With the modern and supposedly more humane electric chair due to replace the gallows at midnight, an overflow crowd packed the courthouse square in Angleton on Aug. 31, 1923 for the last public execution in Texas.

The first dose of “manufactured lightning” was administered in 1890 to a convicted wife murderer in New York. But the much-heralded debut was something less than an unqualified success.

The warden cut off the current after just 17 seconds on the advice of the attending physic...