The accidental electrocution of a stage carpenter, who touched with his bare hand a not insulated wire, was not an isolated incident ... "
Thomas Edison
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electrocution
Origins
Further information: Electric chair
The idea of execution by electricity, electrocution, grew out of the introduction of the electric chair in the late 1890s as an official method of capital punishment in the United States state of New York, thought to be a more humane alternative to hanging. People had been dying (accidentally) from electric shock in the decade before the introduction of the electric chair with the first recorded accidental death by electricity (besides lightning strikes) occurring in 1879 when a stage carpenter in Lyon, France touched a 250-volt wire.[4] The spread of arc light based street lighting systems led to many people dying from coming in contact with the high-voltage lines being used, which seemed to kill instantaneously without leaving a mark on the victim.[5][6] After an 1881 death, a Buffalo, New York dentist Alfred P. Southwick sought to develop this phenomenon into a way to execute condemned criminals with him basing his device on form he knew well, a dental chair.[7] The next 9 years saw promotion by Southwick, the New York state Gerry commission (which included Southwick) recommending execution by electricity, a June 4, 1888 law making it the state form of execution on January 2, 1889, and a further state committee of doctors and lawyers to finalize the details of the method used.[8] The adoption of the electric chair became mixed up in the "war of currents" between Thomas Edison's direct current system and industrialist George Westinghouse's alternating current system in 1889 when noted anti-AC activist Harold P. Brown became a consultant to the committee. Brown pushed, with the assistance and sometimes collusion of Edison Electric and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, for the successful adoption of alternating current to power the chair, an attempt to portray AC as a public menace and the "executioners current".[9]
In May 1889 when New York had its first criminal sentenced to be executed in the electric chair, a street merchant named William Kemmler, there were many suggestions in newspapers as to what to call the new form of execution. The term "Westinghoused" was put forward as well as "Gerrycide" (after death penalty commission head Elbridge Thomas Gerry), and "Browned".[10] Thomas Edison put forward the words dynamort, ampermort and electromort.[11] Some time during that summer popular newspapers started using a word of unknown origin, "electrocution", to describe the new form of capital punishment. New York Times hated the word, describing it as being pushed forward by "pretentious ignoramuses".
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Isolated means far away from everyone or everything else. ... In addition to remote or set apart, isolated can mean a single event, or incident.
The high school students assured their principal that the cafeteria food fight was an isolated incident, promising that it would never, ever happen again.