Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair-Fast Shipping

Description

A “fascinating and provocative” story (The Washington Post) of high stakes competition between two titans that shows how the electric chair developed 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 illuminatedManhattan’s Pearl Street with his direct current (DC) years later, GeorgeWestinghouse lit up Buffalo with his less expensive alternating current (AC).Thetwo men quickly became locked in a fierce rivalry, made all the more complicatedby a novel new application for their product: the electric Edison setout to persuade the state of New York to use Westinghouse’s current to execute condemnedcriminals,Westinghouse fought back in court, attempting to stop the first electrocutionand keep AC from becoming the “executioner’s current.”In this meticulously researchedaccount of the ensuing legal battle and the horribly botched first execution, Moranraises disturbing questions not only about electrocution, but about about our society’stendency to rely on new technologies to answer moral questions.