On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
The revolting scenes accompanying the execution of several criminals in this vicinity are well calculated to bring to public notice the disadvantages of hanging as a a mode of capital punishment. The tt achings of Science are heeded and sought for in the building of prisons, in the management and care of convicts, and in every modern correctional system; and jet in so simple and easj a process as the extinguishing of human life, they utterly ignored.' The most certain, and painleps death known to Science is caused by the lightning stroke, or by, what amounts to the same thing, the electric shock. When a powerful discharge of electricity is received in the body, existence simply stops, and the reason is obvious. Helmholtz has proved that, for any vibration which results in sensation to reach the brain through the nerves.one tenth of a second of time is required. Furthermore, time is also needed for the molecules of the brain to arrange themselves through the effect of that vibration, through the motions and positions necessary to the completion of consciousness, and far this an additional period of one tenth of a second is expended. Consequently, if, for example, we prick our finger with a pin, it takes two tenths of a second for us to feel and recognize the hurt. It can easily be conceived, therefore, that if an injury is inflicted which instantly unfits the nerves to transmit the motion which results in sensation, or if the animating power is suddenly suspended by an injury to the brain before the latter completes consciousness, then death inevitably follows with no intervention of sensibility whatever. Now a rifle bullet, which traverses the brain in the one thousandth of a second, manifestly must cause this instant stoppage of existence, and proof of this is found in the placid faces of the dead, and in the fact that there is nothing more common than to find men lying dead on battle fields, shot through the brain, but with every member stiffened in the exact position it was in when the bullet did its work. But a rifle ball is slow beside the electric shock. Persistence of vision impresses a lightning flash on the retina for one sixth of a second; but its actual duration is barely one one-hundred thousandth of a second. The effect of the shock on the system is excellently described by Professor Tyndall, who, while lecturing before a large audience, inadvertently touched the wire leading from 15 charged Leyden jars, pnd received the whole discharge through his body. Luckily the shock was not powerful enough to be fatal; but as the lecturer regained his Eenses, he experienced the astonishing sensation of all his members being separate and gradually fastening themselves together. He says, however, that "life was blotted out for a sensible interval," and he dwells with much stress upon the opinion that " there cannot be a doubt that, to a person struck by lightning, the passage from life to death occurs without consciousness being in the least degree implicated. It is an abrupt stoppage of sensation.unaccompanied by a pang." So much for the death which, by suitable alteration of the law, we would have substituted for slow strangulation. The next point is its practical accomplishment. Instead cf building a gallows and providing rope, the sheriff, advised by a competent electrician, would procure a powerful Ruhmkorff coiland a heavy battery. These instruments would rarely need replacing, and would last indefinitely for other executions. The battery and coil should be of sufficient strength to deliver an eighteen inch spark. In case of their being more than one person to be executed, all of the condemned would be conducted with all due ceremony to the place of execution, the left hand of one man handcuffed to the right hand of his neighbor,and the conducting wire fastened to bracelets on the disengaged wrists of both criminals, if only two are to be hanged, or to the wrists of the outer men, if more than that number are to suffer. The eulprits being seated so as to be seen by the legal witnesses, the sheriff presses a button. The current is instantly es tablished from the coil, passes through the bodies of the men, and all is over. With a competent electrician, who might be a member of the police force, and specially charged with the duty, there would be no possibility of mistakes. The same ignominy which attaches to the gallows would be transferred to this mode of destruction, while the peculiar death by lightning,which,among the ignorant of all nations and ages, has been the subject of profound superstition, would without doubt, through its very incomprehensibility and mystery, imbue the uneducated masses with a deeper horror. J. F. H. says: "I have six volumes of the SCIENTIFIC American, in which I can find nearly everything that ii known as to engines and machinery.
