Electrocution: Poor Old Burger Head

May 25, 2025 · 1 h 23 min

Show notes

What happens when electricity, something we use every day, becomes a weapon designed to make someone talk?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan explore the disturbing history of electrocution, from secret police and military dictatorships to execution chambers, interrogation rooms, and even psychiatric hospitals.

We’ll begin in Argentina during the Dirty War with journalist Jacobo Timerman, before traveling to Greece and the story of resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis. From there, we’ll follow electricity into the United States, where a battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse helped turn alternating current into one of the most infamous methods of execution in American history.

We’ll look at the disastrous first execution in the electric chair, the evolution of the technology, and how electricity eventually became a tool of torture used by regimes and secret police around the world. We’ll also explore its use during the Cold War, in Latin American dictatorships, Nazi Germany, and modern detention centers.

But electricity hasn’t always been used to hurt people. We’ll also look at the strange and controversial history of electroconvulsive therapy, from its earliest experiments to its use as a modern medical treatment, and the disturbing story of institutions that used electrical shocks as a form of behavioral control.

And because this is Torture: A Dark History, Kevin and Dan bring their own dark and mildly inappropriate humor to an episode where “getting a little shock” can mean something considerably worse than a balloon and a doorknob.

If you’re interested in electrocution, electric torture, the electric chair, Thomas Edison, the Dirty War, Cold War torture, Gestapo interrogation, electroconvulsive therapy, and the dark history of electricity, this episode is going to leave you with a whole new appreciation for outlets in your home.

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