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the death penalty more humane. In 1847 a Brooklyn murderer was knocked cold with ether before he was hanged, on the theory that he would then not suffer during the drop. In the 1870s the New York Medico-Legal Society formed the Committee on Substitutes for Hanging and considered carbon monoxide, poisons, the garrote (a brass collar fitted with a screw that was turned until it crushed the spine), and the guillotine, before finally deciding that hanging remained the best option, because it shed no blood and produced death with reasonable certainty. Another physician came to the same conclusion after conducting an experiment on himself He had a friend strangle him near the point of death with a towel and at the same time prick him with a knife so that he could judge his level of sensation. After reviving, the physician reported that he lost consciousness in eighty seconds and felt no discomfort at all—not even from the "knife thrusts he was inflicting upon my hand." He concluded that, even if the neck did not break, hanging was not cruel.11

Despite these reassurances, many argued that science could offer a method more palatable than hanging, and electricity soon became a favored candidate. Benjamin Franklin's killing experiments were well known, as were the 1869 tests on pigeons, rabbits, and frogs by lethal chamber inventor Benjamin Ward Richardson. Also in 1869, a writer in Putnam's Magazine predicted that "with new scientific knowledge, a painless mode of killing may be discovered,—as by an electric shock." Scientific American claimed in 1873 that killing with electricity would be "certain and painless." After interviewing prominent physicians and electricians in 1879, the New York Herald concluded that electricity offered a "humane, effective and impressive" method of executing condemned criminals.12

The discussion of electrical execution in the Herald, like the earlier one in Scientific American, mentioned batteries, Leyden jars, and induction coils as sources of electricity. By the early 1880s a more potent generator of electricity had become common: the dynamo.

ALTHOUGH ARC LIGHTING ACCIDENTS had claimed four lives in America by the end of 1882, the only one of those deaths to receive serious scientific attention was that of Lemuel Smith, the man who died after grasping the poles of a dynamo in the Buffalo Brush lighting plant in August 1881. The morning after the accident, Joseph Fowler, Buffalo's coroner, conducted an autopsy. Smith's lungs were congested with blood, and the blood appeared to be somewhat thinner than usual, but there was no obvious cause of death. If he had not known the circumstances of the case, Dr. Fowler said, he would not have known what killed the man. He was so intrigued by the case that he returned to the morgue for a second autopsy later in the day. After peeling back the skin from Smith's arms and chest, Dr. Fowler discovered the path of the current: a line stretching from shoulder to shoulder, about two or three inches in width, where the flesh was a little darker than the tissue on either side. A force potent enough to fell a man in seconds left only a delicate tracing upon the flesh.13

Alfred Porter Southwick

Reports of the autopsy caught the attention of Alfred Porter Southwick, a Buffalo dentist who had been following the debates on capital punishment and execution methods. After hearing about Smith's death, Southwick began to collect stray dogs and kill them with electric shocks. As a supporter of the death penalty, Southwick wanted to preserve capital punishment by removing the strongest objection to it: the pain it wrought on its victims, and the damage inflicted upon society by the spectacle of suffering. "Civilization, science, and humanity demand a change," he explained.14

Born in Ohio in 1826, Southwick had moved to Buffalo after finishing high school and found work on the steamboats, eventually becoming chief engineer of the Western Transit Company. Restless in that profession, he studied dentistry and opened a practice in 1862. Southwick helped found the state dental