Word: kemmler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...servant, indefatigable researcher and humorist very much manque, Robertson has highly individual criteria for celebrity. Not for him the Joe Namaths, Henry Kissingers or Valerie Perrines of this world. The Robertson laurels go to "Manchester Jack," the first lion tamer (1835); M. Jolly-Bellin, first dry cleaner (1849); William Kemmler, first man to die in the electric chair (1890), and the late great George Crum, inventor of the first potato chip (1853). Surrounding these immortals is a pantheon of some 6,000 achievers and achievements, each one a monument to ingenuity or perversity. En masse, they provide the best argument...
Christopher Davis, always a painstaking craftsman (Ishmael, Lost Summer), reacts to the situation by underwriting to the point of blandness. His subject is William Kemmler, an ignorant laborer who back in 1889 took a hatchet to his common-law wife when she complained of his sexual inadequacies at the wrong moment...
Guinea Pig. It was emphatically the wrong time for Kemmler, too. Dr. Alphonse David Rockwell was then advancing the notion that electrocution would be a humane method for executing criminals. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were noisily disputing the relative merits of direct and alternating current. Kemmler was a convenient guinea pig, and so became the first man ever to be executed by that new scientific wonder, electricity. Calling his hero-victim Rupert Weber to suit his fictional purposes, Davis takes the reader through the last months of Weber's life-his moods and his memories, fears and dreams...