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

Abstract

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