On 4 Jan. 1903, Thomas Edison electrocuted Topsy the circus elephant to demonstrate the dangers of alternating current electricity.

On 4 Jan. 1903, Thomas Edison electrocuted Topsy the circus elephant to demonstrate the dangers of alternating current electricity.


Topsy had killed one trainer (who had burned the elephants with lit cigarettes), and was aggressive to 2 other trainers (who had prodded her with pitchforks) and was deemed unsafe. Thomas Edison agreed to execute the elephant as part of his campaign to discredit his rival Westinghouse. Edison was a proponent of direct current electricity and had refused to accept the superiority of AC technology when it was presented to him by Nikola Tesla.  Westinghouse bought some of Tesla’s patents, however, and began installing AC generators around the country. Edison believed them to be dangerous predicting, ““Westinghouse will kill a customer within 6 months.”



In 1890, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in an electric chair, and Edison argued that the Westinghouse AC current was the most effective method.  He even coined a term for the execution. The convicted criminals would be “Westinghoused.”

Westinghouse had contributed $100,000 toward legal fees for Kemmler’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and unsuccessfully argued that death in the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Topsy was killed with 6,000 volts of AC current and Edison filmed the elephants death as part of his campaign against Westinghouse.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WARNING! PHOTO BELOW ARE NOT MET FOR THE WEAK HEART.

Image
WARNING! PHOTO BELOW ARE NOT MET FOR THE WEAK HEART. Please note: The following subject matter is of immense importance, but could be difficult to read. There is a Frank Discussion Of Rape And Other Atrocities Committed During War. After entering a large museum in one of the world’s most ancient cities and the former capital of the Chinese empire, Nanking—or Nanjing as it’s known today—my 18-year-old daughter Sophia and I walked over a glass walkway that allowed us to look down 10 feet of earth and observe an ancient footpath. Lights highlighted the ground under the glass while the room we were in was dark.  To our right hung numerous photographs on a black wall showing Japanese soldiers slaughtering Chinese citizens in December 1937 revealed by individual lights, the types one sees on art museum paintings. Dead babies, severed heads, piles of bodies on Yangtze River banks, and helpless prisoners of war were all documented there by photographs taken by the perpetrators themselves, Impe
Read more

During World War II, millions of people were sent to concentration camps, including women. Women in

Image
During World War II, millions of people were sent to concentration camps, including women.  Women in concentration camps were subjected to brutal treatment and often faced more severe conditions than their male counterparts. The conditions in the camps were inhumane, and women were often subjected to forced labor, starvation, and medical experiments. Women were treated differently in concentration camps than men. They were often separated from their families, forced to perform hard labor, and subjected to sexual abuse. Women who were pregnant were also subjected to harsh conditions and medical experimentation. Many women were killed, either as part of the genocide or because they were deemed too weak to continue working. One of the most notorious concentration camps where women were held was Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, women were subjected to forced labor, starvation, and medical experimentation. Many were killed in gas chambers or through other forms of execution. The camp was designed
Read more

At the Gates of Hell: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945

Image
At the Gates of Hell: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945 Compared to the appalling number of men, women and children killed at the Nazi extermination camps places like Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka and others where, cumulatively, millions perished the death toll at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany was (a horrible thing to say!) relatively small. More than a million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone; at Belsen, by most estimates, fewer than 100,000 died from starvation and disease (typhus, for example), as well as outright slaughter But in the spring of 1945, photographs and eyewitness accounts from the liberation of camps like Bergen-Belsen afforded the disbelieving world outside of Europe its first glimpse into the abyss of Nazi depravity. All these years later, after countless reports, books, oral histories and documentary films have constructed a terrifyingly clear picture of the Third Reich’s vast machinery of murder, it’s difficult to g
Read more

Senseless, how will a man castrate himself knowing the pains involved.

Image
Senseless, how will a man castrate himself knowing the pains involved. Driven to extremes by the expectations loaded on them, some men turned to self-castration. Stories such as these show how self-castration made literal the feelings of emasculation which men suffered when they were unable to maintain control in their romantic relationships, whether from poverty, impotence, or because of a domineering partner. Self-castration was particularly strongly associated with men’s fear of being cuckolded and of raising children who were not their own. One 18th-century surgeon told his readers of a gory case in which a man ‘on a suspicion of his wife’s incontinency, and thereby to discover the truth’ decided to geld himself in an upstairs chamber. He was discovered when the blood from the wound ran through the floor and was noticed by the residents of the room below, but luckily was ‘rescued from the most imminent danger’ by the surgeon’s timely arrival. Stories like these were so notorious
Read more

Impalement in the history: Worst way to die

Image
Impalement in the history: Worst way to die The verb “Khazak” in Arabic means penetrating or stabbing, It is the source of the word “Khauzakah” – Impalement, which refers to an inhuman sadistic practice based on the use of a wooden stick with a pointed tip that is pushed through a human body, often through the anus or vagina, then they lift the stick up in the air and hold it to the ground vertically, and the victim rises with it as if he is sitting over it, and the tip of the stick begins to dive into his body more and more by gravity, until it penetrates the viscera and comes out again across the shoulder or mouth. The speed of death varies according to the experience of the executioner. The more the tip of the stick is pointed, the more greased it is, the faster it passes through the body, and the sooner death occurs. The medieval executioners had creative ways and methods to increase agony. Perhaps they used a thick stick and made its head flat, so as to not penetrate the body q
Read more

My Shocking Experience With Patient In A Hospital

Image
My Shocking Experience With Patient In A Hospital I once cared for a middle-aged patient who presented to emergency with a dildo-related very embarrassing situation. He purchased the toy for one of his sexcapades. Curiosity hit. And he shoved the damn thing in his pooper, high-high up! “Me first” attitude didn’t do him much good. Funny feelings subsided fairly quickly and the horror struck when he couldn’t get it out. His drainage was jammed, the toy was slipping further up and after about 24 hours of wishfully waiting for it to naturally pass, it hurt bad enough to seek medical help. The official party line, that he vehemently iterated, was I just fell onto it, how else do you think it got up there! Needless to say, emergency surgery was necessary and he landed in the ICU with sepsis related post-op complications. It took him loooong before being able to use the toilet normally! ** NOT the patient’s X-ray, but it looked similar** Though I have seen some really absurd stuff in the ER,
Read more

The teenage girls who flirted with Nazis before luring them into woods and shooting them

Image
The teenage girls who flirted with Nazis before luring them into woods and shooting them Red lipstick and shiny eye shadow were unlikely but important weapons deployed by members of the Dutch resistance when taking on Nazi soldiers. Freddie and Truus Oversteegen, two sisters, and their best friend Hannie Schaft would put on their best clothes and fastidiously apply their make-up before going into bars to seek out unsuspecting targets. The young girls, who were active in the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, would then strike up conversations with Nazi soldiers or Dutch collaborators. They would giggle and bat their eyelashes as they cajoled them into disclosing classified information. Then they would lure them into the woods on the pretext of a “romantic walk” – and shoot them dead. Freddie and Truus survived the war but Hannie, who is far more famous than the Oversteegen sisters, was caught and executed by the Nazis just three weeks before the war came to an end. The
Read more

Documents reveal horrors mistreated New Zealand war prisoners endured

Image
This is horrific, removing of breast and other documentation reveal horrors mistreated New Zealand war prisoners endured Documents that have been declassified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade have revealed the sordid actions of enemy soldiers committing war crimes during World War II. Among the letters detailing poor treatment is an account from one Norma Smallfield, who said she was living with her husband in British North Borneo in May 1942 when they were captured and detained. "With 48 other women and children I was interned in the convent at Jesselton," Smallfield said. "We were stationed at the convent for about four months. We were [then] transferred to Kuching Internment camp in Sarawak. We travelled to Kuching for five days by ship. "Conditions on the ship were very crowded, no sleeping accommodation was provided other than the deck, half of which was used by the Japanese soldiers." Smallfield, who was 48 when she was captured by the J
Read more

Alternative Service: Conscientious Objectors and Civilian Public Service in World War II

Image
Alternative Service: Conscientious Objectors and Civilian Public Service in World War II During World War II, a new program gave young men who refused to wear a uniform other ways to serve their country. “ smokejumpers ,” these men were trained to parachute into remote areas to fight fires. Smokejumping had proved to be a practical, effective tool against forest fires in locations without road access as early as 1935. By 1943, the program was growing, but suffered from manpower shortages due to the demands of the war. Conscientious objectors began to inquire about joining the program, and 70 were trained that year to become smokejumpers. By the next year more than 100 COs were part of smokejumping teams in the west. Unlike most COs in the Civilian Public Service who worked unpaid, smokejumpers earned a meager five-dollar a month salary. In the off season, they performed forest maintenance, similar work to other COs. Despite their willingness to perform vital, and at times, life-enda
Read more

The grim history of capital punishment in Kent

Image
The grim history of capital punishment in Kent On April 8, 1930, a piece of paper was pinned to a door outside Maidstone prison - a seemingly innocuous act, but a momentous one in that it put a full stop to centuries of legally sanctioned death on behalf of the state in Kent. The piece of paper announced that Sidney Harry Fox had been hanged - and gave Fox the dubious honour of being the last man to swing for his crimes in the county. Almost exactly a year pr eviously he'd ok convinced his 63-year-old mother Rosaline to make a will in his favour, then insured her life before strangling her on the date the policy expired – October 23, 1929 – in a hotel room in Margate. Fox might have got away with the killing - a doctor having initially deduced that Rosaline died from suffocation and shock caused by a fire in her hotel room. But suspicions over the death led to her body being exhumed. A forensic examination ruled she had been strangled to death. And so Fox's fate was seal
Read more