"The Art of Killing by Electricity":
The Sublime and the Electric Chair

Jürgen Martschukat

In July 1896, an article in the Scientific American praised "The Progress of Invention during the Past Fifty Years." The author, Edward W. Byrn, celebrated "a splendid, brilliant campaign of brains and energy, rising to the highest achievement amid the most fertile resources." New technological devices of incredible richness and diversity had been invented, immense progress and marvelous growth had been achieved, and people felt overwhelmed by a "gigantic tidal wave" or "flashing meteors that burst upon our vision." According to Byrn, the Western world had been created anew by the modern, especially the American, man who had touched matter "with the divine breath of thought" and had thus acquired almost supernatural qualities. This technological enlightenment inspired "emotions of wonder and admiration at the resourceful and dominant spirit of man." Thus, according to Byrn, the man-made but nevertheless hardly comprehensible world of technological wonder caused a sublime experience among late-nineteenth-century Americans.1	1
In the middle of this world of technological wonder stood the electric chair, which was developed for the execution of the death penalty in New York State during the 1880s. When electricity and capital punishment merged in the "deadly dynamo," death by electrocution was widely perceived as an advance of civilization. It was part of the remodeled, modern world described in the Scientific American and in many more magazines and writings, and, as such, it was understood to give society a sense of elevation. Though the electric chair was an incorporation of a still-mysterious power, it seemed to signify the human ability—or at least that of white educated males—to understand apparently supernatural forces, to conquer them, and to use them for positive, culturally beneficial effects. Looking at the history of the electric chair through the lens of the sublime helps explain how the electrocution of four death row inmates on July 7, 1891, in Sing Sing state prison could have been celebrated as a "great scientific experiment" and as further advancement in "the art of killing by electricity."2	2
The following article investigates the interrelationship of technology, concepts of progress, the sense of the sublime, and the death penalty in nineteenth-century America. I will try to accomplish this by conceptualizing the sublime not as confined to an aesthetic theory, but rather as a well-established pattern of discourse shaping the contemporary mode of perception, thought, and action. I will then narrow the field to the perception of electricity and finally to that of the electric chair and the first electric executions in the early 1890s.	3
The Sublime . . .