That Tesla something right there.
While we’re waiting, this is a perfect time to ask this. Like most people, I understand very little about electricity. I have a vague understanding of what voltage, wattage, and amperage are, but that’s about it. A few years ago, somebody here posted a link to an absolutely fantastic web page that explained electricity very clearly and explicitly. When I read it, I understood a lot of the gobbledygook for the first time in my life. Does anybody have any idea whatsoever what that page may be? As I said, it was posted here. It was a very simple-looking page—it was just plain text on a pale yellow background. No ruffles or flourishes or anything—just plain text. The title was something incredibly mundane like ‘Bob’s Guide to Electricity,’ or something like that. Anybody know what I’m talking about?
I’m guessing he sponsored it. “This execution was made possible by a generous contribution from Kaf1954!”.
Probably not the one you’re looking for but there is some pretty good info here: Ask the Electrician
That looks like an excellent page, but it’s not the page I was describing. The one I’m after explains the physical properties and behavior of electricity itself, not the mechanics of how it’s put to practical use.
Do you really need that much juice to kill a person? Seems like the elegant approach would be electrodes attached to the chest (probably ventral/dorsal) just strong enough to induce fibrillation. Read the cardiac sinus and put out a negative interference wave. Fibrillation is progressive, it would not take much to set it in (non-)motion. Fibrillation is, after all, how a large number of people die spontaneously every day.
The first big jolt from the electric chair pretty much fries quite a bit of your central nervous system and renders you immediately unconscious (that’s the theory, anyway, nobody has ever come back afterwards to confirm that it works properly). Inducing fibrillation would be extremely painful, and the person being executed would remain conscious and in a great deal of pain for probably somewhere between 5 and 20 seconds.
It’s pretty rare, but the heart does occasionally recover from fibrillation all on its own.
Inducing fibrillation externally like that is also a bit hit or miss. You might have to shock the person several times to get it to work.
It doesn’t seem very elegant to me.
The electric chair, while gruesome to spectators, isn’t cruel to the person being cooked. And just to be clear, they are being cooked. Literally.
ETA: And by the way, you don’t need to do anything fancy like trying to put out interference waves and all of that. A friend of mine and former co-worker (who was sadly killed a few years ago) did a lot of work with doctors perfecting early pacemakers several decades ago. According to him, simple AC current at somewhere around 50 or 60 Hz or so is about the best thing you can get for putting a heart into fibrillation.