The Electric Chair

If you can never connect to a printer, if furniture jumps out to stub your toe, if when you do the dishes the water jumps out the sink to soak you - then you are victim of the inanimate malice of things.The belief that all things are essentially out to get us us has a name - Resi ...  Show more

400 years ago on the River Thames a mad genius showed off the world's first submarine. A crowd of thousands including King James watched as Cornelis Drebbel disappeared beneath the murky water, only reemerging after three whole hours had passed.The same genius also came up with p ...  Show more

On August 6, 1890, a prisoner named William Kemmler became the first man executed in the electric chair. It was designed to be a more humane form of execution, but the gruesome scene in the death chamber that day revealed the device to be anything but. Still, the chair stuck arou ...  Show more

For more than 200 years, doctors have experimented with using electricity to treat everything from liver disease to severe depression to varying degrees of success. We look at the history behind these practices and what's going on. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www. ...  Show more

Murderers in early 19th century London feared surviving their executions. That’s because their bodies were often handed to scientists for strange anatomical experiments. If George Foster, executed in 1803, had woken up on the lab table, it would have been in particularly undignif ...  Show more

Did you know that engineers were harnessing electricity long before they even knew what it was? We take a look at the history and tech behind electricity.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.