Edison's support for the electric chair was part of his overall strategy to suppress the Westinghouse AC system and ensure the future of his own DC system (which would have required generating stations every mile or so.) He also tried to get laws passed which would have effectively made AC illegal on grounds of safety, and anything he could do to increase the psychological association between "AC" and "danger" would clearly contribute to this end.

George Westinghouse was an interesting guy--a prolific inventor, if not quite so prolific as Edison--but probably a better businessman and a better human being. A vignette featuring Westinghouse is here.

A bullet point-blank to the back of the head, a la the PRC, costs thousands of times less than the chair, the gas chamber or lethal injection, and is a lot harder to screw up. I've never understood why methods of execution have to be complicated.

Hanging is humane, if you do it right, and it's not hard.

Except for being exceedingly messy, so's a hydraulic press to the head. It could be made to take less than a quarter second, easily, and provide instant and indisputable death through utter destruction of the brain, which wouldn't have enough time to feel any pain.

(That might be prohibitable as "unusual" punishment, but it's not cruel, and the constitution does use "and", not "or" in that clause. For a reason, one imagines.)

Can't get much humaner than that, can you?

Dave,I think that it's the effect on the public that counts...witness the televised hangings in Iran as we speak.The one bullet was good enough in Stalin's USSR...and then the victim's family would recieve a bill for the bullet,a few kopeks...