
08-05-2003, 10:31 PM
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Am I really here?
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: near Chicago
Posts: 3,025
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12562
Also in 1889:
Fruit-peddler William Kemmler axes his lover Matilda Ziegler to death in Buffalo, NY., and is the first person sentenced to die in the newly designed electric chair. In the culmination of a viscious PR war between competing electricity delivery systems Direct Current championed by Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse's stronger and more lethal Alternating Current as to who would actually provide the killing voltages, Westinghouse loses and it is his AC that rips through Kemmler's body when he is "Westinghoused" the following year.
(Yet it's AC current that we use in North America daily - most of the rest of the world uses DC)
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