You see stories of people getting accidentally electrocuted in everyday life and dropping dead instantly, why aren’t electric chairs engineered with that amount of power?
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We started using electric chairs because Thomas Edison was desperately trying to make his DC power dominate (completely impractical) over AC power, so he would set up demonstrations of killing old circus and zoo animals with Tesla’s AC system. Even demonstration of it on a convict. It actually backfired on him because all people remembered was EDISON and the shocking death of some poor creature, especially the last one, an elephant.
NY kept the chair Edison provided and continued to use it.
DC is totally impractical for delivery of electricity to consumers as it requires a separate pair of wires to each user. There are photographs of some streets with hundreds of wires on poles for just one block, and you would need a power generator within blocks.
Death by electricity is … iffy. We have general guidelines, but we cannot say for sure that electricity X will kill all people because there are variables in people and conditions, and there’s even luck involved based on your heart rhythm when electricity is applied. They picked a number and rolled with it, one high enough that it should kill most of the time, but low enough to not cause an immediate fireball.
Overall, the chair was meant to save capital punishment. There had been some gruesome hangings in the US, and people were losing their taste for executions. This was supposed to be a less horrific method so people wouldn’t start opposing execution. Then this got a bad rap so we moved to gas chambers, then that got a bad rap so we moved to IV drugs.
It’s because the right to lifers want to see these people suffer. There are many ways to kill people instantly and humanely, our sick society just refuses to do so
Probably a shortage of amperage. If you hooked up some heavy duty capacitors to that thing prime then and juice someone so bad that it cooked them instantly you could easily kill someone instantly with an electric chair I think they use a weaker amperage and higher voltage and chairs so that it looks less cruel and doesn’t fried people instantly
I once was electrocuted by a super high voltage decent amperage neon sign. Had a burn through my palm and through my opposite ball off foot. I was suspended by the shock and only survived because I let my body lean off the ladder and fall resulting in a broken leg but better than being fried. Years later I got the ride of my life wiring in a pool pump from a arced underground wire. I tend to stay away from electric jobs nowadays.
The electric chairs that were used are 2000 volts. They deliberately put the electrodes on your head and leg. Your body and your brain run on electricity. The second the switch is turned on and you get the juice, your brain is completely overwhelmed by the high voltage and current and you immediately cease to be a thinking entity. Your brain is off for all intents and purposes. After that, it’s just a question of how long it takes to stop the heart. But it really doesn’t matter how long it takes, because your brain is not active. Its’ fried.
If you really wanted to kill people faster, you would put the electrodes on each arm, insuring a direct path through the heart. When you see people who have been shocked and they instantly go limp, you know the shock went through their heart and stopped it. The problem with this method is that before your heart actually stopped, it would be extremely painful, since your brain would still be active. At least for a moment. So scrambling your brain, seems to be the most humane way to electrocute someone.
Because they dont want to.
In a class discussion about death penalty I proposed the rocket powered guillotine and everyone looked at my I am the barmy one…
We can incarcerate criminals for life making capital punishment unnecessary. Perhaps in the fullness of time they could repent. That time is not there if they were executed years ago.
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