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Why Did The USA Adopt The Electric Chair?
The hidden story of personal animus and commercial rivalry
Magpies, small children, and certain overly-impressionable adults are frequently attracted to shiny new objects. In our modern world, shiny new objects are generally technological. Thus every time a new technology emerges, fanboys quickly thereafter likewise emerge and believe whatever the new technology happens to be, it will automatically be “the answer” to everything. Today blockchain is our fashion du jour and according to its boosters, fast-food chains will soon be offering fried chicken based on blockchains, and Dior is rumored to be working on a line of blockchain-enabled perfumes for the wealthy and irredeemably gullible.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, electricity was the shiny new technology. Electric lights in homes were replacing smelly and dangerous gas lamps. Electricity powered the distance-destroying invention of the telegraph system. Electricity would also power the astonishing technology of the telephone, which ultimately would enable a person on one side of a large country to speak to someone on the other side with almost the same facility as though they were in the same room. One or two far-sighted inventors were even making electric motor vehicles. Unfortunately, as we humans can never see a new technology…
