Educational Media Reviews Online

In the closing decades of the nineteenth-century, electricity was still in its infancy-a novelty to some, magical to some, but to Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, the next step to personal achievement and economic success. Edison was promoting direct current while Westinghouse was behind alternating current. The State of New York was looking for a more "humane" method of execution, rejecting, among others, the guillotine as "too French" and the firing squad as too reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition. Electricity seemed to offer the modern answer. But neither Edison nor Westinghouse wanted "their" electricity linked in the consumers' minds with death, so Edison urged the use of AC for the electric chair and Westinghouse supported DC.

This film portrays the intersection of these goals in the first execution by electrocution and vividly illustrates the role of business in decisions that might first appear to be moral rather than economic. The technical quality is extremely high, and the content is equally well-done, incorporating contemporary still pictures and film along with re-enacted sequences in black-and-white. The re-enactments have no dialogue; instead they are narrated by various experts (a legal historian, an Edison biographer, engineering experts, a medical historian, etc.). The film never glosses over the gruesome details, but commendably it also avoids sinking into lurid sensationalism. Nevertheless, some would find it upsetting, and it could be too intense for younger viewers. With those caveats, highly recommended for U.S. history or history of science collections.