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

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'.

"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.