Volume 50, Number 13 · August 14, 2003
Goodbye, William!
By Richard Cohen
Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair
by Richard Moran
Knopf, 271 pp., $25.00
On July 30, 1888, before an invited audience, one of the first executions by electrocution took place. The condemned prisoner was a seventy-six-pound dog of both uncertain provenance and unproven transgressions who answered to the name of Dash. The dog, incarcerated in a wooden cage, was brought before about seventy-five electricians assembled at the Columbia College of Mines in New York City. Bound, muzzled, and fitted with electrical contacts, he was initially zapped with 300 volts, which made him yelp and whimper but failed to kill him, then 400 volts, which also failed to do the job, and then 700 volts, which caused him to tear off his muzzle. Some of the witnesses, appalled at the dog's obvious suffering, demanded that Dash be instantly destroyed—which he was with a burst of alternating current.
Review, 3401 words
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