The electric chair was chosen as an execution method for being scientific and modern

Evidence

From the carefully documented history of the electric chair written by Trombley, we read 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 set to find the proper methods of execution fell for the arguments carrying 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. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 453

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis of instrumental reason and technological rationality as civilization’s dark core.
• CANDY: The first electrocution drew fourteen doctors among twenty-five witnesses, and choosing it sparked an Edison-versus-Westinghouse current war.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 453