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I.Leon 3

Background information

A.About the author

Richard MoranMore Crime and Le Punishment

Richard Moran is a criminologist and a leading expert on the insanity defense,capital punishment, and the history of the electric chair.The author of numerous

articles and reviews, Moran has also written articles for the Washington Post,Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, and Newsweek.The Executioner's Current

It is the story of how the electric chair developed out of an effort by one nineteenth-century

electric company to discredit the other.EdisonEdison, Thomas Alva(1847-1931)a US inventor who made over 1300 electrical inventions, including the , the record player, and equipment for the cinema.He is most famous for inventing the(=a gla container with a thin wire inside, which produces light by using electricity).When Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse(1846-1914, 美国发明家)were building the first power plants in the country, electric light was a bizarre new technology that few people understood and many people feared.Adding to the confusion were the two competitors' attempts to promote their own systems and discredit the other.When New York State began considering electrocution as a method of capital punishment, Edison recommended Westinghouse's alternating current for the unseemly task.Westinghouse, not wanting the negative stigma aociated with his system, fought back, and a truly well intentioned government effort to find a more humane method of execution became a courtroom battle for commercial supremacy between two competing pioneers.Moran's account is broad, covering the electric power struggle between Edison and Westinghouse, the trial and execution of the first man to die in the electric chair, and the history of the capital punishment debate in the U.S.Edison's popularity as a cultural hero lends appeal to the entertaining drama of the power companies' competition, and the surprisingly colorful history of the electric chair makes for fascinating reading.