Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.58 (902 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0375410597 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"Boring" according to Marifrances. Although I learned some interesting facts, truthfully, this book was dry and boring. It was like reading a long college paper.. J.E. Stephens said Great for Teaching Reading Skills. I bought this to use in my 6th grade reading classroom. It is excellent to use to teach reading skills such as main idea, author's purpose, or summarizing. I put it in a center and students have 10 minutes to use the book for an assignment. Since it is at a lower reading level, students have success in building skills to use in higher level texts.. RET said shockingly good popular history. 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 t
Westinghouse, determined to keep AC from becoming known as the “executioner’s current,” fought to stop the first electrocution, claiming that use of the electric chair constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The legal battle that ensued ended when the Supreme Court refused to rule. Six years later George Westinghouse lit up Buffalo with his less expensive alternating current (AC). Richard Moran shows that Edison, in order to maintain commercial dominance, set out to blacken the image of Westinghouse’s AC by persuading the State of New York to electrocute condemned criminals with AC current. The amazing story of how the electric chair developed not out of the desire for a method of execution more humane than hanging but of an effort by one nineteenth century electric company to discredit the other.In 1882, Thomas Edison launched “the age of electricity” by lighting up a portion of Manhattan with his direct current (DC) system. Moran makes clear how this industry tug-of-war raised many profound and disturbing questions, not only about electrocution but about the technological nature of the search for a humane method of execution. And the fundamental question, he says, remains with us today: Can execution ever be considered humane? A superbly told tale of industrial and
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. Meanwhile, Westinghouse surreptitiously underwrote the appeals of the condemned man, William Kemmler, challenging the constitutionality of electrocution. 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. . 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