The Electric Chair: Not very comfy

So, having lulled you into a false sense of security with that Marmite malarkey, now seems as good a time as any to launch into my veritable deluge of facts about the electric chair. If you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll begin.

In the olden days – 1887 – a ‘War of Currents’ erupted between two big cheeses in the revolutionary new world of electricity. One was George Westinghouse, a Victorian-looking man with a pocket watch and a walrus-like moustache, and the other was Thomas Edison, of ill-gotten light bulb fame*. In an unfortunate coincidence, people got it into their heads that they might like to harness electricity within their very homes around the same time that New York State was looking for a more exciting way to kill criminals. When an upstate dentist came up with the idea of an electrified chair, neither Westinghouse – who was promoting AC (alternating current) power – nor Edison – peddling the inferior DC (direct current) system – wanted anything to do with it**.

Edison – who, frankly, sounds a bit of a shit – decided that the only way to keep his good name unsullied was to promote Westinghouse’s AC as life-terminatingly strong. The press duly assembled for a series of demonstrations in which Edison used AC to electrocute a number of unsuspecting animals, including Topsy the Elephant, late of Coney Island, who was immortalised (for want of a better word) in the short film Electrocuting an Elephant, directed and filmed by one Thomas Edison***.

Far from locking the lunatic Edison away for good, the capital punishment people looked on in awe at his marvellous new creation, and authorised electrical execution (‘electrocution’) for humans in 1888. Edison, the smug git, suggested they call the new process ‘Westinghousing’.

The first ever electrocution took place in New York in 1890 and was a total cock-up. The prisoner was still breathing after being declared dead and it took a few minutes to recharge the generator, during which time a number of vomiting day-trippers tried unsuccessfully to flee the viewing gallery. After an eight-minute frenzy of panic and horror, he finally died. An appalled Westinghouse said ‘They would have done better using an axe.’

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* Edison didn’t invent the light bulb: he tweaked the electric lighting systems of more than twenty earlier inventors and came up with the first commercial bulb – fact.
** DC flows in one direction while AC jiggles about. I’m not a scientist, go away.
*** I am so not joking. Topsy was a bit wild on account of being horribly abused – prior to electrocution, you understand – and had to be put down.