Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair [Paperback]

Richard Moran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 2003

In this amazing story of high stakes competition between two titans, Richard Moran shows how the electric chair developed not out of the desire to be more humane but through an effort by one nineteenth-century electric company to discredit the other.

In 1882, Thomas Edison ushered in the “age of electricity” when he illuminated Manhattan’s Pearl Street with his direct current (DC) system. Six years later, George Westinghouse lit up Buffalo with his less expensive alternating current (AC). The two men quickly became locked in a fierce rivalry, made all the more complicated by a novel new application for their product: the electric chair. When Edison set out to persuade the state of New York to use Westinghouse’s current to execute condemned criminals, Westinghouse fought back in court, attempting to stop the first electrocution and keep AC from becoming the “executioner’s current.” In this meticulously researched account of the ensuing legal battle and the horribly botched first execution, Moran raises disturbing questions not only about electrocution, but about about our society’s tendency to rely on new technologies to answer moral questions.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 (Knowing Right from Wrong: The Insanity Defense of Daniel McNaughton), a sociologist at Mount Holyoke College, marshals his sources-committee reports, legislative hearings, court decisions-to argue that the search for a humane method of execution does not resolve the moral dilemma, but instead leaves capital punishment in the hands of alleged experts who are too often guided by self-interest. For all his careful documentation and apparent impartiality, Moran freely borrows from sensational newspaper stories, many based on second-hand accounts, to accentuate the horrors of electrocution and portray the condemned as victims. With Edison's name in the title and macabre execution scenes in the opening pages, this book should attract browsers as well as politically engaged readers. 22 b&w illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

When Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were building the first power plants in the country, electric light was a bizarre new technology that few people understood and many people feared. Adding to the confusion were the two competitors' attempts to promote their own systems and discredit the other. When New York State began considering electrocution as a method of capital punishment, Edison recommended Westinghouse's alternating current for the unseemly task. Westinghouse, not wanting the negative stigma associated with his system, fought back, and a truly well intentioned government effort to find a more humane method of execution became a courtroom battle for commercial supremacy between two competing pioneers. Moran's account is broad, covering the electric power struggle between Edison and Westinghouse, the trial and execution of the first man to die in the electric chair, and the history of the capital punishment debate in the U.S. Edison's popularity as a cultural hero lends appeal to the entertaining drama of the power companies' competition, and the surprisingly colorful history of the electric chair makes for fascinating reading. Gavin Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (November 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037572446X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375724466
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,203,185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all who support the death penalty, January 23, 2003

By 

Carolyn Davis (Leesburg, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (Hardcover)

While this book may not be enough to push you over the line to rejecting the death penalty, it will certainly make you think about it. A very enticing read, the book touches upon complicated legal entanglements and medical issues without becoming too hard to understand. However, for those with little interest in criminal justice (or the mechanics of electricity), this is probably not a wise choice.

This book starts out being about criminal William Kemmler and the first case in which the electric chair was used. However, as the story progresses, it becomes more and more a tale of Thomas Edison (America's prized inventor and advocate of direct current) and his primary competitor George Westinghouse, who utalizes alternating current. Moran paints a dark picture of Edison, who will seemingly stop at nothing to slanderize Westinghouse by encouraging use of alternating currents for electrocution. This proves a major problem for Westinghouse, because in having his current branded an 'executioner's current', something dangerous to the public and only suited for providing death, he could lose valuable customers.

In this work, Moran's primary goal is to show how the invention and enactment of the electric chair as America's primary method of execution was chiefly motivated not by a desire to improve the humaneness of execution, but by corporate greed. When Edison and his lackey Harold Brown (another electrician) propetuate propaganda about alternating current as 'the best current for electrocutions due to its deadly nature', they are not looking out for the public's well being but for the good of Edison's company. And even when intentions for a better method of execution are good, as Moran points out, 'no execution can really be considered humane'.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars shockingly good popular history, October 23, 2002

By 

Richard Thomas (washington, dc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (Hardcover)

Moran begins with America's first execution using that most peculiar of lethal inventions: the electric chair. The execution sets an appropriate tone for a book that is both a history of that invention and an examination of the search for a humane means of executing criminals: the execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler was a cruel, horrific and botched experiment of an electrocution, and proclaimed a "success" despite all of that.

"Executioner's Current" lays the groundwork for this interesting story of how the United States came to employ what was supposedly a novel, enlightened, and humane means of execution -- in actuality only novel -- by describing it's origins in the electrification of America and the early competition over what model this would follow: George Westinghouse's AC model or Thomas Edison's DC model. DC was economically inferior and inefficient compared to Westinghouse's AC system. Being unable to compete on the relative merits of the two technologies, Edison launched a public relations and lobbying campaign that would rival any modern effort for its obfuscations and distortions. The object of this campaign was to paint AC as being too dangerous to use in residential or commercial applications.

Naturally, when New York state was revising it's capital punishment laws at that time, and electrocution came into the debate as a new, possibly more humane means of execution, they consulted the national hero and genius electrician, Thomas Edison. Edison, in the midst of slandering Westinghouse's more efficient electrical distribution technology, told them that AC was so dangerous that it would be the ideal means to execute criminals. This was followed by staged experiments on animals designed to illustrate how lethal (and how relatively safe DC current) AC current was, the invention of a practical electrical chair, and the many electrocutions that have been performed since.

I am not an opponent of the death penalty, but I have always considered the electric chair to be a ridiculous method of execution. Moran's larger point is that the search for a more humane means of execution has little to do with sparing the condemned from suffering, but is more about assuaging the conscience of the persons and larger society that condemned him. To Moran, the more important question than humane means is whether any execution is humane. On this point, I would disagree with him (Moran is clearly an opponent), but the point is one worth making and the question is one worth asking. Between that and the fascinating story, this book is one well worth reading.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-Written and Thorough, September 11, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (Hardcover)

This is a good book. In addition to being very clearly written in a very engaging style, the author discusses just about all aspects of the development and use of the electric chair: technology of the times, effects of electricity on the human body, legal and political aspects of executing condemned criminals using electricity, related sociological matters, even the life, trial and details of the execution of the chair's first official customer. Naturally, the war between Edison and Westinghouse, i.e., DC vs AC, plays a most prominent role in this exciting saga; in particular, the "efforts" in determining which is deadlier: DC or AC. Highly recommended!