Electrocution is death or serious injury caused by electric shock, electric current passing through the body. The word is derived from "electro" and "execution", but it is also used for accidental death. The word is also used to describe non-fatal injuries due to electricity.
The term "electrocution," was coined in 1889 in the US just before the first use of the electric chair and originally referred only to electrical execution and not to accidental or suicidal electrical deaths. However, since no English word was available for non-judicial deaths due to electric shock, the word "electrocution" eventually took over as a description of all circumstances of electrical death from the new commercial electricity.
Video Electrocution
Origins
In the Netherlands in 1746 Pieter van Musschenbroek's lab assistant, Andreas Cuneus, received an extreme shock while working with a leyden jar, the first recorded injury from man made electricity. By the mid 19th century high voltage electrical systems came into use to power arc lighting for theatrical stage lighting and lighthouses leading to the first recorded accidental death in 1879 when a stage carpenter in Lyon, France touched a 250-volt wire.
The spread of arc light based street lighting systems (which at the time ran at a voltages above 3000 volts) after 1880 led to many people dying from coming in contact with these high-voltage lines, a strange new phenomenon which seemed to kill instantaneously without leaving a mark on the victim. This would lead to execution by electricity in the electric chair in the late 1890s as an official method of capital punishment in the United States state of New York, thought to be a more humane alternative to hanging. After an 1881 death in Buffalo, New York caused by a high voltage arc lighting system, a local dentist named Alfred P. Southwick sought to develop this phenomenon into a way to execute condemned criminals with him basing his device on form he knew well, a dental chair.
The next nine years saw promotion by Southwick, the New York state Gerry commission (which included Southwick) recommending execution by electricity, a June 4, 1888 law making it the state form of execution on January 2, 1889, and a further state committee of doctors and lawyers to finalize the details of the method used.
The adoption of the electric chair became mixed up in the "war of currents" between Thomas Edison's direct current system and industrialist George Westinghouse's alternating current system in 1889 when noted anti-AC activist Harold P. Brown became a consultant to the committee. Brown pushed, with the assistance and sometimes collusion of Edison Electric and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, for the successful adoption of alternating current to power the chair, an attempt to portray AC as a public menace and the "executioners current".
Etymology
In May 1889 the state of New York sentenced its first criminal, a street merchant named William Kemmler, to be executed in their new form of capital punishment. Tabloid newspapers, trying to describe this new form of electrical execution, started settling on "electrocution," a portmanteau word derived from "electro" and "execution". It was not the only choice of word people were considering. The New York Times editorial column noted words such as "Westinghoused" (after the Westinghouse Electric alternating current equipment that was to be used), "Gerrycide" (after Elbridge Gerry who headed New York death penalty commission that suggested adopting the electric chair), and "Browned" (after anti-AC activist Harold P. Brown). Thomas Edison preferred the words dynamort, ampermort and electromort. The New York Times hated the word electrocution, describing it as being pushed forward by "pretentious ignoramuses".
Maps Electrocution
Medical aspects
The health hazard of an electric current flowing through the body depends on the amount of current and the length of time for which it flows, not merely on the voltage. However, a high voltage is required to produce a high current through the body. This is due to the relatively high resistance of skin when dry, requiring a high voltage to pass through. The severity of a shock also depends on whether the path of the current includes a vital organ.
Death can occur from any shock that carries enough sustained current to stop the heart. Low currents (70-700 mA) usually trigger fibrillation in the heart, which is reversible via defibrillator but is nearly always fatal without help. Currents as low as 30 mA AC or 300-500 mA DC applied to the body surface can cause fibrillation. Large currents (> 1 A) cause permanent damage via burns and cellular damage.
The voltage necessary to create current of a given level through the body varies widely with the resistance of the skin; wet or sweaty skin or broken skin can allow a larger current to flow. Whether an electric current is fatal is also dependent on the path it takes through the body, which depends in turn on the points at which the current enters and leaves the body. The current path must usually include either the heart or the brain to be fatal.
See also
- Capital punishment (death penalty)
- Electric shock
- Electricity
References
- Bibliography
- Moran, Richard (2007). Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-37572-446-6.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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