The American correctional system has repeatedly sought to deploy
our native ingenuity to devise the ultimate corrective: an
engine of death that will dispose of our villains in a civilized
manner. The quest, which goes on to this day as states refine
the technique of lethal injections, has been fraught with
disappointments. Hanging was the traditional means of execution
from the founding of the Republic, but it had the disadvantage
that it often failed to break the neck. Sometimes, a charitable
executioner would scramble underneath the gallows and pull down
on the condemned person's feet until he heard the satisfying
snap of breaking bone, but this measure to hasten death was
never written into law, perhaps out of due respect for the
sensitivity of executioners. The 1880s were signature years for
death, when two giants of the burgeoning electrical industry,
Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, independently conceived
the idea of killing with electricity. Edison hired an inventor,
Harold Brown, and his physi