During a time when persons were executed for capital offenses, more prisoners died from gaol fever than were put to death by all the public executioners in the British realm. In 1759, an English authority estimated that each year, a quarter of the prisoners had died from gaol fever. In London, gaol fever frequently broke out among the ill-kept prisoners of Newgate Prison and then moved into the general city population. In May 1750, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Samuel Pennant, and many court personnel were fatally infected in the courtroom of the Old Bailey, which adjoined Newgate Prison. Early modern epidemics
Epidemics occurred routinely throughout Europe from the 16th to the 19th centuries, including during the English Civil War, the Thirty Years War, and the Napoleonic Wars. Pestilence of several kinds raged among combatants and civilians in Germany and surrounding lands from 1618 to 1648. According to Joseph Patrick Byrne, "By wars end, typhus may have killed more than 10 percent of the total German population, and disease in general accounted for 90 percent of Europes casualties." 19th century
During Napoleons retreat from Moscow in 1812, more French soldiers died of typhus than were killed by the Russians.A major epidemic occurred in Ireland between 1816 and 1819, during the famine caused by a worldwide reduction in temperature known as the Year Without a Summer. An estimated 100,000 people perished. Typhus appeared again in the late 1830s, and yet another major typhus epidemic occurred during the Great Irish Famine between 1846 and 1849.
After an 1881 death in Buffalo, New York, caused by a high-voltage arc lighting system, Alfred P. Southwick sought to develop this phenomenon into a way to execute condemned criminals. Southwick, a dentist, based his device on the dental chair.The next nine years saw a 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 Edisons direct current system and industrialist George Westinghouses 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 Westinghouses 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.