Abstract
DEATH BY ELECTRIC CURRENTS. I BELIEVE that no loss of human life from industrial currents of electricity occurred before 1879, though currents strong enough to have caused death were employed in lighting the operatic stage in Paris (at the first performance of Meyerbeer's “Le Prophète”) so long ago as 1849, and in lighthouses on and off the coast of England in 1857. In 1879 a stage carpenter was killed at Lyons by the alternating current of a Siemens dynamo that was giving a voltage of about 250 volts at the time. The man became insensible at once, and died in twenty minutes; artificial respiration was not applied. The first death in this country took place at a theatre in Aston, outside Birmingham, in 1880, where a bandsman short-circuited a powerful electric battery, became insensible, and died in forty minutes. Since that date the annual number of deaths from electric shock has steadily increased, particularly during this century, in which the industrial employment of electricity has extended so widely, an'd is now quite large. In the ten years 1901–10 the Registrar-General's returns show a total of 183 such deaths in England and Wales, the population having risen from 32½ to 36 million during that period. In the three years 1901 to 1903 there were twenty-five deaths; in 1908, twenty-five; in 1909, twenty-nine; in 1910, twenty-six. Only two of these 183 victims were females, because women are so much less exposed to contact with dangerous electric currents than are men. Many deaths by electricity occur annually on the Continent, though I can only bring forward a few scattered figures to prove it. In Germany, thirty-three were killed in 1908; fifty-two in 1909; forty-six in 1911. In Austria eleven were killed by electricity in 1907; ten in 1910; ten in 1911. In Switzerland, twenty-one were killed in 1905; nineteen in 1906. I think it probable that about 200 persons are killed by electricity annually over the whole of Europe. As regards the United States of America, where electricity is so very extensively employed, I have not been able to find any statistical records. So long ago as 1888 Brown estimated that during the past five years some 200 people had been killed by handling live electric wires. One must remember that in America life is held very cheap, and that safeguards and protective legislation tend to be regarded as undue restrictions upon industry and commerce. I imagine that not fewer than 200 persons are accidentally killed by electric currents every year in America. As a rule, onlv a single person is killed by electricity in any single accident; but in an accident occurring in 1909 at Olginate, a village in Lombardy, ten people were killed outright by a three-phase current at 3000 volts, one was saved by artificial respiration, and about a dozen more were severely injured (Hoest).
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Death by Electric Currents and by Lightning 1 . Nature 91, 466–469 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/091466a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/091466a0