Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

At first glance it seems innocuous, and if it were not for the leather bracelets with which the hands and feet of the condemned are tied, it could very well stand in some highly moral family home. A deafish grandfather might well be sitting in it to read his newspapers there.

But an instant later the chair was very repellent to us, and especially depressing were its polished arm rests. Better not to think about those who had polished them with their elbows.

A few yards from the chair stand four substantial railway station benches.

These are for the witnesses. Here is a small table. A wash-stand is built into the wall. That is all there is to the furnishings in the midst of which is accomplished the transition from a worse into a better world.No doubt, young Thomas Alva Edison never dreamed that his electricity would perform such depressing duties.

The door in the left corner leads to a compartment larger than a telephone booth. On its wall is a marble switchboard, the most ordinary kind of switchboard with a heavy old-fashioned knife switch, the kind available at any mechanical shop or in the operating booth of a provincial motion-picture theatre.

The knife switch is pushed in, and the current beats with great force through the helmet into the head of the condemned. That is all. That is the entire technique.

“The man who turns on the current,” said our guide, “receives a hundred and fifty dollars for each such performance. There are any number of applicants for this job.

”

Of course, all the talk we had heard about three men switching on the current and that not one of them knows which of them actually is responsible for the execution proved to be an invention. No, it is all much simpler. The man switches on the current himself and knows all that happens, and fears only one thing – that competitors may take this profitable work away from him.

From the room where the execution is carried out a door leads to the morgue, and beyond that is a very quiet room filled to the ceiling with simple wooden coffins.

“The coffins are made right here in prison by the prisoners them-selves,” our guide informed us.

Well, we thought we had seen enough! It was time to go!

Suddenly Mr. Adams asked to be allowed to sit in the electric chair, so that he might experience the sensation of a man condemned to death.

“No, no, gentlemen!” he muttered. “It will not take very long.