1944: Harvard and IBM dedicate the Mark I computer. Also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or ASCC, the pioneering computer was notable for producing reliable results and its ability to run 24/7.

Harvard electrical engineer Howard Aiken first dreamt up a large-scale calculator in 1937. He knew he needed a corporate partner and first courted Monroe Calculator Company, which turned him down. Aiken went back to the drawing board and came up with a proposal that convinced IBM, whose big product at the time was a punch-card processor. A big plus in the proposal was that it used so many existing IBM components in a new way.

Clair Lake, Frank Hamilton and Benjamin Durfee finished the Harvard computer at Endicott, New York, in January 1943. They demonstrated it to the Harvard faculty members in December, and then took it apart, packed it up and shipped it off to Cambridge, where it was rebuilt in the basement of the physics lab.

The Mark I was a monster: 55 feet long and 8 feet high. It weighed five tons and contained 760,000 components, including 3,000 rotating counter wheels and 1,400 rotary-dial switches, along with an assortment of shafts, clutches and electromagnetic relays, all linked together with 500 miles of wire. Its clickety-clack sounded like a "roomful of ladies knitting."

You fed instructions in on paper tape, and loaded the data on punch cards. It could only perform operations in the precise linear order it received instructions. The tape could not run backward.

The Mark I could handle 23-decimal-place numbers and perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It was also programmed with subroutines for logarithms and trigonometry.

It was slow, taking three to five seconds to do a multiplication. It gave you results through two outputs: teletypewriter and punch card.

Mathematician Grace Hopper of the U.S. Naval Reserve joined Aiken's team at Harvard and was instrumental in keeping the Mark I running. She repaired it one day by removing a moth that had fouled the Mark I's electromechanical innards, becoming the first person to debug a computer. She then coined the term computer bug.

When the time neared to dedicate the Mark I, in August 1944, the Harvard News Office put out a press release giving all the credit for the machine to Aiken. IBM chief Thomas J. Watson was himself so put out that his firm's work was not being acknowledged that he threatened to return to New York, boycotting the dedication and luncheon festivities. Cooler heads prevailed, and Watson stayed for the hoopla, but Aiken and Watson never got over their turf tiff. Years later, when Thomas J. Watson Jr. made a peace offering of a consultant gig at IBM, Aiken refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Hopper and Aiken (also USNR) used the Mark I to help the Navy produce tables for aiming artillery shells and bombs in the closing year of World War II. The electromagnetic machine remained in use until 1959, by which time it was left in the dust by true electronic computers using first vacuum tubes, then transistors, then chips.

And for all of the Mark I's advances, German engineer Konrad Zuse's Z3 model from 1941 may have preceded it as the world's first fully functional, programmable computer.

Aiken went on to build the Mark II in 1947, the same year he founded the Harvard Computation Laboratory and predicted, "Only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States."

Source: Various

SAN FRANCISCO -- LinuxWorld is the E3 for many open source visionaries, tinkerers and zealots who rally around the communal ethos of open software. This year's conference is especially charged. As more open source projects like Firefox go mainstream, it's an exciting time for the GNU gurus to show the rest of the world the light.

The conference boasts various keynote speakers such as, Kevin Clark, director of IT operations at Lucasfilm, Ltd., and also featured an exhibition hall packed with booths spreading the good word of the latest open source edicts.

Left: A skull-pture composed of various dead electronics greets visitors outside the Moscone North Convention hall. The skull interacts with passersby, eliciting a creepy electronic voice. The skull was presented by the Alameda County Computer Resource Center which aims to refurbish 1,000 salvaged computers in three days with open source software and donate them to local schools.

Fusion-io demonstrates its silicon-based storage drive. While CPU processors have advanced continuously since 1987, disc drives have always had a hard time keeping up, says Rick White, co-founder and chief marketing director.

“We’ll be able to replace racks and racks of disc drives with just one flash,” says White. “Computers will finally be completely silicon and use a lot less power, too.”

The new flash drives also promise to be environmentally friendly since companies that shift from spinning discs to the new drives would lower their carbon emissions considerably. According to White, a traditional 720-rpm disc drive uses over 300,000 kwh a year whereas the new drive uses less than 100 kwh yearly.

Expo attendees passing by the Fusion-io booth could sign a waiver to ride the bull, er, spinning hard drive.

“We’re putting the show back in trade show,” says Rick White co-founder and chief marketing director of Fusion-io. “Don’t feel bad," jeers White to the drive’s latest defeated passenger, "either way you’re eventually going to have to let go of that spinning drive anyway."

Shelly Milam, dressed as Tux the Linux penguin, and Ariana Parasco, dressed as The Gnu, dance their way around the expo showroom polling attendees on their favorite tech mascot.

“We are doing a stunt to promote Groundwork Open Source,” says Milam. “We’re looking for the next open source idol.”

Those who participate have four competitors to choose from; Tux, Beastie, The Gnu and The Firefox. “So far I think Tux is winning,” says Milam.

Here, one unlucky machine blasted with sand and saltwater gets a second chance at life.

DriverSavers Data Recovery displays various machines claimed before their time through unfortunate circumstance, and discusses how their company recovered the valuable data stored on the damaged disc.

"With more people than ever recording their lives digitally, that data has become exponentially more valuable," says Jacqueline Cunningham, a strategic alliances specialist for the company.

“We save data, we save reputations and we’ve even saved marriages,” says Cunningham. “It’s always either personal or financial but either way it’s very important.”

Gloria Galicia, left, and Perla Ibarra, middle, aren't your typical booth babes -- both of the savvy beauties run personal blogs that cover both the operating system BSD and their personal lives.

“I work for one of the sponsors of BSD,” says Galicia. “I’ve never been to a trade show before and wanted to check it out and support BSD.” Both women are onsite to answer questions about the latest version of the OS, PC-BSD 7, Fibonacci edition.

“This operating system has been under steady development since the ‘70s, and we’re a viable alternative to Linux,” says Matt Olander, who manned the BSD booth. “Yahoo’s entire network is run on PC-BSD.”

Possibly the only booth containing natural materials in the entire exhibition hall, Larry Frazier’s display of his hand-carved mobius strips draws a crowd.

“A mobius is a three-dimensional shape with only one edge and one surface,” says Marian Frazier, who manned the booth with her husband. The beautiful sculptures fashioned from blocks of wood, both exotic and domestic, bronze and alabaster befuddle onlookers as they run their fingers along an edge only to end up back where they started.

“People’s eyes sparkle when they walk up,” says Larry. “They’ve been very enthusiastic.”

Rackable Systems' modular data center is housed in a 40' x 8' container. The system's unique design allows the operator to get it up and running in just a couple of hours whereas a traditional data center can take a couple of years to build.

“To run it we just need power, networking and water,” says Jason Coari, Rackable Systems' senior marketing manager. “We’ve taken the fans out of the individual servers and replaced them with central fan bases." The larger fans not only keep the servers cooler and are less prone to break down but they’re also more energy efficient, reducing energy costs up to 80 percent.

The units’ modular status and energy efficiency also makes it a likely candidate to be deployed in disaster recovery zones.

A lost businessman is lulled to sleep by a barrage of geekery, jargon and woefully optimistic philosophies about open software's transformative potential.

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In 2002, when Graham Hopper was tapped to head Disney's videogame operations, his bosses gave him a choice: Come up with a dramatic plan to reinvigorate the flailing unit or downsize and focus exclusively on licensing to other companies.

It was far from an obvious choice. At the time, many Hollywood studios were getting out of the games game—Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, and DreamWorks dumped the divisions they had launched during the digital boom of the 1990s, having learned the hard way that the ability to make successful films and television shows didn't mean squat in the interactive world. Producing quality videogames required hundreds of millions of dollars and years of patience.

Hopper convinced his bosses to hang on—with a small footprint, making cheap games based on Disney Channel fare like Hannah Montana and Kim Possible. Just five years later, that decision has put it ahead of the pack, as Hollywood goes hurtling back into videogames. Paramount and Universal are spending tens of millions of dollars to create a new slate of products, and MTV and Warner Bros. have invested hundreds of millions to build themselves into major publishers.

"If you were to build an entertainment company from scratch today, you wouldn't even question that games should be in it," says Hopper, a dapper South African who spent a decade in Disney consumer products before his videogame stint.

It's not the first time such words have been uttered in Hollywood, but there's a sense of inevitability—for some, perhaps even desperation—this time around. When Hollywood exited videogames five years ago, it was riding high on revenues from DVDs. Today, home entertainment is shrinking, box office is flat, the TV audience is increasingly splintered, and significant internet money remains hypothetical. Videogame revenue, meanwhile, shot up 34 percent last year and has increased 49 percent so far in 2008.

Companies are busily recruiting experienced talent, spending big on acquisitions, and pushing through early failures. Warner Bros. made its first stab at videogames with the 2005 flop The Matrix Online, but has gone on to release a much broader slate—and spent more than $200 million last year to buy British developer Traveller's Tales, maker of the ultra-successful Lego Star Wars games.

Movie-based videogames have a deservedly terrible reputation. Since they're often made on the 12- to 18-month timeframe of a film's production schedule rather than the three years it takes to produce a major console game, and can sell well on the back of a movie's mega-marketing spend, they're regularly amongst the lowest-quality titles on the market. For proof, just check the reviews of recently licensed games like Iron Man and Wall-E."

But even adaptations that sell can tarnish a brand with young consumers if the games stink—something studios now recognize. Universal, not wanting to rush its self-financed Wanted game, hasn't announced a release date yet, even though the film is out. Warner Bros. is turning Watchmen into a series of small downloadable games rather than rush one big package for the film's release next March.

"The ultimate goal for us is to have our best IP well established and sustainable on the videogame market," says Martin Tremblay, who worked at Ubisoft and Vivendi Games before becoming president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in June. Accomplishing that is a crucial first step for studios before becoming a fully legit publisher by moving into original titles.

So far, Disney is the only player in Hollywood that has already done so. After establishing girl-targeted brands like Hannah Montana and Kim Possible as million-unit-plus sellers in 2003 and 2004, it came into 2005 with a small but viable publishing operation. "This is a very disciplined company, so we were given a small amount of resources at first to prove we could be successful," recalls Hopper. "Then we were able to get more investment and just keep on growing."

Disney's C.F.O., Tom Staggs, said last year that the conglomerate is prepared to more than triple its spending on games from $100 million in 2006 to $350 million by 2012. Disney recently moved videogames out of the sprawling consumer-products unit and into a new operating division along with online media.

The revived Disney Interactive Studios (formerly Buena Vista Games) has used its capital infusion to acquire six development studios (the folks who actually make the games) since 2005, and has a slate of 19 titles for its fiscal year ending in September, significantly more than any other media conglomerate and even some pure-play publishers like Sumner Redstone's struggling Midway or Eidos.

"By the existing model, Disney is definitely in the lead. They are a good year or two ahead of Warner," observes Keith Boesky, a former president of Eidos who now leads his own videogame agency. "The question is whether one of the other studios will come up with a better way to pursue the market."

About 70 percent of Disney's games are based on existing film and TV properties like Prince Caspian and High School Musical—the bread and butter of Disney Interactive's business. But the real reason the company is willing to invest so much may lie in that other 30 percent. Its small but growing slate of original titles, which started last year with alien-exploration game Spectrobes and is expanding this fall with the stunt-driving title Pure and Guitar Hero-like music simulator Ultimate Band, are potentially more than just game properties. They're new franchises that can eventually flow through the Disney pipeline: Imagine Pure the theme park ride or Spectrobes the animated TV show.

"They're a content engine, like any other form of media," Hopper says.

Core videogame players are still largely young males, and Disney Interactive has started pursuing them with games like Pure and February's Halo-esque shooter Turok, based on a comic book about a dinosaur hunter. That's not exactly standard fare from the most conservative studio in Hollywood.

"Part of our opportunity here is to connect in a relevant way with demographics groups that are otherwise harder for our company to reach," Hopper says. "It's easy to get other publishers to license our hit movies or TV shows, but if we want to invest in new customers via videogames, we have to do it ourselves."

Fans of extraterrestrial life may have been disappointed when internet-fed rumors of Martian life ended in a NASA press conference on soil composition.

But they can take solace in a newly popular theory that suggests the rest of space may teem with microbes.

This once-controversial notion holds that the universe is filled with the ingredients of microbial life, and that earthly life first came from the skies as comet dust or meteorites salted with hardy bacteria.

"Studies have shown that microbes can survive the shock levels of being launched into space," said Charles Cockell, a microbiologist at the Open University. "And as more and more organisms are discovered under extreme conditions, it's become more plausible that things could survive in space for the time it takes to go from one planet to another."

Not long ago, Cockell's claims would have been greeted with scientific derision. But as scientists learn more about Earth and space, the theory, which goes by the grandiose name of "galactic panspermia," seems less far-fetched.

Bacteria, recent discoveries have shown, thrive in Earth's most extreme locales, from Antarctic ice to the interiors of volcanoes and nuclear reactors, and have even survived in space. Meanwhile, astronomers seem to find Earth-like planets wherever they train their telescopes; comets have proven unexpectedly rich in organic material. Closer to home, water was once widespread on Mars, and still suffuses the atmosphere of Venus.

Perhaps life could evolve in a comet, or survive inside a rock catapulted into orbit by a planetary meteor strike. The odds might be against it -- but life is good at beating the odds.

"One hundred years ago, people wondered if animals could go from one land mass to another," said Cockell. But then people discovered that birds migrate for thousands of miles, that storms carry insects across oceans and seeds between continents. "Panspermia is the next step," he said.

Galactic panspermia advocates aren't exactly saying that little green men came to Earth and planted the seeds of life here. At the simplest end of the spectrum is the proposition that earthly life was jump-started by the arrival of its basic components from space. Meteors have proven rich in amino acids -- the building blocks of life -- and Earth was pummeled by meteors for the first 200 million years of its existence. In April, Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow traced the molecular signatures of earthly amino acids to those of neutron stars.

"Everything that is going on on Earth occurred because the meteorites happened to land here. But they are obviously landing in other places," he said at the time. "If there is another planet that has the water and all of the things that are needed for life, you should be able to get the same process rolling."

But Earth -- and planets in general -- might not be the only habitable space locales. Comets -- orbiting collections of ice, dust and rocks -- are rich in nitrogen and oxygen, as well as other organic material.

Chandra Wickramasinghe, a Cardiff University astronomer and astrobiology pioneer, suggests that heat from radioactive elements could melt the normally frozen water inside comets, making them a perfect interstellar petri dish. Microbial life could evolve inside them, or simply be picked up from a passing meteor originally ejected into space from a life-rich planet.

Is that likely? In any given comet, perhaps not. But there are billions of comets in our solar system alone, floating like so many dandelion seeds through the ether, and bacteria have proven freakishly durable. They've been recovered from Antarctic ice and revived after 10 million years in deep-freeze. Some Black Sea strains photosynthesize in near-darkness, while others thrive on nuclear radiation or infrared light. Bacteria have been found inside volcanoes and in sediments miles beneath the ocean floor.

Bacteria have even survived exposure to the vacuum of space, as well as pressures comparable to those generated by meteor strikes capable of kicking debris out of Earth's orbit. And all that's necessary to establish a new bacteria colony, Wickramasinghe calculated, is for one microbe in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to flourish in its new environs.

Wickramasinghe even concluded that organic material found in comets -- most recently by the Stardust spacecraft, which plucked amino acids from the 81P/Wild 2 comet -- is biological in origin. In other words, the comet is not just a good place for life to grow, but actually contains organic material produced by earlier life, Wickramasinghe believes.

That is, of course, hypothetical, and not everyone is convinced. "Some astrobiologists are evangelists," said Columbia University biometeorologist Nancy Kiang. But with further bacteria-in-space experiments planned by NASA and the European Space Agency, and missions ongoing to sample other planets and interstellar bodies, the evangelists are being taken seriously.

"The universe is mostly empty space, but here and there are special places where complex things can happen: clouds of dust, planetary surfaces, comets and asteroids," said Cornell University astrogeologist Jim Bell. "They appear scattered throughout most of the observable space we can study with our instruments thus far. Astronomers have been finding hundreds of planets around other stars. There are probably lots more places out there where life could exist."

Practicality is the last thing anyone considers when designing concept cars. A car made of glass? Windows like gun slits? An automakers' lawyers would kill those ideas faster than General Motors is killing Hummer.

But practicality isn't the point. Concept cars are flights of fantasy carrying auto design into the future. Since our future will be a place where a gallon of gas costs more than a gallon of Scotch, the students at Royal College of Art designed their cars that run on things like electricity and algal fuel.

These outlandish designs will influence the cars you drive tomorrow. RCA has been teaching vehicle design since 1967 and its alumni include big-name designers at Ford, Mazda, Volvo and other companies. An RCA grad has probably worked on the car you're driving now, even if it isn't made of glass.

Left: The Airflow by Pierre Sabas of France has wheel-mounted electric motors and is made entirely of glass. "I’ve tried to wrap it around like fabric. It allows for a new driving sensation and it gives the occupants a new perception of the outside world," he says. The car won the Best Design Interpretation Award at the Pilkington Automotive Vehicle Design Awards.

Jon Radbrink of Sweden also has a thing for glass. He used a whole lot of it on "Lexus Nuaero," his gas-electric hybrid. "I was inspired by architecture and used glass in conjunction with other materials to create a layered effect that gives the feeling of transparency for the occupants," he says. The Pilkington judges liked it enough to give it the Best Use of Glazing -- that means glass -- award.

None of the technology Spanish designer Arturo Peralta Nogueras has planned for his vehicle exists yet, but if you're gonna dream, dream big. "Senses" runs on algae and features an exterior made of "solid hologram technology," whatever that is. It's also got artificial intelligence, and the interior "evolves and adapts to its environment, passengers and scenarios," though we're not sure how. No matter. It sure looks cool.

Dong Kyu Kim of South Korea was influenced by fashion design, and "Chameleon" takes its styling cues from shirt collars, blowing scarves and women's eyeliner. The car is asymmetrical because, "like a good dress, it will never be perfect," and paramagnetic technology allows it to change colors so it'll always match your outfit.

"I'm thinking about a new way of consuming cars," says Italian designer Ilaria Sacco, by allowing a high level of personalization. She calls the car "My Lounge," and it takes an Ikea approach to design by allowing buyers to pick everything that goes into it, "like how you would design your living room." (Hex wrench not included.)

Joonas Vartola's "Iomega" isn't so much a car as a "relaxation capsule" with a chauffeur. Vartola says the shape of a swan inspired the exterior. Driver and passengers sit in separate compartments, which "fosters the idea of this being a passenger car rather than the usual driver's car architecture," the Finnish designer says.

Paul Howse wanted to offer a new definition of luxury and exclusivity with "Enigma." It's an electric vehicle that ideally would get its power from the sun, and the passenger compartment uses magnetic levitation to isolate it from the rest of the car.

Raquel Aparicio Lopez's "Soft Vehicle" is made of foam. You stash your stuff in a boot, er, trunk that opens with a zipper and you climb in through "a sensual slit" and sit in a seat surrounded by impact absorbing "jelly balls." The Spanish designer believes softer cars are safer cars. "I would like to extrapolate rubber, textile and other soft materials into vehicle design," she says.

Sergio Loureiro Da Silva designed "Phoenix" for maximum efficiency. There's a turbine up front, a kinetic axis -- whatever that is -- and electric motors at the back. The Spanish designer likens the vehicle to a motorcycle with a sidecar, but it looks to us like something you'd see in a pod race on Tattooine.

Yun Woo Jeong's "Transform" might be the offspring of an unholy marriage between Optimus Prime and a Morgan. It has a transparent elastic top that can be stretched to any shape to suit the driver's needs and mood. "I've been interested in 'transformables' since I was a boy," says Jeong. "It is common to boys across the world. How many transformable robots have passed over our memories? Why do they generate so much enthusiasm? Some say it's childish. But I assume it is human instinct."

I've made fun of replica swords many times in this space, but I want to assure readers that it's only because the collectible weapons are dumb and stupid. However, I have to admit that I, too, feel the geekish drive to hang a drop-forged piece of metal from the wall. I think it's some sort of genetic thing, a throwback to the days when the survival of one's tribe depended on the ability to justify ridiculous purchases.

However, I think I've found a solution to my conflict. My friend Gary, who is a volunteer emergency medical technician, informed me of the existence of a wonderful thing called a Halligan bar.

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If you're a firefighter, or someone who works with firefighters, or someone who lives with one or more firefighters, or someone who makes, markets or sells equipment for firefighters, or someone who has traveled forward in time to read my columns, you probably already know about Halligan bars.

A Halligan bar is a single-piece metal tool designed explicitly and brilliantly for totally busting stuff up in the name of rescue. As I understand it, it's the standard tool for an astonishing number of fire departments, because it's awesome at what it does.

Here's why I feel more comfortable with the idea of having a Halligan on my wall than, say, showing off a Glamdring replica or a bat'leth.

First off, a Halligan is not a replica of anything. It is entirely the thing it is, designed to do what it does. There is nothing ceremonial or decorative about this tool. You can tell that it seriously resents locked doors and wants them to die.

Secondly, I'm much more likely to use a Halligan than a sword. There are many situations in life where you wish you had a knife, and a few unfortunate ones where you might wish you had a gun, but if you find yourself wishing that you specifically had the Sword of the Daywalker, either you live a more interesting life than me, or a less interesting life than pretty much anyone.

Now, to be fair, I can't specifically think of a moment where I wished I had a large metal bar with a pick and an adz on one end, but I'm convinced that that's just because I never knew it was an option. It's like bánh mì -- Vietnamese sandwiches. I never knew they had to be an important part of my life until I knew they existed. At any rate, there have certainly been times where I had to -- or just wanted to -- totally disassemble something in an authoritative manner, and I lacked the tool to do it.

And when you get down to it, a Halligan makes a better weapon than a fussy sword makes a forced-entry tool. It's hard to come up with a situation where I would be personally involved in combat with melee weapons -- most of the scenarios I can devise involve a powerful alien race using Wikipedia's "random article" option to pick humanity's champion -- but I figure my opponent probably won't care much whether they get gutted with William Wallace's Claymore or smacked with the New York City Fire Department's favorite hunk of metal. I know null-set about weapon fighting either way, but if someone makes a boffer Halligan, I promise to give it a try at the next con I attend.

Finally, comparing the prices of a proper Halligan and most replica swords, they're both equally expensive, which is to say kind of ridiculous for something that's going to just hang there on your wall and totally fail to impress the ladies. Luckily, I can think of a handy way to finance a Halligan purchase: writing a column about them.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a rescuer, a resuscitator and a resupinator.

1890: William Kemmler becomes the first person ever executed using electrocution. It doesn't go well.

Kemmler, a Buffalo, New York, vegetable peddler with a strong jealous streak, confessed to killing his wife with a hatchet following an argument. "I killed her, and I'll take the rope for it," he said, expecting to be hanged.

But the state of New York had other plans.

It was Kemmler's bad luck to be condemned to death just as the state was ready to try out a newfangled killing device called the electric chair.

The first chair was built by Harold Brown, an employee of Thomas Edison, who happened to be doing a lot of work with electricity in general and was exploring electrocution as a more humane method of execution than hanging.

It also happened that Edison was embroiled in a battle with Nicola Tesla and George Westinghouse over whose electric current would be adopted as the standard. Edison was pushing direct current, or DC, while Tesla and Westinghouse championed alternating current, or AC.

Edison, never shy about exploiting a situation to his advantage, especially if it could cripple a rival, therefore directed Brown to rig the chair to operate on AC. By associating the Tesla-Westinghouse current with something as unpleasant as the state killing of a human being, Edison hoped to turn public opinion his way. He even suggested replacing the new coinage, electrocution, with "to be Westinghoused." It never caught on.

The execution was delayed while Kemmler's case was appealed on the grounds that it violated the Eighth Amendment restriction against cruel and unusual punishment. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices denied Kemmler's appeal. An execution date of Aug. 6 was set.

When his time came, Kemmler went to the chair obligingly, like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter. Contemporary accounts describe him as composed and cooperative. "Gentlemen, I wish you luck," he said to his executioners. "I'm sure I'll get a good place, and I'm ready."

The switch was thrown, and 1,000 volts of AC slammed into Kemmler. There was every reason to think that would be sufficient: Only a day earlier, it had been enough to kill a horse during a final test.

After 17 seconds, the current was shut off. The attending physician, Dr. Edward Spitzka, pronounced Kemmler dead. But he wasn't dead. He was still breathing, and when a member of the gallery pointed that out, Spitzka and another physician re-examined Kemmler. "Have the current turned on again, quick. No delay," Spitzka said.

This time they gave Kemmler 2,000 volts. According to witnesses, the second jolt caused his blood vessels to burst and his skin to catch fire.

A New York Herald correspondent who witnessed the execution left no doubt about its effect on him: "The scene of Kemmler's execution was too horrible to picture. He died the death of Feeks (.pdf), the lineman, who was slowly roasted to death in the sight of thousands."

Westinghouse, who had tried to prevent his current from being used for the execution, later remarked laconically: "They would have done better using an ax."

Despite Kemmler's grisly death, a number of states, mostly in the eastern and southern United States, adopted the electric chair -- known colloquially as "riding the lightning" -- as the preferred method of execution. It remained in widespread use until late in the 20th century.

The electric chair is no longer used in this country as the primary method of execution. Several states, however, still keep one around as a secondary method.

Sources: Various