In article , scharkalvin wrote:
Malcolm Reeves wrote:
On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 Roy Lewallen wrote:

I've also read that Edison created and promoted the electric
chair, which was run from AC, to dramatize the danger of AC over DC. He
had a big investment in DC distribution systems and equipment, while
Westinghouse was promoting AC power distribution.

Didn't Edison try to get execution by electric chair "Westinghousing"
too, or is that a rumour.

Early electric chairs WERE AC, but they tended to fry you rather than
electrocute.

Electric chairs, early and semi-modern and modern, use/used AC because
AC electrocutes more than DC does (at least if the AC frequency is in the
power-line, lower-audio or upper-"subsonic" frequency range). (AC
frequencies of radio frequencies or high audio frequencies were safer.)

This business of electric chairs frying rather than electrocuting has a
grain of truth - electric chairs often have enough voltage and current to
cook vital organs in case "more-true electrocution" does not occur.

Electrocution in a typical case is most likely with AC (secondarily
pulsating DC) of power line or lower-audio or nearly-audio-subaudio
frequency and with shock path involving the head or a limb so as to
involve the brain or the heart or both. Worst case usually involves
ventricular fibrillation, a deadly disturbance in heart rhythm where
electrical cause is "typically" 100-1,000 mA of low frequency AC or
pulsating DC through the torso.
Electrocution is unreliable enough that electric chairs require
"backup" mechanisms of killing. As in either cooking vital organs or
paralyzing breating long enough to deprive the brain of oxygen long enough
to disable restarting of breathing when the shock is stopped. I insist
that survival of shocks that are not far from bad-case is equally
unreliable!

Tesla used to demonstrate passing a million volts through his body to
light gas tubes, but he used high frequency current (in the khz range) to
do it.

Tesla-related AC survival involved high frequencies that are not as bad
as either lower frequency AC or unsteady DC! High enough frequency AC is
less-electrocuting than DC can be given even slowest accidental
application/removal rates!
Horror stories by horrifically-burned high-voltage-DC survivors come
mainly from those who lived to tell a horrific tale rather than had a
closed-casket funeral because the current was DC rather than
power-line-frequency AC.

- Don Klipstein )