Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair

A "fascinating and provocative" story (The Washington Post) of high stakes competition between two titans that shows how the electric chair developed through an effort by one nineteenth-century electric company to discredit the other.

In 1882, Thomas Edison ushered in the “age of electricity” when he illuminated Manhattan’s Pearl Street with his direct current (DC) system. Six years later, George Westinghouse lit up Buffalo with his less expensive alternating current (AC). The two men quick...