Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Los Amigos Fiasco" (short story, humor, free): A method to turn mere mortals into supermen!

This sometimes hilarious, other times merely amusing, story dates from early days of electric power. And needs to be read with substantially suspended credulity.

Story summary.

A town called Los Amigos to the west of New York (state?) in the US is using electric chair for the first time for execution of a criminal. Since recent experience of NY wasn't happy - victim took a long time dying - this city will use much higher voltage.

Only the result is what the task-focused executioners see as a fiasco. This high charge has turned Duncan Warner, the condemned man, into a superman! "Electricity is life, and you have charged him with it to the utmost." "What you have done with your electricity is that you have increased this man's vitality until he can defy death for centuries... it will take the wear of hundreds of years to exhaust the enormous nervous energy with which you have drenched him."

Fact sheet.

First published: The Idler, December 1892.
Rating: A
Download full text from The Wondersmith.