The electric chair was adopted on scientific and progress-minded grounds

Evidence

And we learn from the carefully documented history of the electric chair written by Trombley that the first electrocution (of William Kemmler, held on 6 August 1890 in New York’s Auburn State Prison) ‘excited a great deal of medical interest, and of the twenty-five witnesses who watched Kemmler killed by electricity, fourteen were doctors.’ We also learn that the invention of the electric chair became an occasion of thorough scientific debate about the respective advantages of alternating and direct currents, and caused a heated public argument between such supreme luminaries of modern technology as Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. We learn in addition that the distinguished members of Governor Hill’s commission charged with finding the proper methods of execution fell for the arguments that carried the authority of science and progress: what convinced them was that electricity, ‘the invisible and imperfectly understood form of energy was quintessentially modern’; it was also clean and promised to be cheap – and the members of the commission were duly impressed. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 700

Categorization

• CANDY: Fourteen of twenty-five witnesses at the first electrocution were doctors — a punchy, self-contained historical detail.
• SHARE: The Edison–Westinghouse current war reaching into execution technology is a niche detail a specific person into electrical history would relish.

Related

• The electric chair was chosen as an execution method for being scientific and modern (similarity 0.94)