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.
On this day..
- 1943: Lepa Radic, Yugoslav Partisan
- 1723: Charles Weaver, John Levee, Richard Oakey and Matthew Flood
- 1804: Ann Hurle, forger
- 1943: The five martyrs of the lycee Buffon
- 1721: William Spigget, after peine forte et dure
- 1527: Georg Wagner
- 1844: Hester Foster and William Young Graham
- 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
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Inhumane
The research and facts in this article are horrendously bad.
1) Gee Jon was executed by liquid hydrocyanic acid vaporized by a portable pesticide sprayer made specifically for liquid cyanide, not by a sodium cyanide reaction in sulfuric acid to produce hydrogen cyanide, a process not used at that time.
2) Gee Jon was executed in a shed used by the prison butcher as the prison butcher shop until it was converted for Gee Jon’s execution by lethal gas. Purpose built gas chambers with chemical hydrogen cyanide gas generators built in — they type your article strongly implies was used –didn’t exist when Gee Jon was executed.
3) Gee Jon lost consciousness in about five seconds after the cyanide pesticide sprayer was started. His unconsciousness was very fast compared to others who also died by lethal gas in gas chambers designed using the potassium cyanide/sulfuric acid reaction method although the difference in methods of generating hydrogen cyanide gas may not account for the differences in rapidity of losing consciousness.
4) There is no simple way of causing instantaneous death and the immediate cessation of a human’s nervous system or other bodily functions. Such a death is virtually impossible. What is possible is the near instantaneous loss of consciousness so that the inmate is unaware of the process of dying within moments of its start. Body convulsions and other physical manifestations caused by the process of central nervous system and muscle death are NOT evidence of torture in and of themselves. The real crucial issue is rapidity of loss of conscious awareness and whether a method for inflicting death will virtually guarantee an extremely rapid loss of that awareness.
If your’re going to pursue an anti-death penalty agenda, do it with credible facts and research. Leave the lies and salacious polemic propaganda at home. They don’t help your arguments against judicially inflicting death and alienate those who you most need to convince.
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Other accounts say a insecticide sprayer from California was use not pellets in acid.
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