Electricity as an Executioner.

Bruce Herald, Volume IX, Issue 802, 12 May 1876, Page 3

Electricity as an Executioner.

The revolting scenes accompanying the execution of several criminals in America are well calculated to bring to public notice the disadvantages of hanging as a mode of capital punishment. The teachings of science are heeded and sought for in the building of prisons, in the management and care of convicts, and in every modern correctional system ; and yet in bo simple and easy a process as the extinguishing of human life they are utterly ignored. The moßt certain and painlesß death known to science is caused by the lightning stroke, or by, what amounts to the same thing, the electric shock. When a powerful discharge of electricity is received in the body, existence simply stops, and the reason is obvious. Helmholtz has proved that, for any vibration which results in sensation to reach the brain through the nerves, one- tenth of a second of time is required. Furthermore, time is also needed for the molecules of the brain to arrange themselves through the effect of that vibration, through the motions and positions necessary to the completion of consciousness, and for this an additional period of one- tenth of a second is expended. Consequently, if, for example, we prick our finger with a pin, it takes two-tenths of a second for us to feel and recognise the hurfe. It can easily be conceived, therefore, that if an injury is inflicted which instantly unfits the nerves to transmit the motion which results in sensation, or if the animating power is suddenly suspended by an injury to the brain before the latter completes consciousness, then death inevitably follows with no intervention of sensibility what- 1 ever. Now a rifle bullet, which traverses the brain in the one-thousandth of a second, manifestly must cause this instant stoppage of existence, and proof of this is found in the placid faces of the dead, and in the fact that there is nothing more common than to firjd men lying dead on battle-fields, shot through the brain, but with every member stiffened in. the exact position it was in when the bullet did its J work. But a rifle ball is slow beside the electric shock. Persistence of vision impresses a lightning flash on the retina for one-sixth of a second, but its actual duration is barely one one-hundred-thousandth of a second. The effect of the shock on the system is excellently described by Professor Tyndall, who, while lecturing before a large audience, inadvertently touched the wire leading from fifteen charged Leyden jars, and received the whole discharge through the body. Luckily the shock was not powerful enough to be fatal ; but as the lecturer regained his senses, he experienced the astonishing sensation of all his members being separate and gradually fastening themselves together. He says, however, that " life was blotted out for a sensible interval," and he dwells with much stress upon the opinion that " there cannot be a doubt that, to a person struck by lightning, the passage from life to death occurs without consciousness being in the least degree implicated. It is an abrupt stoppage of seusation, unaccompanied by a pang." So much for the death which, by suitable alteration of the law, we would have substituated for slow strangulation. The next point is its practical accomplishment. Instead of building a gallows aDd providing a rope, the sheriff, advised by a competent electrician, would procure a powerful Ruhmankorff coil and a heavy battery. These instruments would rarely need replacing, and would last indefinitely for other executions. The battery and coil should be of sufficient strength to deliver an IS-inch spark. la case of there being more thau one person to be executed, all of the condemned would be conducted with all due ceremony to the place of execution, the left band of one man handcuffed to the right hand of hia neighbor, and the conducting-wire fastened to bracelets on the disengaged wrists of both criminals, if only two are to be hanged, or to the wrieta of the outer men, if more than that number are to suffer. The culprits being seated so as to be seen by the legal witnesses, the sheriff presses a button. The evirrent is instantly established from the coil, passes through the b.odies of the men, and all is over. With a competent electrician, who might be a member of the police force, and apeclally charged with the duty, there would be no possibility of mistakes, The Bame ignominy which attaches to the gallows would be transferred to this mode of destruction, while the peculiar death by lightning, which, among the ignorant of all nations and ages, has been the subject of profound superstition, would without doubt, through ita very incomprehensibility and mystery, imbue the uneducated masses with a deeper horror. — ' Scientific American,'