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health advisory Hospital Dentists Yu 2007-11-11 18:18:34

I know that a dentist invented the electric chair but what was the name of the dentist

Answer:

This is pretty interesting actually. The first person to think of it, that is using electricity as a means of execution, was a man named Alfred Southwick who saw a drunk guy die after touching "an exposed terminal on a live generator." Then Harold P. Brown actually invented the chair itself. He worked for Thomas Edison and his specialty was electrocution. He was actually hired to develop the chair and thats why a lot of the credit goes to Edison.

"Brown's design was based on George Westinghouse's alternating current (AC), which was then just emerging as the rival to Edison's less transport-efficient direct current (DC), which was further along in commercial development. The decision to use AC was entirely driven by Edison's attempt to claim that AC was more lethal than DC." (Wikipedia.com)

And apparently when it came time to replace hanging and put an electric chair to use, neither Edison or Westinghouse wanted their currents to be used because of the bad publicity it would bring (would you want your house's electricity to be the same current that kills murderers?) so Edison and Brown did all these demonstrations with the AC, killing animals in public, to prove it was more deadly than the DC. It worked because the AC was used for the electric chair.

Thanks for asking! I would have never looked that up on my own.

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Alfred P. Southwick highlighted the technology, Harold Brown applied it.

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The first practical electric chair was made by Harold P. Brown. Brown was an employee of Thomas Edison, hired for the purpose of researching electrocution and for the development of the electric chair. Since Brown worked for Edison, and Edison promoted Brown's work, the development of the electric chair is often erroneously credited to Edison himself.

GO TO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/electric_ch...

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look here

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http://inventors.about.com/od/hstartinve... the history of the electric chair

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Sir Electric the Cute?

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Alfred P.Southwick came up with idea, but Harold P.Brown made the first practical electric chair.

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