Stuff You Should Know - How the Electric Chair Works

Episode Date: April 11, 2019

The electric chair is an all-American invention. It spread almost nowhere else in the world as a capital punishment but worked overtime in the States. Despite the terrible sights and sounds an electrocution produces, it was created out of humaneness.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and there's Jerry over there,

and this is Stuff You Should Know over here. And I guess I probably sound a little too chipper for what we're about to talk about because it is grim stuff. It is, and I, my friend, have a fact that you probably know, but I don't know if everyone else knows that the word electrocute is a portmanteau that was coined during the War of Currents.

I'm so happy with you, this is my fact too. I was like, Chuck's gonna love this. I appreciate you assuming that I already knew it. Well, I assume you know everything. Let him have it, Chuck. Well, yeah, it comes from the words electric and execution, and when I saw that, I was like, that can't be right.

Surely the word electrocute was around before then, but there was no before then, because there was no mass use of electricity, and I don't know who exactly coined it. I couldn't find that, but it was during the War of Currents. Yeah, I saw it in a paper from 1908 that said that, and he just said it so matter of factly. I was like, what?

That doesn't, oh, wow, that is right, electrocute, electro execution. It's like the sex executioner. It's like sex and the executioner, the sex executioner. Yeah, and that's also a word that gets misused because a lot of people say someone's electrocuted if they just experienced a profound shock, but that's not the case.

That's why I was confusing, I think, at first for us, for like, wait, that's not sensible. I also saw one other, electro-Thanasia. Okay. I know it's not nearly as good as electrocute, but I wanted to toss it out too. And this episode has what I believe may be the best if you should know band name of all time.

I know what that one is too. So we'll just hang on to that. Okay, cool. Yeah, I saw that and I was like, there's Chuck's band name. Yep. So we're talking electrocution, and now that you know electrocution, what the word means, you know, we're specifically talking about

being put to death on purpose through electricity. And as far as we know, the only way that anyone's ever been put to death using electricity is in an electric chair, which is a specifically American invention. Did you know that before you researched this? I did, and we should point out that the Philippines did use this for a while,

but it was because we basically were like, you guys should totally use the electric chair, here have one. Right, back in I think like 1926, and they used it for 50 years until 1976. And then they were like, this is really gross. We're gonna stop using this. And stop executing people all together,

isn't that right? Did they all together? I just assumed they went to firing squad or something. I think, I don't know if it was in 76, but I think they got rid of the death penalty perhaps. How very civil. So with the electric chair, we've had, like I said, it was an American invention,

and it's been around since, I guess the 1880s is when it really started to kind of make its debut. But it's really kind of basic and simple for something as seemingly complicated as harnessing electricity to extinguish a human life, right? It's a chair that you strap somebody to

and run electricity through their body until they die. It's really about that simple. Yeah, I mean, if you've ever seen a movie, or God forbid, if you've ever been to an execution, can imagine doing something like that, but people do that. And by the way, you know, if I say things like that,

I'm just speaking for myself, everyone. Well, we did like a whole lethal injection episode, and you came out pretty strongly against the death penalty if I remember correctly. So it's already out there. Yeah, I just, if I seem like I'm turned off by a lot of this is because I am, but there are a lot of people in this country

that when they hear about like flame shooting out of someone's head and blood coming out of someone's eyeballs and the smell of cooked flesh, they're like, heck yeah, like zap them again. Shouldn't have killed those people. You're getting what you deserve. So there are a lot of people out there that feel that way. And I'm just not one of them.

Yeah, I was reading about the execution of Ted Bundy. He was electrocuted in Florida, I'm pretty sure. And there were, yeah, it was Florida. There were people partying outside of the prison where he was put to death. I remember that. Holding like a barbecue. What year was it?

Was it like 1990 maybe or 89? I feel like I was in college, but I remember seeing that on the news. And that was just like, it seemed like a tailgate was going on. Yeah, that's what it seemed like from what I read. And there was apparently zero Bundy supporters. It was all people who were there to cheer on his death.

So they're definitely people who feel that way out there for sure. So yeah, getting back to what you're saying though, it is very rudimentary. There was a metal cap that is the electrode and that is put onto a prisoner's shaved head. There is a natural sponge with saline salt water in that sponge.

And salt water is conductive and that's the reason they use that. But there have been a lot of problems with the wrong sponges. Too much salt, too little salt, too much water, too little water. But that's generally how it works. That goes in between the cap, that metal cap

and the person's head. And then there's another electrode that's usually on the leg of the prisoner, but sometimes it's on the foot or the base of the spine or something. And this all just allows electricity to flow freely through a person's body until they die. Right, right.

Because the electrode that goes in through the head, that's where the electricity comes from. And then the other electrode that's connected to the ground, like through the leg, allows the current to pass through the body all the way, right? And from that free flow of electricity, that's where you get these tremendously horrific results,

ultimately culminating in the death of the person. And then Chuck, you said that they put a sponge on people's heads. It has to be a natural sponge. Did you say that? I did. So apparently they found, as we'll see, only a natural sponge will work.

But one of the other purposes it serves, besides acting as like kind of a reservoir for the saltwater conductor, it fills the space between the metal cap and the victim's head. Because the metal cap is like this little metal cap and your head's not a perfect cap-shaped dome. So the sponge is meant to also kind of fill that space

and get the electricity everywhere going through your head. Yeah, and as far as the chair, the actual wooden chair, I mean, it could have been anything. It could have been some upright thing, like Hannibal Lecter was strapped to, like a upright gurney. But they settled on a chair. It's generally this big, heavy oak chair.

And many times, irony of all ironies, that chair is built by prison labor. Mm-hmm, I saw that too. And it's almost invariably called Old Sparky, but there are also some that were called Old Smoky. And then the worst of all, I think, was the Louisiana's called Gruesome Gurdy, which is a terrible name for a chair.

Actually, it's a perfect name for an electric chair, actually, now that I think about it. Yeah, but the, I don't know, the sort of, I guess, tradition of naming electric chairs, these cute names, is also something that's a bit of a turnoff. Yeah, just a tad, a tad bit. So you're strapped into this chair.

Obviously, your arms are strapped in. Your legs are strapped in. Most of the times, you have a strap across your chest and groin area. And again, the chair is just, it has nothing to do. It doesn't have electricity running through it at all. That is just the means to keep the prisoner strapped in. Right, right, because when that switch is thrown,

your muscles just contract to the point where you can just snap bones. Joints get just thrown out of joint, literally. It's a huge muscle, muscular contraction throughout your entire body, because that's how your muscles contract is through electricity and electrochemical reaction, right? So when you introduce a huge amount of electricity

to your body, all at once, all the muscles in your body contract. And it's so much so that if you're not strapped and you would just fly right out of the chair. I think it must have been our electricity episode. We talked about how when people who have touched an electrical wire, their muscles have contracted so strongly

that they've thrown themselves across the room. Like you're not blown across the room by the electricity. That's your muscles contracting and shooting you across the room. That's why they have people strapped to the chair in the electric chair to keep them from shooting across the room when the electricity shoots through them. Yeah, and depending on what state you're in,

they're all gonna have their own protocol for how to carry out an electrocution. And we should also point out too that they are generally not used anymore. There are only nine states that still have that option. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. Are you noticing a trend?

I see a pattern. And then finally, Oklahoma. Not the only state, not in the South. But it's not something that is generally still used in the United States. No, but it is a backup. And it's not a backup, I think, if lethal injection is in work.

It's a backup if the prisoner specifically says, I don't want lethal injection. I want the electric chair. Right, so depending on where you are, the protocol is gonna vary. This one is pulled from Tennessee. That was an execution last year that Edmund Zagorsky, I guess, asked for the chair

because it was 2018. And this was the protocol. The electric chair will release 1,750 volts of electricity for 20 seconds. We'll stop for 15 seconds and then we'll release another 1,750 volts for another 15 seconds. After the first wave of electricity,

officials will wait five minutes and then close the blinds into the witness room. The doctor will check for signs of life. If there are none, the doctor will pronounce him dead. If he is still alive, the blinds will be raised. Another round, I assume, like an encore. The curtain goes back up and another round of electricity will be administered

and the doctor will be called in again. Right. How about that? That encore thing kind of got me stuck. I mean, I don't know. The parallels are obvious. So, yeah, but I think also in the lethal injection, when we explain the state witnesses,

people who are hired to come and witness on behalf of the people because the state is executing people on behalf of the people of that state. And these are the representatives of everybody else who lives in that state. I mean, yes, of course, there's no way you wouldn't get weirdos.

But if I remember correctly, they try to weed those people out. But yes, I get where you're coming from. I'm not trying to shoot your opinions down or anything like that. Sure. Yeah, so one of the things, like you said, there's like 1700 volts.

I've seen that's low. Like I've seen 2000 at least is what you want. And then the amps are really the big one because a voltage is kind of like the water pressure in a hose where the amps are like the actual flow rate of how much is coming through. So the amps are what kill you, they say.

But you have to balance the amps in that you wanna introduce enough amps through voltage into the inmate to kill them quickly and painlessly. Because I don't think we've said, the reason the electric chair was brought around was not to just set somebody on fire as you were executing them.

It was to, because it was thought to be like a painless and humane way to execute a prisoner. That's supposedly the point of executions. So you wanna balance a quick and painless death through enough amps and voltage introduced with not so many amps and not a high enough amount of voltage that you cook the person and set them on fire. That's basically the tightrope that a state executioner

who electrocutes somebody is walking in figuring out how much juice to deliver for the electric chair. Yeah, and I tried to find if, you know, I'd always heard that there were dummy switches and that like three guards will all flip a switch at the same time so no one knows if they were the one. And I think that was just,

I didn't see any support for that. And that may just be built on the old thing of the firing squad where someone has blanks. And, you know, so like one person, everyone basically can say, well, I may have had the blank. I may not have actually had the bullet in my gun. But that is apparently not the case with electric chairs and a volunteer throws one switch.

The, you know, it's generally a prison guard has said, this is something that I will do. I'm volunteering for this. You can't apparently force someone to do this. It's always a volunteer. Right, and depending on the state too, they might not actually work at the prison. They might, that might just be their job as an executioner.

It may be a second job they have or something like that. And from what I've seen, they're typically called electricians. The electro executioner is called an electrician. And New York had some very famous and prolific ones, kind of at the heyday of the electric chair in like the first half of the 20th century. Oh yeah?

Yeah, one of them killed, are you ready for this? This is one of the most gruesome things I've ever heard in my life. One of them killed seven men in secession in one day. Wow. And they had all seven men in sing-sing on death row, like in the death house at the same time. And so as one would be taken away,

the other 11 would just be sitting there like freaking out, like, and then the next one would come and it just kept whittling down. And as they went through this day of executions, that like the sense among the inmates, they were like almost losing their minds. It's one of the cruelest things I've ever heard in my life, at least in the modern era, you know?

There's no way to execute prisoners. And I believe they've really gotten away from that. You don't execute more than one person in a day at the same place. I think it's really kind of like your time to shine is your special day. You're not gonna share it with 11 other, or eight, six other people anymore.

But the executioner, the electrician for New York who did that, I can't remember his name right now, but he actually ended up taking his own life. Because apparently he was doing this to pay the medical bills for his wife, who was chronically ill. And this paid really, really well. And eventually she died, and he abruptly quit,

and then went and took his life. Wow. Yeah, so it's not like if you're an electrician or you're an executioner. I don't think it's kind of like this is a fun thing. Like I think this kind of destroys everybody involved, basically. Yeah, and so you mentioned that it was supposedly

the humane way of killing people. And we'll get to how that happened in a minute. But the two gentlemen, Jean-Louis Prevost and Frédéric Battelli, they, by the way, we got an email about someone who was not happy with my Italian. Did you see that? Yes, but we got a couple from people

who were Italian-Americans saying like, I love it, don't ever stop. Yeah, the one guy who said I went too far was also very upset about my characterization of New Englanders liking Dunkin' Donuts as well. Wow. So I sort of took that one with a grain of salt. That's a big fat, that's a salt lick, I think.

Yeah, and donut jokes, come on. Stop ragging on Dunkin' Donuts. So anyway, those two gentlemen, they did a lot of research into heart defibrillation in the 1890s. And the idea at that time was, hey, what's going on here when you electrocute someone is it instantly sort of kills the prisoner

by massive brain damage and a stoppage interruption of the heart. And so that's why they thought it was more humane than like hanging, which we'll get to in a sec. But that is not the case, as we will see from the scores of botched electrocutions over the years. Right, that's why if you read like these procedures

for executing a prisoner using electricity, there is two rounds of juice, invariably. And the first one supposedly destroys the brain. But the second one, remember how I said all the muscles in the body like contract? Well, one of the biggest muscles in the body is your heart and your heart contracts, which ironically protects it from dying.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, so that's why they'll stop with the electricity, the electrical flow for several seconds to let the heart like come out of seizure again. And then when they do it a second time, allegedly that is the one that's meant to destroy the heart. So initially the first one is supposed to destroy the conscious mind and then ultimately the brain.

And it supposedly happens very fast. The number you'll see bandied about is that it happens in one 240th of a second, which is faster than you can consciously register pain. So you're dead, you're at least unconscious and then you're dead right after that before you can feel pain. But the person I think I've seen associated with that

is a guy named Fred Luchter, who's actually like a well-known engineer of Tennessee's electric chair. And I believe a Holocaust denier too. And I didn't see anywhere else like any legitimate study that showed that. So, but it's like somebody said it and everybody's just gonna go with that.

But supposedly that's what the first juice does is knock you out and kill you brain-wise, you're brain dead. And then the second one kills your cardiac system. Yeah, it was, Aaron Morris did a documentary about him actually. About Fred Luchter, Luchter? Yeah, it was called Mr. Death. And part of it was on his work with the electric chair.

And then part of it was on your right, the fact that he is a notorious Holocaust denier. And guess what he does now? I have no idea. He apparently is a, works in the garden department of a Home Depot. Really? Yeah, in his old age.

Wow, I'm correct that he built Tennessee's electric chair. He wasn't an actual electrician, right, or an executioner. No, no, no, he, it's a really good documentary, of course, because it's Aaron Morris, but yeah, you should check it out. Cool, do you want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about a very famous Supreme Court case,

and then lots about hanging right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

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Okay, Chuck, so we're back. And you wanted to talk about the Supreme Court, you said, what about? ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] I love it when you're coy. Yeah, 1985, the US Supreme Court chose not to review a case, Glass v. Louisiana, which would have been a very big deal

because it was on the constitutionality of the electric chair. The whole, that whole thing about cruel and unusual punishment has always been a talking point when it comes to whether or not people should be put to death and just how to do that. And they chose, like I said, they chose not to review it,

but very famously, Justice William Brennan wrote a dissent that described an execution like this. And by the way, this part is particularly gruesome. So if you don't want to hear about this, then just tune out for like 20 seconds. When the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner cringes, leaps, and fights the straps with amazing strength.

The hands turn red and then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and rest on his cheeks. The prisoner often defecates, urinates,

and vomits blood and drool. Sometimes the prisoner catches on fire, particularly if he perspires excessively, and witnesses hear a loud and sustained sound like bacon frying, and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh permeates the chamber. And dude, we should point out like,

Brennan wasn't saying, you know, in the worst case scenario, this is what happens. That's a pretty standard, that's standard for an electric chair execution. And then there's like, there was one other thing too that I saw, still in the gruesome zone, everybody. You said that the, well, Brennan said

that the person gurgles often. They'll also sigh. And apparently it freaks out witnesses because they're like, he's still alive. And what happens, again, when the muscles contract, whatever air is in the lungs gets trapped in there because your epiglottis shuts tight. Just, it's not opening again.

So then when the electricity is turned off and your muscles relax, that air is expelled out. And it sounds like you're sighing or you're gurgling if there's fluid in there. And it's just another terrible facet of this, of this kind of execution. Yeah, so we promised talk of hanging, and that's really how the electric chair came about.

In Europe, they had long used the guillotine, but here in the United States, kind of from the beginning, I guess there were firing squads, but hanging was really the quote unquote, humane way of executing prisoners for a long time with the idea that if it's in the case of a gallows, that door would drop, you would drop,

and your neck would snap basically, and you would die very, very quickly. But that was not always the case. There was a man named Tom Ketchum in 1901, in the New Mexico territory. His head was completely torn off of his body. Yep, that's just one. There were plenty of them that actually happened to.

A woman named Eva Duggan, had that happen to her in Arizona in 1930 as well. And it's not like it's not, that's not the only possible outcome from a botched hanging. Like they can go the other way as well, where you're not, like your neck doesn't snap, or your head doesn't pop off, and you're just slowly suffocating.

There was the case of one guy, I think his name was William Williams, who was just born to lose apparently. He dropped and didn't, it didn't strangle, it didn't break his neck, it didn't do anything. And the prison officials had to like, basically strangulate him with the rope to kill him. And so all this stuff, and there's plenty of them,

all this stuff was making the news at the time. And it was kind of converging with a public sentiment, against the death penalty in general. So if the public's kind of like, I'm not quite sure we should be killing people. I don't feel very good about this. And the news of botched hangings are coming out, something's going to change.

And there are basically two things that can happen at a point in history like this. Either the society can say, you know what? Execution in general is just bad, bad news. And let's just not do that anymore. Or maybe we do need execution, but we need to find a better way to do it in pronto, because this is not okay any longer.

Yeah, there was another kind of hanging. You always think of the gallows and that trap door, but there's something called a suspension hanging, where the person is on the ground with a rope around their neck, and weights are dropped over a pulley, and then you are jerked up instead of being dropped, and that supposedly will snap your neck.

And that was the case with the execution of Roxalanna Drews in 1887. She was small, and so when that rope was jerked up, her neck was not snapped, and she slowly was strangled to death for about 20 minutes. And she had killed her husband, and that was a case that was controversial for a lot of reasons.

It was very much a pre-planned killing, but she claimed that she had been abused. She had her children involved in the killing. It's a pretty interesting story. She sent her 10-year-old out, and then had her teenage kids help out. So one of the kids tied a rope around her dad's neck. The woman, the mother, Roxalanna, shot him,

but I think didn't use the gun properly, so it didn't kill him. Gave the gun to her 14-year-old nephew. He shot him a few more times. The husband's laying there, unable to move, pleading for help, and then she comes barreling in with an ax and cuts his head off.

Geez. Yeah, so she takes the head and the body to the parlor. They stayed there for about a day. Then she cut the body up, burnt it, and got rid of the ashes, and then was found out. So, but the upshot of all this was when she was executed, she didn't die quickly and humanely. She died very slowly and painfully,

and very important publicly at a time when the public, in particular in New York, was like, we're better than this. And so, not strictly from her botched execution, but definitely, in part, because of it, New York said, we need to find a better way to do this. How can we execute somebody better? And they said, prominent lawyer,

Elbridge Thomas Jerry Goh. And so, Jerry formed. Well, he's like, well, you guys picked me first, so we're gonna call the commission, the Jerry commission. And he assembled two other guys, including a man named Alfred P. Southwick, who was a dentist, who was interested in this kind of stuff. He was like, you know what?

Being a dentist isn't scratching that sadistic itch. Right. He was basically like the founder of Ohio Art, you know? Yeah, exactly. So, the three of them get together, and they spend two years figuring out, like looking at different ways of execution, and they looked at all of them,

and they released this journal report, like a formal New York State government report, that details and chronicles all the different ways that you could officially kill somebody, from precipitation, which is pushing them off a cliff, to boiling them alive, whether you want it to be, you know, molten lead or water, doesn't really matter at that point,

to crushing from heavy stones. And they looked at 34 different methods of execution in detail, and they concluded that none of them were an improvement on hanging. That, yeah, some of them would definitely, like provide the public spectacle that would probably deter other people,

or make them think twice about killing somebody, but definitely no more humane, as inhumane as hanging could be, especially a botched hanging. So, they said, okay, well, we're back to square one, but one of us, Alfred P. Southwick, thinks he knows of a method that we haven't hit upon yet, and it was electricity.

No, he had seen a Marx Brothers movie, and he said, maybe we should just drop a safe on someone's head as they walk down the sidewalk. Right, they're like, yeah, it could kind of work, but if you miss, you just really maim them terribly. Yeah, so he came upon electrocution as what he felt was like the best way, because electricity was,

this is where we get into kind of things aligning, and carbon arc lining becoming widespread in cities, and people having street lights, and electricity in their houses was in big cities, was sort of a new thing, but it was super dangerous, and there were a lot of cases of people getting electrocuted that was a drunken buffalo, a drunk man who grabbed hold of a generator,

just to sort of see what it felt like, died instantly, and that's when Southwick was like, wait a minute, I think we're onto something here, if it can kill people just instantly, then that's kind of what we're after. Right, so the thing is, it's like that whole instantly thing, that's a little subjective. Yeah, it happened once to this guy.

Right, yeah, it happened one time, and then also, this is what an eyewitness standing, a little ways away says, it happened, he died instantly. Well, are you fudging a little bit, because instantly or not really kind of counts when you're looking for a new method of execution for a state to use over and over and over again, and to spread throughout all 50 states, basically.

It's really important that it's instant, and they were like, yeah, yeah, it's instant, let's just look into this one, because it's gotta be better than hanging. So they did, and when they found out that that when it became public and announced that they were kind of forming a subset to the Jerry Commission called Chuck.

The Electric Death Commission, best band name of all time. Yeah, we have arrived at the band name, everybody. Yeah, there's not a lot on this, even. I looked into this a little more, and it's not all over the internet, surprisingly. No, it's not, but I've seen it in some reputable sources, so it's not like it's just totally made up, or a myth, or a legend, or something like that.

I think it was, it was basically they said, okay, the Jerry Commission has done its job, we're gonna set ourselves up in this own commission, the Electric Death Commission, to basically show that electrocution is a good and humane way to take a life, right, for the state. So Alfred Southwick fell in with a guy named George Fell, appropriately enough.

George Fell was a surgeon, he was a tinkerer, an engineer, and he became extremely interested in the applications of electricity to cause death as well. And so Southwick and Fell basically got together and formed this like weirdo cabal to figure out how to create an electric chair. Yeah, this part I don't quite get, because I know that, and I can hardly even say this

and it's out loud, but I know that they practiced on stray dogs, like they electrocuted hundreds of dogs, but it says here they were supplied by the Buffalo ASPCA, not knowingly, right? Yes, I saw somewhere, Chuck, that for at this time, thanks to these guys, that became the method of euthanasia that the local animal shelters used on stray animals. Really?

Yeah, so I guess they started testing on them and it became like so useful, I guess, that the ASPCA said, hey, bring your equipment on over here. And they started using it to execute straights, that's what I saw. Wow, I'm sure they're not proud of that, part of their history of protecting animals from cruelty. I'm sure that they are not actually,

like please, please stop, just keep moving on, keep going, talk about Thomas Edison. Wow, so at the end of this and all of these dogs, they basically came to that conclusion that we talked about earlier was that electricity will instantly disrupt the heartbeat and the rhythm and death will be instant and painless. And New York passed a state law saying basically,

in 1888, that this is the way forward for us. Yeah, and again, this is long after the time when the two guys, Provost and Battelli, had shown, this is like the early 1800s, I think, that you could actually use electricity to restart somebody's heart. And then also now we know that actually electricity doesn't instantly kill you by causing a heart attack,

it does the opposite. The heart becomes, like goes into safe mode to protect itself and you have to hit it again to make it spasm and go into fibrillation. Because that's what fibrillation is, it's like in a non-rhythmic heartbeat to where you can't actually pump any blood out. That's a heart attack, right, or that's fibrillation,

that's cardiac arrest. That's not what happens when you get hit with the first jolt of electricity. So I don't know if Fel and Southwick were just making this up, or if it just happened that it did kill dogs like that or what, maybe they were using a massive amount or maybe they were using just the right level of amps,

I don't know, but they definitely demonstrated that this was something that could be done. But it wasn't just them, simultaneous to Southwick and Fel, who from everything I could tell were, aside from the fact that they killed a lot of dogs with electricity, were legitimate scientists who were doing this to find a humane alternative to hanging.

There was another guy who was the opposite of legitimate, wasn't a scientist, and was a fairly shady character named Harold Brown. Yeah, so off to the side, Fel and Southwick built the first actual chair. So just park that there for a moment. And then we have to talk. Just pop a squat, take a seat.

And then, no, don't sit there. Sit in the other chair. So we have to talk about the war of currents, which we've talked about on this, I think we did a whole podcast on this, right? Yeah, we did like, did Nikola Tesla change the way we use electricity? Answer, yes.

Yeah, so we don't need to go over all that again, but just very quickly, the war of currents, there was a big war between whether or not we were gonna move forward as a nation with AC power or DC power. Thomas Edison wanted that DC power. That was, he had invested heavily in that. So he was trying to make that one out.

And then George Westinghouse, of course, on the other side was working, had invested in AC power. And Brown, who you mentioned, he actually worked for Edison, is that right? Yes, but supposedly unbeknownst, he even testified under oath that he did not work for Edison

when he very well, very much did and had for years by that time. How interesting. Yeah, yeah, he was a shave ball. And the one thing that I can't figure out, Chuck, is whether he was truly a crusader against Westinghouse and AC power, like he genuinely thought it was dangerous.

And then he fell in with Edison, or if he was an Edison operative from the outset, that's what I've not been able to establish, but he was definitely working for Edison secretly. Interesting, so the Electric Death Commission gets in touch with Edison. And then the Grabster put this together for us, and I thought this was a very kind of great comparison.

He said, you know, what happened next is sort of like if the government said to Pepsi, hey, you guys are experts on soda, how should we kill someone with a soda? And Pepsi was like, here, we'll do lots of experiments that will prove to you that Coca-Cola will kill somebody very easily. And that's basically what happened is,

is Harold Brown, working with Edison, did all these gruesome public electrocutions to show how dangerous AC current was so they would adopt it for the electric chair, which would in turn, in his mind, give AC current a bad name. Right, I mean, that's as underhanded as a guess. Like if you are in competition in business,

that's like Uber calling fake lift rides when they started out. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. But this is way, way worse, but it's still in the same wheelhouse. But that's what Edison was doing. He was like, oh, yeah, totally, this is great.

Apparently he declined first to participate, have anything to do with this Electric Death Commission. And then he was like, oh, wait, yes, actually, I have a great idea. I would like to be involved. I really suggest that AC current be used. And he used Harold Brown to just basically carry out this whole thing.

So much so that Harold Brown managed to convince the Electric Death Commission that not only should AC current be used for the first electrocution in the state of New York, a Westinghouse generator should be used to generate that electrical current. And he tried to buy some generators from Westinghouse and they're like, no, no, you can't.

We know what you're gonna do with those. So we ended up buying second hand ones. And that kind of sets the stage for the first execution, which, if you ask me, is a really good point to take our second break. Agreed. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, we're in Auburn State Prison. It's August of 1890. And there's a guy named William Kemmler who is convicted of murdering his common law wife, Tilly, with an ax.

And when he was caught, he apparently had done it in a drunken rage. And I don't know if he felt remorse or guilt or was just bored with the whole thing. But he had a quote where he said something like, yes, I struck her with a hatchet. I intended to kill her. The sooner I am hung and it's over with the better.

Hanged. Hanged. I always get that wrong, don't I? Yeah. So the sooner I'm hanged and it's over with the better. And I guess he was not afraid of the noose, but when he found out that they were going to use electrocution and that he would be

the first ever human being to be executed by the state with electricity, he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you talking about again? And started to file lawsuits. So he actually also became the first person to challenge the constitutionality of the electric chair as a means of execution.

Yeah, that's kind of a crazy fact, I think. The very first person to go to the electric chair was the first person to be like, I don't think this is right. Yeah, it's true. But the Supreme Court said, no, no, they ruled against Kimmler and said, it does not violate the Eighth Amendment

to the Constitution. And he went, what about the excessive bail? And they went, I thought you were talking about cruel and unusual punishment. And he went, I was just kidding. Whatever you wanna hear. Yeah, so his execution, the very first one, was by all accounts botched pretty severely

in and of itself. Yeah, so you remember how, what was his name? Harold Brown managed to get Westinghouse generators used for that first execution, but he had to buy second hand ones. The first jolt of electricity that was sent through William Kimmler to kill him only lasted for 17 seconds, because one of the belts started to fall off the generator.

So they had to stop before it had killed him. And by all accounts, he was sitting there struggling with life left in him. And the New York Times reported that, quote, strong men fainted and fell like logs on the floor at the site. Yeah. It was a terrible thing to see.

And also if you look at the drawings of the execution that were used in the newspapers of the day, he's just sitting there in a chair surrounded by people like Harold Brown and George Fell and Alfred Southwick. And then the witnesses are all just milling around, like standing around watching him.

Like they're watching some guy like in a drinking contest or something. And that's how he was executed. So I would imagine like, you know, it'd be bad enough to be a witness to an execution today where it's real sterile and it's really clinical and there's a glass, thick glass window between you

when the curtain comes down to standing in the same room with somebody who's being electrocuted just a few feet away. That's gotta make it even worse, you know? Yeah. And so, you know, clearly not a more humane way after this first execution, but they press forward because, and I think Ed points out very astutely

that there was something about the fact that it was a use of technology that wasn't tie a rope around someone's neck or just put a bullet in their head that it seemed less offensive to the public at large, I think, because it's not the kind of thing like they didn't, if you're not a witness to it and you just read about something in the paper,

it may seem like there is an acceptable moral distance because of this technology. Right, right, right. So like when hanging came, when hanging was under fire for, you know, not being humane, new technology that kind of put more distance between you that just seemed more advanced.

And because it was more advanced in this kind of technocratic way of thinking, it was more humane, it was more high tech, so it must just be better. That was kind of how the electric chair came to replace hanging. But even though that first one was simply botched, the idea of it just made it, it allowed it to spread.

And from like all, not all the accounts, but most of the accounts that I saw of that first execution were just like, this is terrible, this is gruesome, this will probably never happen again. And then other states were like, oh, you cook them with electricity, huh? Like that idea, let me try that too.

And it spread fairly quickly and became far and away the dominant method of execution in the United States in the 20th century. Yeah, and there have been many, many, and you know, at the end, we'll talk about some more botched executions, but I don't think there are any more legendary than Willie Francis in 1946.

He was executed in Louisiana for a murder that to call his trial questionable and suspect is like an understatement. It seems like this guy was just totally railroaded. And you mentioned gruesome Gertie earlier, that was the name of the electric chair in Louisiana. In this case, for his execution, it was set up by a drunk prison guard

who apparently didn't set it up correctly. It was total human error. So he goes down in history as, to my knowledge, the only person who has ever been executed technically twice or because he survived his botched execution such that he lived completely through it. They couldn't use the chair anymore. And he actually lived to fight to say,

hey, you can't do this again, because that is totally, that is the definition of cruel and unusual. You tried to kill me once and it didn't work. And I'm here in court again, and the Yo Supreme Court said, no, sorry, you're gonna have to go to the chair again. Isn't that the craziest thing you've ever heard? Crazy.

So the guy, this wasn't like the guy survived and they're like, quick, quick, throw the switch again. He's still alive. We need to finish the job or whatever you wanna call it. This was the electric chair's broke after going through a full execution. The guy's still alive and lives for another year before they're like, all right,

we fixed the electric chair, it's time for you to die again. And they did it twice. And that second time, that was that. But that's the definition of cruel and unusual. I agree with you entirely. Yeah, and the interesting thing though is if you look, there were statistics put together about four or five years ago

that shows that the electric chair and like you said, we did one on lethal injection. That starting in the late 70s kind of became one of the more preferred choices for most states. But as far as what you would consider botch percentage, the electric chair kind of leads the way except for the firing squad.

Only 1.92 electrocutions are categorized as botched compared to 7.12% for lethal injection. Yeah, which is, that's a pretty good track record comparatively speaking, I guess. But then there's a really big point here too. It's like in a botched lethal injection, at least from the perspective of the witnesses, that's vastly preferred to a botched electrocution

where the person catches fire or something like that, right? Yeah, absolutely. But here's the problem with all of these, with comparing botchness and what's preferred in all of that one's much more, that's a much more tasteful botched execution than this one. We, because the medical profession has said,

we don't have anything to do with this. Like, yeah, a doctor can be present to pronounce the person dead, but the doctor is not going to assist in any way, shape, or form and still keep the medical license. We cause no harm, so we can't assist in executions, right? Our understanding of execution is coming, it's like anecdotal, like how to carry out an execution,

what protocol you should use. Like it's done by the people who are doing this almost through trial and error, or from people's data where they executed dogs a hundred something years ago. And that was what was used to kill, hundreds if not a thousand plus humans in, actually, but yeah, probably more than thousand humans

in the United States in the 20th century. The thing is this, Chuck, so you can stop there pretty easily and just say like, so we don't know if it was ever humane, we don't know if it did cause instant death, people catch on fire or whatever, but you actually, we've never known whether it does cause instant death,

because when your autopsy after your execution, your brain is cooked, like invariably, that is one of the byproducts of an electrocution. Your brain gets cooked basically through and through. It can be at like 120 degrees Fahrenheit at autopsy still, you know, dozens of minutes or an hour or so later when your brain is removed, it's still that hot, right? So we don't actually know if the electric chair

isn't humane or isn't painless, we don't really know. But then at the same time, an execution and whether it's tasteful or appears humane, it's yes, it's meant to be that way for the inmate, but it really is meant to be that way for society, because it has to be palatable and tasteful for society, or else society's gonna be like, nope, we can't do that anymore like we did with hanging.

And that is what happened actually with execution because of some botched executions in Florida in the 90s. Society said like, we've gotta find another way. I've heard about this lethal injection thing, let's try that instead. Yeah, I mean, should we talk about some of these awful stories? Yeah. So let me see here.

October 1985 in Indiana, electrocution of William Van Diver. The first administration of 2,300 volts, he was still breathing. The execution took a total of five volts, I'm sorry, five jolts in 17 minutes. The smell of smoke of hair and flesh burning, the Department of Corrections said this, quote,

the execution did not go according to plan. Yeah, they like to be droll it sounds like. How about Horace Franklin Duncan's Jr. 1989 in Alabama, two jolts of electricity, nine minutes apart. The first jolt failed to kill him, and the captain of the prison guard opened the door to the witness room and said, I think we've got the jacks on wrong.

They reconnect the cables correctly, and death was pronounced 19 minutes after the first charge. But the first charge, it's not like it wasn't painful. It was probably more painful than the second one, because the second one produced death, but it was not, it couldn't possibly produce the kind of voltage that would kill a person. It was just basically torture,

like a little torture starter, like they have a TGI Fridays, and then that was followed by the entree, which was death, which is not supposed to happen. So again, if you'll kind of harken back to all these news stories coming out, like, oh, this is not how we're supposed to be executing people, what's going on?

This is starting to go on in the 80s and then early 90s around the United States with electrocution. Yeah, this one in Georgia, 1984, Alpha Otis Stevens. The first charge failed to kill him. He struggled to breathe for eight minutes, and they carried out the second charge. After the first two-minute power surge,

there was a six-minute pause, so his body could cool enough so physicians could examine him. And in that six-minute period, he took 23 breaths, which, if you do the math, and think about how intermittent those breaths are, and then the quote from the Georgia prison official was, "'Stevens was just not a conductor of electricity.'"

But, how about that? And then there were three, Chuck, there were three in Florida that really kind of galvanized public opinion against electrocutions. Joseph, or Jesse Joseph Teferro, Pedro Medina, and a guy named Alan Lee Davis. And Teferro and Medina both caught on fire. I think Teferro's head had like six-inch flames shooting out

from under the crown, under the electrode on his head, and Medina had like a foot flames, and like so much that his whole, he was just charred. His head was charred during the execution. Again, we don't know that he actually suffered, but that's not what the public wants to see or read about when we leave it to the state to execute people humanely. That's not supposed to happen.

And then Alan Lee Davis very famously had photographs taken of him after his execution, and his face seems to be very clearly contorted in a look of pain. He was a very big man, like 350 pounds, and a tremendous amount of blood loss. It looks like it came out of his mouth, and maybe even his chest,

but they later determined that it came out of his nose, but there's just a lot of blood. And they also said like, well, the guy was on blood thinners, so it's pretty clear this happened, but it doesn't really mean anything. He got a nosebleed during the electrocution, and the public said, we don't care.

That's number three down in Florida alone. Go find something else. Let's try this lethal injection thing. Yeah. I did a list actually. I think Nebraska in 2008 was the last state to stop using the electric chair as their primary source, but I was curious, like which state just

has executed the most people, period, by whatever means, and Texas leads the way. What? They have two stats since 1930 and since 1976, but Texas has executed 1,800, I'm sorry, 841 people since 1930. Georgia's number two actually with 436, but since 1976, Georgia has executed 74 people

to Texas's 563. Oh my gosh. And since 76, Virginia's actually second, and then Florida is third, both have over 100. Would not have guessed Virginia. Florida, I probably would have guessed. Texas I knew, but wow, that's a significant, that's a long gap between number one and two.

Yeah, and Texas has always been criticized as death penalty, happy? I would say that's a fair characterization sadly. Prove it's wrong, Texas, you can't do it. Yeah. So remember, we said that everybody was like, no more electrocutions, let's find something else. They went to the lethal injection,

which is supposedly more humane. I was reading this article by a law professor named Austin Sarat, who basically said, those two prisoners in Tennessee in December of 2018 alone opted for the electric chair because they didn't have faith that lethal injection was going to be less painful or less prolonged, they wanted the electric chair instead. And that up to this point, every time we've changed

what our method of execution is, it's been technologically speaking, socially speaking, a step forward in that kind of area. And that going back to the electric chair is a huge step backwards. And to him, it represents a major crisis in the legitimacy of the death penalty. And he was, I guess, kind of wondering without saying it,

like is this the beginning of the end for the death penalty in the United States again? Interesting. I thought so too. But that's electric chairs. You can buy one or you could. I think it's once sold in 2012. Tennessee's old Sparky sold in 2012, if I'm not mistaken.

Really? Yeah, on an online auction for $25,000. Marilyn Manson? I don't know. I heard it was being put in a museum in Tennessee, so probably not. Gotcha. But that's electric chairs, like I said, everybody.

And if you wanna know more about them, you can go look around the internet. You can also just leave this behind forever. It'll kind of be nice to shed this one, because it was some grim research. Yeah, I agree. And since I say sorry for putting us through this one, Chuck, this is a Josh pick, everybody.

Since I, I mean, like halfway through research into today, I was like, God, man, I just feel just bad right now, you know? And then you had a panini and everything was OK. Yeah, it was a good panini for sure. Well, since we said panini, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm curious if you're gonna, this is the one, Josh. But here we go. Hey, guys, I just recently started listening to podcasts,

because apparently I'm a Luddite. So I've been wading my way through the old episodes. I listened to the one on Soundness, and I wanted to let you know there is a Holiday Inn just outside of Toledo in Parisburg. Did you see this email? Yeah, I did. I responded, actually.

Oh, OK. Well, I can't wait to hear what happened. It's called the Holiday Inn French Quarter, which used to be a holodome, and to which it is possible to have, or was possible to have a pool membership. In addition to three pools in a large hot tub, the hotel has a large sauna. And I am positive that this is the Holiday Inn

that Josh's dad took him to when he was a kid. Staple for over 50 years. Unfortunately, the hotel will be closing at the end of the month. After losing its Holiday Inn flag to a new build, that is from Deanna Pollen. Yep. Is that the one?

No, it's not. Oh. But my family used to go on staycations at that French Quarter holiday. Oh, really? It was like two towns over. And it was pretty awesome when you were a kid. I think she's kind of underselling

at the three pools in the hot tub. Like, the pools were meandering and went all over the place. There were like bridges over them. So you'd swam under bridges. They would go out. So they were like indoor outdoor pools. It was pretty awesome. But my pool membership and sauna membership

was at the Holiday Inn near Southwick Mall, which that Holiday Inn is now an assisted living tower, I believe. But for a little while, in between being a Holiday Inn and being an assisted living tower, it was abandoned. And one of the coolest photosets you can look at are abandoned hotels. And somebody went to the trouble

of getting photos inside this abandoned Holiday Inn. It's really cool, including the pool. So just look up, I think, abandoned Holiday Inn, Toledo, Ohio, Southwick Mall, maybe, and I'll probably bring it up. Well, maybe you'll end up there one day and bring it full circle. Yeah, I was depressed that the French Quarter's

going under, though. That was a great, great little place. And I was talking to you, and I was like, oh man, did I ever tell you about my family staying at the French Quarter? She's like, yes, you told me your family went on vacation two towns over at Holiday Inn. I was like, yeah, that was great, though.

I think the best one was the pool that was in the highway median. What was that one? Oh, I just thought that was like the fourth pool. Oh, right. The use at your own risk pool. Right, it was disconnected. You had to run like heck to get to it.

That's right. Well, Chuck, you got anything else? No. Well, if you want to get in touch with us to let us know about some part of my childhood being shut down forever, we'd love hearing about that kind of stuff. You can go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com

and look for our social links. And you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.