1924: Gee Jon, debuting the gas chamber
February 8th, 2009 Headsman
It was the best of intentions. It was the worst of intentions.
As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the forefathers’ standard means of dispatching an evildoer — a length of rope or a shot of lead — were under re-examination by a technophilic nation convinced its science could find a way to kill a man without inconveniencing him.
The first great American contribution — if you can call it that — to the the art of killing me softly was the electric chair, and its debut did not impress everyone.
Out west, grossed out by electrocution and inspired by the pestilent fogs that had lately enveloped World War I trenches, the Nevada legislature cottoned to the brainchild of one Dr. Allen McLean Hamilton to say it with cyanide.
Unfortunately, the logistics of billowing a plume of lethal gas directly into the prisoner’s cell to take the condemned asleep and unawares — another ostensible mercy that would have opened a path towards a Japan-like system of perpetual apprehension followed by sudden execution — proved insoluble; so, they had to build a little airtight room and give the procedure all the familiar ceremonial trappings.
That little airtight room was used for the first time ever on this date in 1924.
Its occupant was Gee Jon, a Chinese-born resident of San Francisco’s Chinatown who had gunned down a member of a rival tong in the railroad town of Mina not far from the California border.
A minute or two after the sodium cyanide pellets hit the sulphuric acid to release a toxic cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas, Gee Jon fell unconscious. He remained in the chamber, shrouded in gas, for half an hour to make sure: later, the apparatus improved with the addition of a stethoscope to enable a doctor to declare death from outside the cell.
Good enough for government work.
The gas chamber would win a fair following in the American South and West, notably California.
However, the gas chamber’s questionable “humaneness” — including some stomach-churning dying panics by suffocating prisoners, and the paranoia of prison staff that a leak in the seals could give them a snort of HCN — never matched the dream of the zipless kill, and the Zyklon-B associations Nazis later provided did not boost public relations. With the onset of the (seemingly) more humane and (definitely) much cheaper method of lethal injection, the gas chamber vanished from the scene in the 1990′s.
Though it still remains a backup option in Arizona, California, Maryland, Missouri and Wyoming, next month will mark a full ten years since the most recent — and quite possibly last ever — gassing.
Also on this date
- 1804: Little Harpe and Peter Alston, Mississippi pirates
- 1942: Icchok Malmed
- 1924: The first electrocutions in Texas
- 1910: George Reynolds and John Williams
- 1587: Mary, Queen of Scots
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Gassed,History,Milestones,Murder,Nevada,Organized Crime,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,USA
Tags: 1920s, 1924, allen mclean hamilton, carson city, chemistry, death tech, february 8, gee jon, hydrogen cyanide, mina, nevada state prison, science, technology, world war i, zyklon-b
February 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
[...] presents 1924: Gee Jon, debuting the gas chamber posted at Executed [...]
December 2nd, 2009 at 4:13 am
[...] near 15 years in service in Nevada and previously mammal-tested in the Golden State, the gas chamber made California’s gallows a [...]
January 25th, 2010 at 10:08 am
[...] the Republic’s youth, before science started devising less personal, more mechanical ways to kill. In fact, these executions on consecutive days in 1996 are as of this writing the last time that [...]
May 16th, 2010 at 10:29 am
[...] 16th, 2010 Headsman America’s weird love-affair with Frankenstein execution technology has been an occasional theme on this blog, but the fact is that the old-school execution methods [...]
February 21st, 2011 at 4:31 am
[...] Arizona in 1934 replaced the gallows with the western states’ hot new killing technology, the gas chamber … leaving Dugan the last female client of that state’s [...]
January 24th, 2012 at 4:51 am
[...] The reason for his fascination with gas seems to be obscure; the method had never been employed east of the Mississippi. Maybe it had something to do with 1932′s remarkably smooth gassing of a North Carolinian from nearby Burke County in Nevada, the nation’s gas chamber pioneer. [...]
November 27th, 2012 at 12:46 pm
Other accounts say a insecticide sprayer from California was use not pellets in acid.