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According to Old Sparky, a historical resource in the Electric Chair category of the Yahoo! Directory, there are several claimants to the title. An inventor named Harold Brown, however, conducted several grisly prototype experiments under the auspices of Thomas Edison, and helped construct the chair used in the first execution. In 1888, Brown wrote
an editorial to the New York Post, describing the "death of a boy who touched a straggling telegraph wire running on AC current." The state was looking for a humane replacement for hanging, a method that had resulted in some gruesome episodes of strangulation and/or decapitation. Subsequently, Brown was hired by Edison to help create the electric chair. The history of "old sparky" is fraught with questionable science, capitalist backstabbing, and flagrant animal abuse. In a canny ploy to blackball his AC competitor Westinghouse, Edison (a DC man) encouraged the use of AC electrical current in electrocution. The idea was to portray AC as incredibly dangerous; he and Brown sacrificed dozens of hapless animals, including a circus elephant, in a brutal smear campaign. It worked. The world's first execution in 1890 was an unmitigated disaster. The prisoner, a murderer named William Kemmler, had to be jolted twice before he died. A famous New York Herald piece described the smoke, the flames, and the smell: "Strong men fainted and fell like logs on the floor."
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