The Birth of the Electric Chair

This is a particularly grim and grizzly topic and there will be some discussion of pretty gruesome stuff in this episode, 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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

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

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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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. 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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. 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.