought electrocution could be that approach.
(17:09):
He consulted with a friend of his, doctor George E. Fell,
and they began to look into the possibility of advocating
for electrocution over hanging Southwick published his argument in eighteen
eighty three and began to write articles about electrocution, and
they came to the attention of the Governor of New York,
David Bennett Hill, who had taken over for an outgoing
(17:31):
Grover Cleveland, who had recently been elected President of the
United States. One of Hill's acquaintances was Daniel H. Macmillan,
a friend to Southwick and a New York senator. Macmillan
championed the death penalty, but the growing resistance from abolitionists
who wanted to outlaw hanging posed a challenge. Macmillan saw
(17:51):
Southwick's proposal as a possible way to sidestep that challenge.
If the abolitionists were arguing that hanging was in humane,
if it was cruel and violent, well how about a clean,
painless method of putting someone to death. Macmillan saw electrocution
as a possible way to preserve the death penalty and
overstep these objections. When we come back, I'll continue the
(18:15):
journey to the creation of Old Sparky, but first let's
take a quick break. So Southwick's work inspired a New
York senator named McMillan to advocate for electrocution as an
alternative to hanging, thus preserving the death penalty in the
(18:38):
state of New York. David Bennett Hill, the Governor of
New York, listen to McMillan's arguments, using Southwick's published works
as citations, and he became convinced that it was a
suitable alternative to hanging. In fact, he even made it
part of his eight State of the State speech, stating
the present mode of executing criminals by hanging hiss down
(19:00):
to us from the dark ages and it may 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. He
did not specifically bring up electrocution, but the implication was
(19:20):
pretty clear. Now this plays into a common belief in
the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of
electricity brought with it an expectation that technological advancements were
going to improve absolutely everything about our lives. Technology would
provide a superior way to do all the tasks that
previously had to be done through manual labor. So if
(19:43):
technology could revolutionize manufacturing, why not executions. Macmillan and Hill
were unable to push legislation through in eive to support
electrocution as a new means to carry out death sentences. Instead,
in eighteen eighty six, Macmillan introduce a resolution to form
a committee that would explore alternatives to hanging, with the
(20:04):
goal of finding the most humane method to carry out
a death sentence. Macmillan named Southwick one of the members
of this committee, Knowing that Southwick was a fervent supporter
of electrocution. The other two members, Matthew Hale and Elbridge T. Jerry,
were from wealthy families, so is Southwick for that matter,
(20:25):
and they had no firm stance on the matter. Southwick
was relied upon as the voice of science and medicine,
though he was a dentist and only an amateur electrician.
The fact the commission didn't include a medical doctor or
an experienced electrician would mean that defending their stance would
become difficult. It also indirectly led to some of the
(20:45):
more horrific displays of electricity. Now this brings our story
in line with something else that was unfolding around the
same time, the so called War of the Currents. There
were two camps headed by two generals. On one side,
you had Thomas Edison, heralded as a genius inventor and businessman,
who advocated for direct current, which is the type of
(21:08):
current supplied by stuff like batteries. On the other side,
you had George Westinghouse, who was banking on alternating current,
saying it provided a much better means to distribute electricity
across longer distances. Now, I didn't include Nicola Tesla in
this description because he was more like a lieutenant serving
under Westinghouse, though he had originally worked as an employee
(21:30):
over at one of Edison's companies before getting seriously shafted
by Thomas Edison. The development of the electric chair and
the War of the Currents are linked together, and both
events were dependent upon leveraging public perceptions and making use
of propaganda in an effort to win people over to
a certain point of view. So this commission, which later
(21:53):
some would refer to as the Charming Electrical Death Commission,
produced an enormous report about the various means of execution
that people had been using since Biblical times. It included
not just methods like hanging and beheading, which was still
a practice in France, but also being stoned to death,
(22:14):
pressed by weights, burned alive at the stake, crucifixion, drawing
and quartering, and more. The grizzly encyclopedia of ways humans
have ended the lives of those condemned took up about
half of the report's pages. The point was clear execution
in its primitive forms was nearly always brutal and inhumane.
(22:37):
Another section of the report was largely dedicated to the
results of a survey the Commission sent out to various
authorities and doctors, so lawyers, judges, police officials, et cetera.
The survey just had five questions. The third question asked
if there might be a more humane alternative to hanging
(23:00):
and what that might be. The fourth question proposed four
alternatives and asked for the views of those taking the
survey on each of those alternatives. The four, in order
were electricity, poison, the guillotine, and the garote. The survey
excluded any suggestion that capital punshment should be abolished out right,
(23:21):
a telling omission, because that was certainly something that could
have been on the table, but was left out on purpose.
Now I say that a large part of the report
was dedicated to the results of this survey, but it
was more like it was dedicated to cherry picked results
from the survey. The full results showed that only a
small number of those questioned preferred electricity to hanging for
(23:46):
supported electricity and then said hanging is just fine. Seeing
as how the Commission was being guided by an advocate
for electrocution, it should come as no surprise that those
results were not laid out in full. Instead, the report
included choice quotes and tidbits from the survey. Some of
(24:07):
those responding to the survey voice concerns that electrocution might
cause harm to those carrying out the execution, a challenge
that was not easily dismissed by the committee because there
was just a lack of practical applications that they could
point to to test that idea. So now let's switch circuits,
so to speak to the War of the currents. Edison
(24:31):
and Westinghouse were fiercely battling over the which standard, whether
it was direct or alternating current, would become the accepted
methodology for distributing power throughout the United States. Electric lights
could run on either. Early appliances mostly ran on direct current,
and direct current was pretty simple when you got down
to it. But the big issue with direct current is
(24:53):
that it would require very thick copper cables and a
lot of voltage to push beyond a certain stans, and
you quickly lost efficiency when you were trying to transmit
power over distance. So it wasn't a huge issue if
you located the power plant near the places where you
were delivering electricity, also known as the load. So if
(25:13):
the load was close to the power plant no problem.
Direct currents fine, but it got more problematic when you
wanted to send electricity to more remote locations. So it
was the kind of thing that could work in dense
populations if people didn't mind power plants right next door,
but it would be harder to pull off outside of
those dense environments. Alternating current could take advantage of stuff
(25:36):
like transformers to step up or step down the voltage
direct current can't. That meant that it could use those
transformers to help distribute electricity over much greater distances from
the point of production. So Westinghouse was arguing that a
C was best, though it would also mean having to
include converters for devices that would depend upon direct current,
(25:58):
so those converters would take the coming a C and
transform it into direct current for the appliance to use.
Edison argued that alternating current was far more dangerous than
direct current. He had also been contacted by a guy
named Henry Berg Jr. And that was the founder of
the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
or a s p c A. Now Berg had asked
(26:21):
Edison if perhaps electrocution could be a more humane way
to put down stray animals, essentially saying, there are too
many strays, We're never going to find homes for all
of them, so some of them will have to be
put to death. What's the best way to do that
that will cause the least amount of pain and suffering
(26:41):
to animals? So you might ask, well, what were the alternatives? Well,
they were mainly hanging and drowning. So yeah, we're terrible things,
we humans, We've done awful things to poor little animals.
Edison carried out several experiments electrocuting stray animals, and those
experiments got the notice of the Commission in New York.
(27:03):
Edison decided to spend this as sort of a propaganda
attack on Alternating Current and Westinghouse. His demonstrations of electrocution
used Alternating Current, with essentially the message being this version
of electricity is inherently dangerous and will lead to fatalities,
and yeah, this is all awful. I love animals, so
(27:25):
I really hate this topic intensely. But I also wanted
to take this opportunity to address a historical misrepresentation of
Edison that gets lumped in with all this discussion usually,
and that of course, is the famous electrocution of Topsy
the elephant. Now, the basic story that gets passed around
is that Edison ordered or oversaw the electrocution of this
(27:50):
circus elephant, which had killed one handler after said handler
had burned the elephant with a cigar, and that Edison
did this in part as a way to demonstrate how
dangerous alternating current is. But that story is both oversimplified
and just playing wrong. First, Topsy wasn't put to death
(28:11):
after killing a handler. She was actually kept around for
a while after that incident happened. It was only after
a different incident, when one of her other handlers got
drunk and decided to ride the elephant through the streets
of New York, that her reputation put the operations of
her owners in jeopardy, and they didn't want their business
interests to be ruined, so they chose to put her
(28:33):
to death as almost like a publicity stunt. Initially, they
planned to hang her, but the s p c A
thought to have her electrocuted instead, believing that to be
a more humane way to put an animal to death.
This was done by people who worked for a company
that bore Edison's name. It was an Edison company, but
Thomas Edison himself didn't have any involvement with that company
(28:57):
at that time. He had already left the company. Me Plus,
this wasn't part of the War of the Currents because
the War of the Currents had already been settled for
a decade when Topsy was actually put to death in
N three. So this gets conflated a lot. It did happen,
but not the way it's typically said. This by the way,
(29:18):
it was also several years after the first execution of
a human by electrocution, So I'm gonna be backtracking in
just a second. Anyway, Topsy's life makes for a very
sad story, but it's not something we can lay at
the feet of Thomas Edison himself in this case. Still,
I don't want to exonerate Thomas Edison. He did put
(29:39):
more than a few animals down using electrocution, so he
did plenty of things that were not great, but this
was not one of them. Now, when we come back,
I'll talk more about the first electric chair and the
first terrible execution, but first let's take another quick break.
(30:07):
The Electrical Death Commission used Edison's experiments as sort of
a source of data to advocate for the use of
electrocution and death penalty cases. The apparent lack of wounds
on the animals and the swiftness of death seemed to
fit the criteria the Commission was searching for and their
efforts to establish electrocution as an alternative to hanging and
(30:28):
to preserve the death penalty in general in the state
of New York. The Commission presented their findings to the
New York legislature, which was under intense pressure to make
changes to the death penalty. Several states had already abolished
the death penalty, but New York was not quite ready
to make that step, and so the legislature took up
debate on the subject in eight eight and ultimately came
(30:51):
to an agreement. They passed an electrical execution law, and
that law took effect on January one, eighteen eighty nine.
To Harold P. Brown, an electrical engineer and one of
Edison's warriors in the War of the Currents, Brown had
argued passionately against the adoption of alternating current He had
(31:13):
stated that it was inherently deadly. He was brought on
as a consultant to create a working manifestation of an
electrocution device for the State of New York to test it,
in other words, and to determine the best use of it.
Southwick had previously suggested an electrical chair based in part
on dentistry chairs. Remember Southwick was a dentist. Brown's job
(31:37):
was to oversee more electrocution experiments with animals and determine
the proper procedure current and voltage needed to put a
person to death. Brown would rely upon alternating current despite
there being no mandate from the state on what type
of current should be used, and he experimented on animals,
putting several to death. He determined that it would take
(31:57):
between one thousand and fifteen hundred volts of alternating current
to electrocute a person, and more pointedly, he mentioned that
that represented only half of the voltage that was running
through power lines at that very moment, So his implication
was pretty clear, this is the electricity needed to kill someone,
and you've got twice that running overhead in your typical
(32:19):
power line. Brown was a master at passive aggressive criticism,
not to mention outright aggressive criticism. Brown maintained that alternating
current was inherently more dangerous than direct current. Allegedly he
challenged Westinghouse himself to a current standoff in which Brown
would hold a live wire that was running direct current
(32:40):
into him, and Westinghouse would have to do the same
with a wire running alternating current, and then they would
just step up the voltage in equal steps until one
of them let go. Westinghouse reportedly declined to acquiesce to
his request, and to be fair to Brown, you can
think of alternating current as being more day DRIs than
direct current, in the sense that it takes less voltage
(33:03):
for a C to cause harmed humans than it would
with d C. Also, alternating current has an oscillation to it,
as the current alternates right while changes direction that can
more easily lead to ventricular fibrillation that uncontrolled spasming of
the heart than if you had an encounter with direct current.
(33:24):
But it's not really ideal to experience either, and a
direct current of sufficient voltage can be just as deadly
as alternating current. It just takes more of it, or
more voltage, I guess I should say. Now. Brown's passionate
arguments against alternating current and his involvement in the construction
(33:45):
of the first electric chair often get slightly misconstrued to
say Edison was involved in the creation of the electric
chair itself, and he wasn't, at least not directly, but
he carries that reputation with him as well. Also, just
so you guys know, I am not a big fan
of Thomas Edison. I think a lot of the stuff
(34:06):
he did was really shady, But I also don't believe
in heaping on stuff that wasn't his fault on top
of the stuff that probably was his fault. Now. Brown
apparently indulged in some hanky panky over at Edison's company
when it came to powering the first electric chair. Understandably,
(34:26):
no power company was eager to have its name associated
with a device meant to put someone to death, especially
while they were simultaneously trying to market electricity to the
general public. Brown apparently engaged in some clandestine shenanigans to
get hold of some Westinghouse alternating current generators for the
(34:47):
purposes of powering the first electric chair. Further letters reported
to have belonged to Brown showed that he did that
under the direction of Edison's company. So, and that's sense
Edison did play a part in this, largely to disparage
the reputation of his rival, which is gross. As for
(35:08):
the design and production of the chair itself, that dubious
honor largely went to Edwin R. Davis. He was an
electrician in the employment of the Auburn Prison in New York.
The chair was designed to restrain the prisoner. Two electrodes
would make contact with the prisoner's skin. One was designed
to rest against the top of the prisoner's shaved head,
(35:32):
and the other would be positioned to make contact with
the prisoner's back. Each electrode was a disc of metal
mounted on a rubber pad, and each disc was also
covered with a sponge soaked in brine. The first person
to be executed via electric chair was William Francis Kemmler.
Kimbler made his living selling vegetables in Buffalo, New York.
(35:54):
He was a known drunkard. In eight he got into
a vicious argument with his girlfriend or common law wife,
Tilly Ziegler. He was intoxicated at the time. He then
reportedly killed Tilly with a hatchet before walking over to
a neighbor's house and confessing to the crime. He was
(36:15):
arrested and convicted and sentenced to die. Now the path
from sentencing to the electric chair was not a direct one,
and that's because Westinghouse, discovering that his equipment would be
used to power this electric chair, acted out quickly to
try and prevent this from happening, and he was sort
of behind a lawsuit that was brought against New York
(36:36):
State claiming that electrocution would amount to cruel and unusual punishment,
which is against the Constitution of the United States of America.
The argument included statements that people aren't all the same,
and what might be enough voltage and current to kill
one person might prove insufficient for the next person, and
(36:58):
without being assured that death would be swift and in theory, painless,
this could amount to cruel an unusual punishment. The Supreme
Court ultimately weighed in on this issue, stating that there
was no basis to establish elexecution as cruel and unusual,
and the execution was to proceed. Even so, it took
(37:18):
a long time for these legal disputes to settle down
and for a date to be set for the execution.
That date would end up being August six. On that day,
jailer's shaved the top of Kidler's head so that the
electrode could make contact with the skin. He was escorted
to the execution room, where a group of twenty five
(37:40):
witnesses were gathered, including fourteen doctors. Kimler sat in the
chair and jailer's secured restraints around his arms, his legs,
and his waist. The jailer's placed the electrode on Kimler's back,
and they strapped the other one to the top of
his head. They placed a black cloth over his head
as well. The all renaming current generator began to charge up,
(38:02):
now supposed to build up a charge of two thousand
volts or a potential difference of two thousand volts, which
would be well over the fifteen hundred volts that Brown
had suggested, but according to reports, the shock was administered
at only seven hundred volts for seventeen seconds, whereupon a
physician signaled that Kimbler was dead. The executioner had when Davis,
(38:25):
now known as the State Electrician, shut off power, and
then witnesses said that Kimler made noises and was clearly breathing.
It was a horrifying situation. Making matters worse was that
the generator would need time to build up the voltage
again to have another go, so it was revved up,
(38:46):
building up to slightly more than one thousand volts when
a second shock, this one lasting more than a minute,
was sent through Kimbler. Afterward, the jailers discovered that the
very dead Kimbler had suffered pretty nasty injuries. The electrode
at his back had burnt through Kemmler's skin down to
(39:06):
the spine. Witnesses reported that they had seen smoke coming
from the body and head of Kimbler. A report described
him as appearing to sweat blood as capillaries burst in
his face. It definitely did not seem like the quick,
painless method that Southwick had envisioned. A deputy corner for
the State of New York had this to say about
(39:28):
the ordeal quote, I would rather see ten hangings than
one such execution as this. In fact, I never cared
to witness such a scene again. It was fearful. No
humane man could witness it without the keenest agony. I
am not an electrician, but I have considerable insight into
electrical matters. Electricity applied as it was today will never
(39:52):
serve as an executioner. And yet it is my honest
belief that things might have been a thousand times worse
than they were, though it seems almost impossible that they
could be today. The apparatus was defective to a standpoint
that approached carelessness. Even had it been perfect, we cannot
say now any better than we could a week or
(40:13):
a year ago, that it would do its work as
it should be done. I don't think that Kimler was
dead when the current was applied the second time, but
he was unconscious end quote. Now. Despite this gruesome display,
New York would continue to employ electrocution as a method
(40:33):
of execution. Several other states would follow suit. Over time,
executioners developed more reliable practices when it comes to electrocutions,
though there was no shortage of reports about botched executions
and horrible outcomes. There are cases in which people have
reported seeing the person in the chair bursting into flames.
For example, it's really chilling, horrifying stuff. Notably, only two
(40:59):
countries ever used the electric chair. One is the United States,
the other is the Philippines. In the US, the electric
chair today is used as an alternative method for execution
in several states. The primary method is lethal injection, but
the electric chair remains an option that inmates can choose
if they prefer it. The most recent use of the
(41:22):
electric chair as of this recording was August two thousand nineteen,
in the execution of convicted murderer Stephen Michael West. The
electric chair is really an American invention. There's a lot
of lore and slang around it. It can be called
the chair, or old Sparky, or the mercy seat. There's
(41:42):
a great nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song titled
the Mercy Seat. It could be called the hot seat.
That's where that phrase comes from. Being electrocuted also has
various slang terms associated, like ride the lightning. Since its invention,
more than four thousand people have been put to death
in the electric chair. The modern electric chair is a
(42:03):
bit different from the one in electrodes tend to attach
at the head the back of the leg now, not
the spine, and we no longer have the antiquated generators
that cause such a terrible problem with that first execution.
But there's still been no shortage of awful stories about
executions that did not go exactly as planned. Now I'm
closing this episode out by stating there are fifty three
(42:26):
countries in the world that still have the death penalty,
and I hope the United States can take itself off
that list at some point. But that wraps up this
episode of tech Stuff. As I said before, I know
it's a grim topic, but one I think is pretty important.
And it also really displays the dangers of working around electricity,
(42:49):
that you really need to be careful around this stuff
because it can be fatal and it has been plenty
of times before. And if you guys have suggestions for
a true episodes of tech Stuff, perhaps ones that aren't
quite so grim, get in touch with me. Let me
know the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter.
(43:10):
The handle of both of those is text Stuff hs W.
Don't forget to visit our website that's tech Stuff podcast
dot com. You're gonna find a link to the archive
of every episode we've ever recorded. There are more than
a thousand of them out there, so go check that out.
You also find a link to our online store, where
every purchase you make goes to help the show. We
greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(43:38):
Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's how
stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
our Heart Radio and I love all things tech. Once again,
I have to to couch my loving of all things
(00:26):
tech because today's topic is a dark one that I
do not love. It's the electric chair, the method of
execution that has a history dating back more than a century.
This is a particularly grim and grizzly topic and there
will be some discussion of pretty gruesome stuff in this episode,
(00:47):
So if you are sensitive to such things, I gently
suggest you stop listening now. I think this is an
important topic, but I also love you guys, and I
never want you to regret listening to one of my episodes.
And I completely understand it if this really turns you
off and you think I can't listen to it. But
(01:08):
if you're fascinated by it and you want to learn
more about the history of the electric chair and how
it came to be, which has more to do with
politics and social morays than it does with technology, keep listening.
And before I dive into the history and talk about
the development of the electric chair and what goes on
(01:29):
with it. I wanted to address my own bias on
this matter because I'm very much against the death penalty.
I do not believe executions are effective as a deterrent
in a best case scenario. In my view, each execution
removes just one person from the possibility of ever doing
(01:49):
direct harm to someone else. That's the best case scenario,
and there are a lot of bad scenarios. Executions in
an electric chair or otherwise. They're expensive procedures, largely because
of the legal processes that typically exist to make sure
the execution is in fact approved and is the appropriate measure.
(02:14):
And most importantly for me, there remains the possibility that
the state could put someone to death who is innocent
of any crimes it has happened before. Our desire for
justice sometimes feeds bad decisions in which we need to
have someone to pend the blame on, even if that
someone isn't absolutely certain to be the one at fault.
(02:37):
And that means even if you view capital punishment as
being a just punishment, you could still end up with
a case of state sponsored murder of an innocent person.
And because of those reasons, I'm anti death penalty. However,
I will do my best to cover this topic without
too much personal commentary for them that bias. I just
(03:01):
wanted to put it on the table right up front
and be transparent about it. All right, let's get started.
Although the word electrocution came into use specifically for the
description of being put to death via the electric chair,
since that time, we've used it to describe any death
due to being exposed to an electric shock, and there
(03:24):
were plenty of cases of injury and death from electricity
before anyone thought of the electric chair. For one thing,
lightning has been around longer than people have, so it
stands to reason that there have been deaths in the
past due to lightning strikes, either directly or indirectly, but
we're not going to focus on those. That really isn't
(03:45):
the realm of tech stuff. Now. While there was a
lot of experimentation with electricity in the nineteenth century, it
wasn't until the late eighteen seventies that we get what
might be the earliest electrocution due to an accidental exposure
to electricity. Now, this is likely in part because much
of the early work with electricity for many decades was
(04:08):
with electrostatic generators. Now, these can discharge very high voltage sparks,
but they tend to be of a low amperage, and
without it being a high voltage and uh sufficient average,
you're not going to cause death or serious injury to somebody. Now,
if you listen to my previous episode about the basics
(04:31):
of electricity, you will remember that while both voltage and
amperage are important, most folks will say it's the amps
that will get you. But I have a bit more
to say about this. In a second, voltage is similar
to water pressure, right, It's how hard the electricity is
being pushed through a circuit, whereas amperage or current is
similar to the amount of water flowing past a specific
(04:54):
point within a given amount of time. It's the amount
of charge going through. It doesn't take much current to
pose a danger to humans. You can feel a shock
of current of just ten milli amps, So a milla
amp is one of an amp. So if you were
to grab a wire with a current between ten and
(05:17):
twenty mill amps running through it, of alternating current in particular,
you'd find yourself unable to let go as your muscles
seized up around that wire. The current would need to
be broken for you to regain control. If you encountered
between one hundred and two hundred milli amps, you're in
the fatal zone. At that amperage, the electric current causes
(05:39):
the heart to go into ventricular fibrillation, meaning the heart
begins to spasm irregularly. You get a rapid, irregular heartbeat.
Above two hundred million amps, you actually have a better
chance of survival, though you could suffer some pretty nasty injuries,
including burns and possibly image to internal organs. Why would
(06:02):
you survive at a higher current then? Why is one
to two hundred the deadly zone. Well above two hundred milliamps,
your heart tends to seize up, just as your hand
would have seized up around a wire with twenty amps
running through it. Miller apps, I should say apps would
be way too much, But Miller amps your hand would
(06:23):
just seize up around it. Your heart would do the
same and around above two hundred milli amps. Uh. This
means that you would not go into ventricular fibrillation. Your
heart would just stop. So if someone were to cut
off the current that was running through you and then
a minister resuscitation, you could recover, assuming you hadn't experienced
significant damage to other organs like your small intestine or
(06:47):
more uncommon, but it is possible something like your liver.
So does that mean voltage is not important at all? Well, no,
that's not true either. You also remember from that previous
episode that I talked about the concepts conductivity and resistance.
This describes the ease or the difficulty if you if
(07:08):
you prefer at which current can pass through a given substance.
So something that has got a high conductivity facilitates the
movement of electricity through that substance, something with high resistance doesn't. So,
assuming your skin is dry, your body's electrical resistance is
relatively high, which means there needs to be a sufficient
(07:31):
amount of voltage. You need to have a sufficient amount
of pressure to get the current to run through the
human body. Higher voltages have that pressure. So it's really
the combination of the proper voltage and current that leads
to a case of electrocution. Okay, so back to historical accounts.
One of the earliest types of electrical lights used ever
(07:54):
in the history of humans was the arc lamp. Now,
these preceded the incandescent bulbs that were made famous by,
but not invented by Thomas Edison's labs. In fact, they
preceded it by decades. They were first developed in the
early eighteen hundreds. However, it wasn't until the eighteen seventies
(08:15):
and the evolution of direct current dynamos that these arc
lamps became a practical technology for widespread use. The arc
lamp worked on a different principle from incandescent lamps. Actually,
I should just say works, because there are still arc
lamps in use today for very specific applications. So incandescent
(08:36):
bulbs work by running a current through a very thin
wire and the thin wire heats up and it gives
off light. It literally it incandescence. The arc lamp generates
light in a different way. It creates a sustained spark
or arc between two carbon rods that are spaced apart
at a particular distance. Other materials besides carbon can be used,
(08:59):
but the early arc lamps were carbon arc lamps. The
gap between the rods is important. If the gap is
too wide, then the spark or the arc won't be
able to sustain itself. It would fire off and starts
and stops, so you would get a flickering light and
sort of a sputtering noise that would come along with it.
(09:21):
If the rods are too close to each other, then
you would get a sustained spark, but you would get
a limited amount of light. You want to maximize the
light you get while minimizing the chance of the lamps sputtering.
So what's actually going on with these arc lamps. Well,
it gets a bit technical, and I don't want to
take too much time away from the actual focus of
(09:43):
this episode, but I'll give a very quick overview. The
rods act as electrodes and a voltage is applied between them. Now,
remember a voltage is a difference in electric potential between
two points. These two rods are then brought into contact
with one another. Typically they're inside a lamp bulb structure
that actually has air in it, so it's not a
(10:05):
vacuum bulb like an incandescent bulb would be, and this
causes current to flow between the two rods. Some of
the carbon atoms in the rods ionize, they become charged particles,
and some of these ionized carbon atoms vaporize off of
the tips of the rods. So you get this ionized
carbon vapor between the two rods and the vapor can
(10:29):
conduct electricity very much like a wire would, So an
electric current can flow from one electrode to another through
the air due to this carbon vapor, and you get
a very bright light as a result. In fact, it
was so bright that the lamps became popular for very
specific applications such as lighting up streets at night, rather
(10:51):
than using gas lamps. They were also used in theatrical
lighting for stages, and this leads us to the first
recorded case of a electrocution that I could discover. The
account is in a report titled Injury Mechanisms and Therapeutic
Advances in the Study of Electrical Shock that was written
by two members of the faculty at the University of Chicago.
(11:13):
In their report, they mentioned that the earliest recorded case
of artificial electrocution as opposed to electrocution by lightning, happened
in eighteen seventy nine. A carpenter working at a theater
touched a wire connected to a two hundred fifty voult generator,
producing alternating current. Now, considering that work in electricity had
(11:35):
been going on for decades before that tragedy, I suspect
there may have been other cases, but this is the
earliest documented one that I could find. Arc lighting began
to replace gas lamps in many cities. It provided brighter light,
and it was also less expensive to operate than gas lamps,
which also depended upon stuff like oil from whales, and
(11:58):
that whales were being hunted to near extinction. So the
switch to electricity, pun intended, would mean whale hunting began
to decline and while populations began to recover. But it
also paved the way for more accidents with humans, of
which there were more than a few. The people who
died from electrocution appeared to do so nearly instantaneously, and
(12:22):
frequently they had no external signs of damage. And this
brings us up to eighteen eighty one in Buffalo, New
York and a man named Alfred P. Southwick d D
s yep. The story of the electric chair hinges upon
a dentist. And I could make a lot of jokes
about dentists here, including referencing the film and stage play
(12:44):
of Little Shop of Horrors, but those are easy jokes,
so I'll just acknowledge it and move on. Southwick witnessed
an accident in eighty one that led him to consider
the possibility of electrocution as a means to carry out
capital punish ment. He witnessed a man who was deep
in his cups that means he was drunk, and that
(13:06):
man touched a live generator terminal. He suffered a fatal
shock as a result. Now, Southwick's perception was that the
death was swift and apparently painless. Now, at the time,
the typical method of carrying out capital punishment in the
United States was hanging. The nineteenth century had seen some
(13:27):
pretty dramatic changes in the US when it came to
capital punishment until the middle of the nineteenth century, so
the eighteen forties and fifties, public hangings were common, and
there was a long list of crimes for which capital
punishment could be brought to bear, and in many cases
it was a mandatory sentence. Now, these were holdovers from
(13:49):
the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, but there was a
growing concern about the ethics of the death penalty and
the effects it could have on a crowd. There had
actually been pets at a few of these public hangings,
and that meant that many states had either moved to
private hangings out of the public view, or they were
abolishing the death penalty outright. Another perspective was that such
(14:14):
widespread application of the death penalty was acting as a
deterrent for juries to deliver a guilty verdict on a suspect.
Juries were aware that if they gave a guilty verdict,
the sentence would lead to an execution. Therefore, many people
on a jury were reluctant to deliver a guilty verdict.
They didn't want to be responsible for the death of
(14:34):
another person. So there were some people who wanted to
abolish the death penalty, not because they thought it was
inhumane or it was wrong, but because they felt that
guilty people were being set free because Juries were too
squeamish to condemn someone to death. So they said, well,
we should get rid of the death penalty so we
can lock these people up, because right now the options
(14:57):
are a mandatory death sentence or are letting them go free.
And then there was the curious case of John Babbacomb Lee,
a man accused of having murdered a woman by the
name of Emma Keys. Now, despite Lee's proclamations of innocence
and a lack of really compelling evidence, there was a
(15:17):
lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing that directly tied lead
to the murder. Lee was actually convicted of the crime
and he was sentenced to hang. But things did not
work out quite as planned. When it came time to
drop the trap door out from underneath Lee's feet, the
door remained in place and Lee did not budge. The executioner,
(15:41):
James Berry, reset the scaffold and attempted to hang Lee
three times. All three times the mechanism failed. The experience
must have been a pretty dramatic one. Lee's sentence was
then commuted to life imprisonment. He would eventually be released later.
It appeared as though the scaffold had a misaligned bar
(16:03):
that was blocking the trap door, and then this probably
happened when it had been relocated from a different spot
not long before the scheduled execution. I can only imagine
what Lee must have gone through to believe, not once,
but three times his life was about to end, only
for nothing to happen. The psychological toll was another cruelty
(16:25):
cited by critics. Now, it doesn't take much imagination to
summon up how barbaric a hanging can be, particularly public hangings.
In some cases, the hanged would live for up to
half an hour before dying of asphyxiation. In other cases,
if the drop were long enough, the force of the
sudden stop coupled with the noose tightening could reportedly result
(16:48):
in a decapitation. Southwick apparently believed in the death penalty,
but also felt a more humane approach to ending a
life was called for, and he was not alone in
this belief. There were countless doctors, politicians, intellectuals, and others
who shared his beliefs. He thought electrocution could be that approach.
(17:09):
He consulted with a friend of his, doctor George E. Fell,
and they began to look into the possibility of advocating
for electrocution over hanging Southwick published his argument in eighteen
eighty three and began to write articles about electrocution, and
they came to the attention of the Governor of New York,
David Bennett Hill, who had taken over for an outgoing
(17:31):
Grover Cleveland, who had recently been elected President of the
United States. One of Hill's acquaintances was Daniel H. Macmillan,
a friend to Southwick and a New York senator. Macmillan
championed the death penalty, but the growing resistance from abolitionists
who wanted to outlaw hanging posed a challenge. Macmillan saw
(17:51):
Southwick's proposal as a possible way to sidestep that challenge.
If the abolitionists were arguing that hanging was in humane,
if it was cruel and violent, well how about a clean,
painless method of putting someone to death. Macmillan saw electrocution
as a possible way to preserve the death penalty and
overstep these objections. When we come back, I'll continue the
(18:15):
journey to the creation of Old Sparky, but first let's
take a quick break. So Southwick's work inspired a New
York senator named McMillan to advocate for electrocution as an
alternative to hanging, thus preserving the death penalty in the
(18:38):
state of New York. David Bennett Hill, the Governor of
New York, listen to McMillan's arguments, using Southwick's published works
as citations, and he became convinced that it was a
suitable alternative to hanging. In fact, he even made it
part of his eight State of the State speech, stating
the present mode of executing criminals by hanging hiss down
(19:00):
to us from the dark ages and it may 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. He
did not specifically bring up electrocution, but the implication was
(19:20):
pretty clear. Now this plays into a common belief in
the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of
electricity brought with it an expectation that technological advancements were
going to improve absolutely everything about our lives. Technology would
provide a superior way to do all the tasks that
previously had to be done through manual labor. So if
(19:43):
technology could revolutionize manufacturing, why not executions. Macmillan and Hill
were unable to push legislation through in eive to support
electrocution as a new means to carry out death sentences. Instead,
in eighteen eighty six, Macmillan introduce a resolution to form
a committee that would explore alternatives to hanging, with the
(20:04):
goal of finding the most humane method to carry out
a death sentence. Macmillan named Southwick one of the members
of this committee, Knowing that Southwick was a fervent supporter
of electrocution. The other two members, Matthew Hale and Elbridge T. Jerry,
were from wealthy families, so is Southwick for that matter,
(20:25):
and they had no firm stance on the matter. Southwick
was relied upon as the voice of science and medicine,
though he was a dentist and only an amateur electrician.
The fact the commission didn't include a medical doctor or
an experienced electrician would mean that defending their stance would
become difficult. It also indirectly led to some of the
(20:45):
more horrific displays of electricity. Now this brings our story
in line with something else that was unfolding around the
same time, the so called War of the Currents. There
were two camps headed by two generals. On one side,
you had Thomas Edison, heralded as a genius inventor and businessman,
who advocated for direct current, which is the type of
(21:08):
current supplied by stuff like batteries. On the other side,
you had George Westinghouse, who was banking on alternating current,
saying it provided a much better means to distribute electricity
across longer distances. Now, I didn't include Nicola Tesla in
this description because he was more like a lieutenant serving
under Westinghouse, though he had originally worked as an employee
(21:30):
over at one of Edison's companies before getting seriously shafted
by Thomas Edison. The development of the electric chair and
the War of the Currents are linked together, and both
events were dependent upon leveraging public perceptions and making use
of propaganda in an effort to win people over to
a certain point of view. So this commission, which later
(21:53):
some would refer to as the Charming Electrical Death Commission,
produced an enormous report about the various means of execution
that people had been using since Biblical times. It included
not just methods like hanging and beheading, which was still
a practice in France, but also being stoned to death,
(22:14):
pressed by weights, burned alive at the stake, crucifixion, drawing
and quartering, and more. The grizzly encyclopedia of ways humans
have ended the lives of those condemned took up about
half of the report's pages. The point was clear execution
in its primitive forms was nearly always brutal and inhumane.
(22:37):
Another section of the report was largely dedicated to the
results of a survey the Commission sent out to various
authorities and doctors, so lawyers, judges, police officials, et cetera.
The survey just had five questions. The third question asked
if there might be a more humane alternative to hanging
(23:00):
and what that might be. The fourth question proposed four
alternatives and asked for the views of those taking the
survey on each of those alternatives. The four, in order
were electricity, poison, the guillotine, and the garote. The survey
excluded any suggestion that capital punshment should be abolished out right,
(23:21):
a telling omission, because that was certainly something that could
have been on the table, but was left out on purpose.
Now I say that a large part of the report
was dedicated to the results of this survey, but it
was more like it was dedicated to cherry picked results
from the survey. The full results showed that only a
small number of those questioned preferred electricity to hanging for
(23:46):
supported electricity and then said hanging is just fine. Seeing
as how the Commission was being guided by an advocate
for electrocution, it should come as no surprise that those
results were not laid out in full. Instead, the report
included choice quotes and tidbits from the survey. Some of
(24:07):
those responding to the survey voice concerns that electrocution might
cause harm to those carrying out the execution, a challenge
that was not easily dismissed by the committee because there
was just a lack of practical applications that they could
point to to test that idea. So now let's switch circuits,
so to speak to the War of the currents. Edison
(24:31):
and Westinghouse were fiercely battling over the which standard, whether
it was direct or alternating current, would become the accepted
methodology for distributing power throughout the United States. Electric lights
could run on either. Early appliances mostly ran on direct current,
and direct current was pretty simple when you got down
to it. But the big issue with direct current is
(24:53):
that it would require very thick copper cables and a
lot of voltage to push beyond a certain stans, and
you quickly lost efficiency when you were trying to transmit
power over distance. So it wasn't a huge issue if
you located the power plant near the places where you
were delivering electricity, also known as the load. So if
(25:13):
the load was close to the power plant no problem.
Direct currents fine, but it got more problematic when you
wanted to send electricity to more remote locations. So it
was the kind of thing that could work in dense
populations if people didn't mind power plants right next door,
but it would be harder to pull off outside of
those dense environments. Alternating current could take advantage of stuff
(25:36):
like transformers to step up or step down the voltage
direct current can't. That meant that it could use those
transformers to help distribute electricity over much greater distances from
the point of production. So Westinghouse was arguing that a
C was best, though it would also mean having to
include converters for devices that would depend upon direct current,
(25:58):
so those converters would take the coming a C and
transform it into direct current for the appliance to use.
Edison argued that alternating current was far more dangerous than
direct current. He had also been contacted by a guy
named Henry Berg Jr. And that was the founder of
the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
or a s p c A. Now Berg had asked
(26:21):
Edison if perhaps electrocution could be a more humane way
to put down stray animals, essentially saying, there are too
many strays, We're never going to find homes for all
of them, so some of them will have to be
put to death. What's the best way to do that
that will cause the least amount of pain and suffering
(26:41):
to animals? So you might ask, well, what were the alternatives? Well,
they were mainly hanging and drowning. So yeah, we're terrible things,
we humans, We've done awful things to poor little animals.
Edison carried out several experiments electrocuting stray animals, and those
experiments got the notice of the Commission in New York.
(27:03):
Edison decided to spend this as sort of a propaganda
attack on Alternating Current and Westinghouse. His demonstrations of electrocution
used Alternating Current, with essentially the message being this version
of electricity is inherently dangerous and will lead to fatalities,
and yeah, this is all awful. I love animals, so
(27:25):
I really hate this topic intensely. But I also wanted
to take this opportunity to address a historical misrepresentation of
Edison that gets lumped in with all this discussion usually,
and that of course, is the famous electrocution of Topsy
the elephant. Now, the basic story that gets passed around
is that Edison ordered or oversaw the electrocution of this
(27:50):
circus elephant, which had killed one handler after said handler
had burned the elephant with a cigar, and that Edison
did this in part as a way to demonstrate how
dangerous alternating current is. But that story is both oversimplified
and just playing wrong. First, Topsy wasn't put to death
(28:11):
after killing a handler. She was actually kept around for
a while after that incident happened. It was only after
a different incident, when one of her other handlers got
drunk and decided to ride the elephant through the streets
of New York, that her reputation put the operations of
her owners in jeopardy, and they didn't want their business
interests to be ruined, so they chose to put her
(28:33):
to death as almost like a publicity stunt. Initially, they
planned to hang her, but the s p c A
thought to have her electrocuted instead, believing that to be
a more humane way to put an animal to death.
This was done by people who worked for a company
that bore Edison's name. It was an Edison company, but
Thomas Edison himself didn't have any involvement with that company
(28:57):
at that time. He had already left the company. Me Plus,
this wasn't part of the War of the Currents because
the War of the Currents had already been settled for
a decade when Topsy was actually put to death in
N three. So this gets conflated a lot. It did happen,
but not the way it's typically said. This by the way,
(29:18):
it was also several years after the first execution of
a human by electrocution, So I'm gonna be backtracking in
just a second. Anyway, Topsy's life makes for a very
sad story, but it's not something we can lay at
the feet of Thomas Edison himself in this case. Still,
I don't want to exonerate Thomas Edison. He did put
(29:39):
more than a few animals down using electrocution, so he
did plenty of things that were not great, but this
was not one of them. Now, when we come back,
I'll talk more about the first electric chair and the
first terrible execution, but first let's take another quick break.
(30:07):
The Electrical Death Commission used Edison's experiments as sort of
a source of data to advocate for the use of
electrocution and death penalty cases. The apparent lack of wounds
on the animals and the swiftness of death seemed to
fit the criteria the Commission was searching for and their
efforts to establish electrocution as an alternative to hanging and
(30:28):
to preserve the death penalty in general in the state
of New York. The Commission presented their findings to the
New York legislature, which was under intense pressure to make
changes to the death penalty. Several states had already abolished
the death penalty, but New York was not quite ready
to make that step, and so the legislature took up
debate on the subject in eight eight and ultimately came
(30:51):
to an agreement. They passed an electrical execution law, and
that law took effect on January one, eighteen eighty nine.
To Harold P. Brown, an electrical engineer and one of
Edison's warriors in the War of the Currents, Brown had
argued passionately against the adoption of alternating current He had
(31:13):
stated that it was inherently deadly. He was brought on
as a consultant to create a working manifestation of an
electrocution device for the State of New York to test it,
in other words, and to determine the best use of it.
Southwick had previously suggested an electrical chair based in part
on dentistry chairs. Remember Southwick was a dentist. Brown's job
(31:37):
was to oversee more electrocution experiments with animals and determine
the proper procedure current and voltage needed to put a
person to death. Brown would rely upon alternating current despite
there being no mandate from the state on what type
of current should be used, and he experimented on animals,
putting several to death. He determined that it would take
(31:57):
between one thousand and fifteen hundred volts of alternating current
to electrocute a person, and more pointedly, he mentioned that
that represented only half of the voltage that was running
through power lines at that very moment, So his implication
was pretty clear, this is the electricity needed to kill someone,
and you've got twice that running overhead in your typical
(32:19):
power line. Brown was a master at passive aggressive criticism,
not to mention outright aggressive criticism. Brown maintained that alternating
current was inherently more dangerous than direct current. Allegedly he
challenged Westinghouse himself to a current standoff in which Brown
would hold a live wire that was running direct current
(32:40):
into him, and Westinghouse would have to do the same
with a wire running alternating current, and then they would
just step up the voltage in equal steps until one
of them let go. Westinghouse reportedly declined to acquiesce to
his request, and to be fair to Brown, you can
think of alternating current as being more day DRIs than
direct current, in the sense that it takes less voltage
(33:03):
for a C to cause harmed humans than it would
with d C. Also, alternating current has an oscillation to it,
as the current alternates right while changes direction that can
more easily lead to ventricular fibrillation that uncontrolled spasming of
the heart than if you had an encounter with direct current.
(33:24):
But it's not really ideal to experience either, and a
direct current of sufficient voltage can be just as deadly
as alternating current. It just takes more of it, or
more voltage, I guess I should say. Now. Brown's passionate
arguments against alternating current and his involvement in the construction
(33:45):
of the first electric chair often get slightly misconstrued to
say Edison was involved in the creation of the electric
chair itself, and he wasn't, at least not directly, but
he carries that reputation with him as well. Also, just
so you guys know, I am not a big fan
of Thomas Edison. I think a lot of the stuff
(34:06):
he did was really shady, But I also don't believe
in heaping on stuff that wasn't his fault on top
of the stuff that probably was his fault. Now. Brown
apparently indulged in some hanky panky over at Edison's company
when it came to powering the first electric chair. Understandably,
(34:26):
no power company was eager to have its name associated
with a device meant to put someone to death, especially
while they were simultaneously trying to market electricity to the
general public. Brown apparently engaged in some clandestine shenanigans to
get hold of some Westinghouse alternating current generators for the
(34:47):
purposes of powering the first electric chair. Further letters reported
to have belonged to Brown showed that he did that
under the direction of Edison's company. So, and that's sense
Edison did play a part in this, largely to disparage
the reputation of his rival, which is gross. As for
(35:08):
the design and production of the chair itself, that dubious
honor largely went to Edwin R. Davis. He was an
electrician in the employment of the Auburn Prison in New York.
The chair was designed to restrain the prisoner. Two electrodes
would make contact with the prisoner's skin. One was designed
to rest against the top of the prisoner's shaved head,
(35:32):
and the other would be positioned to make contact with
the prisoner's back. Each electrode was a disc of metal
mounted on a rubber pad, and each disc was also
covered with a sponge soaked in brine. The first person
to be executed via electric chair was William Francis Kemmler.
Kimbler made his living selling vegetables in Buffalo, New York.
(35:54):
He was a known drunkard. In eight he got into
a vicious argument with his girlfriend or common law wife,
Tilly Ziegler. He was intoxicated at the time. He then
reportedly killed Tilly with a hatchet before walking over to
a neighbor's house and confessing to the crime. He was
(36:15):
arrested and convicted and sentenced to die. Now the path
from sentencing to the electric chair was not a direct one,
and that's because Westinghouse, discovering that his equipment would be
used to power this electric chair, acted out quickly to
try and prevent this from happening, and he was sort
of behind a lawsuit that was brought against New York
(36:36):
State claiming that electrocution would amount to cruel and unusual punishment,
which is against the Constitution of the United States of America.
The argument included statements that people aren't all the same,
and what might be enough voltage and current to kill
one person might prove insufficient for the next person, and
(36:58):
without being assured that death would be swift and in theory, painless,
this could amount to cruel an unusual punishment. The Supreme
Court ultimately weighed in on this issue, stating that there
was no basis to establish elexecution as cruel and unusual,
and the execution was to proceed. Even so, it took
(37:18):
a long time for these legal disputes to settle down
and for a date to be set for the execution.
That date would end up being August six. On that day,
jailer's shaved the top of Kidler's head so that the
electrode could make contact with the skin. He was escorted
to the execution room, where a group of twenty five
(37:40):
witnesses were gathered, including fourteen doctors. Kimler sat in the
chair and jailer's secured restraints around his arms, his legs,
and his waist. The jailer's placed the electrode on Kimler's back,
and they strapped the other one to the top of
his head. They placed a black cloth over his head
as well. The all renaming current generator began to charge up,
(38:02):
now supposed to build up a charge of two thousand
volts or a potential difference of two thousand volts, which
would be well over the fifteen hundred volts that Brown
had suggested, but according to reports, the shock was administered
at only seven hundred volts for seventeen seconds, whereupon a
physician signaled that Kimbler was dead. The executioner had when Davis,
(38:25):
now known as the State Electrician, shut off power, and
then witnesses said that Kimler made noises and was clearly breathing.
It was a horrifying situation. Making matters worse was that
the generator would need time to build up the voltage
again to have another go, so it was revved up,
(38:46):
building up to slightly more than one thousand volts when
a second shock, this one lasting more than a minute,
was sent through Kimbler. Afterward, the jailers discovered that the
very dead Kimbler had suffered pretty nasty injuries. The electrode
at his back had burnt through Kemmler's skin down to
(39:06):
the spine. Witnesses reported that they had seen smoke coming
from the body and head of Kimbler. A report described
him as appearing to sweat blood as capillaries burst in
his face. It definitely did not seem like the quick,
painless method that Southwick had envisioned. A deputy corner for
the State of New York had this to say about
(39:28):
the ordeal quote, I would rather see ten hangings than
one such execution as this. In fact, I never cared
to witness such a scene again. It was fearful. No
humane man could witness it without the keenest agony. I
am not an electrician, but I have considerable insight into
electrical matters. Electricity applied as it was today will never
(39:52):
serve as an executioner. And yet it is my honest
belief that things might have been a thousand times worse
than they were, though it seems almost impossible that they
could be today. The apparatus was defective to a standpoint
that approached carelessness. Even had it been perfect, we cannot
say now any better than we could a week or
(40:13):
a year ago, that it would do its work as
it should be done. I don't think that Kimler was
dead when the current was applied the second time, but
he was unconscious end quote. Now. Despite this gruesome display,
New York would continue to employ electrocution as a method
(40:33):
of execution. Several other states would follow suit. Over time,
executioners developed more reliable practices when it comes to electrocutions,
though there was no shortage of reports about botched executions
and horrible outcomes. There are cases in which people have
reported seeing the person in the chair bursting into flames.
For example, it's really chilling, horrifying stuff. Notably, only two
(40:59):
countries ever used the electric chair. One is the United States,
the other is the Philippines. In the US, the electric
chair today is used as an alternative method for execution
in several states. The primary method is lethal injection, but
the electric chair remains an option that inmates can choose
if they prefer it. The most recent use of the
(41:22):
electric chair as of this recording was August two thousand nineteen,
in the execution of convicted murderer Stephen Michael West. The
electric chair is really an American invention. There's a lot
of lore and slang around it. It can be called
the chair, or old Sparky, or the mercy seat. There's
(41:42):
a great nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song titled
the Mercy Seat. It could be called the hot seat.
That's where that phrase comes from. Being electrocuted also has
various slang terms associated, like ride the lightning. Since its invention,
more than four thousand people have been put to death
in the electric chair. The modern electric chair is a
(42:03):
bit different from the one in electrodes tend to attach
at the head the back of the leg now, not
the spine, and we no longer have the antiquated generators
that cause such a terrible problem with that first execution.
But there's still been no shortage of awful stories about
executions that did not go exactly as planned. Now I'm
closing this episode out by stating there are fifty three
(42:26):
countries in the world that still have the death penalty,
and I hope the United States can take itself off
that list at some point. But that wraps up this
episode of tech Stuff. As I said before, I know
it's a grim topic, but one I think is pretty important.
And it also really displays the dangers of working around electricity,
(42:49):
that you really need to be careful around this stuff
because it can be fatal and it has been plenty
of times before. And if you guys have suggestions for
a true episodes of tech Stuff, perhaps ones that aren't
quite so grim, get in touch with me. Let me
know the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter.
(43:10):
The handle of both of those is text Stuff hs W.
Don't forget to visit our website that's tech Stuff podcast
dot com. You're gonna find a link to the archive
of every episode we've ever recorded. There are more than
a thousand of them out there, so go check that out.
You also find a link to our online store, where
every purchase you make goes to help the show. We
greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(43:38):
Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's how
stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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