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Electric Chair Is History," Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 27, 2002. On requests to attend executions, see Edmund W Holmes, "Anatomy of a Hanging," Pennsylvania Medical Journal 4 (1901): 737-74. On electrocution exhibits at a dime museum, see Monthly Catalogue, Eden Musee, March 1893, November 1906, Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Kathleen Kendrick, '"The Things Down Stairs': Containing Horror in the Nineteenth-Century Wax Museum," Nineteenth-Century Studies 12 (1998): 1-35. On the chair at the world's fair, see Moses P. Handy, Official Directory of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1893), 648; Shaw, World's Fair Notes, 44. On electric chair carnival sideshows, see Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, 129-31.

12. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 467,489, emphasis in original. Also see H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 62-64; H. Bruce Franklin, "Billy Budd and Capital Punishment: A Tale of Three Centuries," American Literature 69 (1997): 337-59. Twain may have been inspired by a statement made by Edison in his first public statement on the electrocution law: "An electric light current will kill a regiment in the ten-thousandth part of a second." New York World, June 22,1888.

13. William Dean Howells, "Execution by Electricity," Harper's Weekly 32 (1888): 23. Puzzled by Howells's irony, one electrician wrote, "So far as I can make out from his language, he favors the use of electricity." Thomas D. Lockwood, "Electrical Killing," Electrical Engineer 7 (March 1888): 89-90. Howells had a good reason for expressing his opposition to the new method in such an indirect style. In 1887 he courageously criticized the conviction of innocent men for the Haymarket bombing and as a result became the target of harsh public criticism. See Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 288-97; Timothy L. Parrish, "Haymarket and Hazard: The Lonely Politics of William Dean Howells," Journal of American Culture 17 (Winter 1994): 23-32.

*Most of the documents in TAEM and TAEB also can be found on the Edison Papers Web site: http://edison.rutgers.edu. Bernstein, "The Damnable Alternating Current," Proceedings of the IEEE 64 (1976): 1339-43; Theodore Bernstein, "'A Grand Success': The First Legal Electrocution Was Fraught with Controversy Which Flared Between Edison and Westinghouse," IEEE Spectrum 10 (February 1973): 54-58; Thomas Metzger, Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla, and the Electric Chair (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1996); Craig Brandon, The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999); Arnold Beichman, "The First Electrocution," Commentary 35 (1963): 410-19; Roger Neustadter, "The 'Deadly Current': The Death Penalty in the Industrial Age," Journal of American Culture 12 (1989): 79-87; Paul A. David, "Heroes, Herds and Hysteresis in Technological History: Thomas Edison and 'The Battle of the Systems' Reconsidered," Industrial and Corporate Change 1 (1992): 129-80. Richard Moran, Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (New York: Knopf, 2002), was published too late for consideration here.

ART CREDITS

Images on the pages noted have been supplied by the following sources:

Jean Antoine Nollet, Essai sur l'Electricité des Corps (Paris, 1746), frontispiece. Courtesy Bakken Library

Illustrations by Martie Holmer

Courtesy U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site

Giovanni Aldini, Essai Théorique et Expérimentale su le Galvanisme (Paris, 1804). Courtesy National Library of Medicine

Adapted from Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, Edison: His Life and Inventions, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 917. Courtesy Cornell University Libraries

Scientific American 44 (April 2, 1881): 207. Courtesy Cornell