Electric chair?
Answer:
Alfred P. Southwick developed the idea of using electric current as a method of execution after having witnessed an intoxicated man die after having touched an exposed terminal on a live generator.[1] As Southwick was a dentist accustomed to performing procedures on subjects in chairs, his electrical device appeared in the form of a chair.
The first electric chair was made by Harold P. Brown. Brown was an employee of Thomas Edison, hired for the purpose of researching electrocution and for the development of the electric chair.[citation needed] Since Brown worked for Edison, and Edison promoted Brown's work, the development of the electric chair is often erroneously credited to Edison himself. Brown's design was based on use of George Westinghouse's alternating current (AC), which was then just emerging as the rival to Edison's less transport-efficient direct current (DC), which was further along in commercial development. The decision to use AC was partly driven by Edison's claim's that AC was more lethal than DC, however at the very high currents used for the device, which could be as high as ten amperes, the difference in lethality between the two types of currents was approximately a factor of two, which was marginal. The term "electrocution" originally referred only to electrical execution (from which it is a portmanteau word), and not to accidental electrical deaths. However, since no English word was available for the latter process, with the new rise of commercial electricity, the word "electrocution" eventually took over as a description of all circumstances of electrical death.
In 1886, after a particularly grusome and bloody hanging was reported, New York State established a committee to determine a new, more humane system of execution to replace hanging. Neither Edison nor Westinghouse as part of the War of Currents wanted their electrical system to be chosen because they feared that consumers would not want in their homes the same type of electricity used to kill criminals.
In order to prove that AC electricity was dangerous and therefore better for executions, Brown and Edison, who promoted DC electricity, publicly killed many animals with AC. They killed animals with electric current for the press in order to ensure that AC current was associated with electrical death. It was at these events that the term "electrocution" was coined. Edison tried introduced the verb "to Westinghouse" for denoting the art of executing persons with AC current. Most of their experiments were conducted at Edison's West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory in 1888.
The demonstrations apparently had their intended effects, and the AC electric chair was adopted by the committee in 1889.[2]
When it came to building the actual state execution device, the Westinghouse company refused to sell an AC generator for the purpose, so Edison and Brown used subterfuge in order to acquire the AC generator. They pretended that the Westinghouse AC generator was for use in a university, and had it dropshipped to New York through a country in South America.
The first person to be executed via the electric chair was William Kemmler in New York's Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890; the 'state electrician' was Edwin Davis. The first 17-second passage of current though Kemmler caused unconciousness, but failed to stop his heart and breathing. The second considerably longer application killed Kemmler, but caused an odor of burned flesh. Neverlessless, most onlookers found no evidence of suffering, and their report to the committee was sufficient to continue developement of the method.
The first woman to be executed in the electric chair was Martha M. Place, executed at Sing Sing Prison on March 20, 1899. It was adopted by Ohio (1897), Massachusetts (1900), New Jersey (1906) and Virginia (1908), and soon became the prevalent method of execution in the U.S., replacing hanging (although it saw very little use in the Western states, with the gas chamber the more popular alternative to hanging there). It remained so until the mid-1980s, when lethal injection became widely accepted as an easier method for conducting judicial executions.
In 1900, Charles Justice was a prison inmate at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. While performing cleaning detail duties in the death chamber, he devised an idea to improve the efficiency of the restraints on the electric chair. Justice designed metal clamps to replace the leather straps, thus allowing for the inmate to be secured more tautly and minimize the problem of burnt flesh. These revisions were incorporated into the chair and Justice was subsequently paroled from prison. Ironically, he was convicted in a robbery/murder and returned to prison 13 years later under a death sentence. On November 9, 1911, he died in the same electric chair that he had helped to improve.[3]
when people started committing murders and stuff...
When someone felt the need.
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