EXECUTIONER'S CURRENT: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair
Richard Moran, . . Knopf, $25 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-375-41059-8
This account opens at New York's Auburn Penitentiary, in 1890, with a bloody, scorched body strapped in the electric chair. The first electrocution concluded a courtroom drama involving a humanitarian dentist, an ambitious attorney, an illiterate murderer and the great American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison. Edison joined the debate over electrocution in an effort to discredit his rival, George Westinghouse, whose system of alternating current, or AC, was rapidly outpacing Edison's direct current, or DC, in the race to electrify America. Playing upon concerns about public safety and eager to brand Westinghouse electricity the "executioner's current," Edison advised legislators that a shock of AC killed most efficiently and, disregarding his own professed opposition to capital punishment, suggested a design for the chair. Meanwhile, Westinghouse surreptitiously underwrote the appeals of the condemned man, William Kemmler, challenging the constitutionality of electrocution. Withholding his personal opposition to the death penalty until the book's final sentence, Moran (
Reviewed on: 09/09/2002
Genre: Nonfiction
Open Ebook - 228 pages - 978-0-307-42580-5
Paperback - 271 pages - 978-0-375-72446-6