Imagine it's the winter of 1924. Right. And there's
this group of engineers, politicians, and prison
officials in Nevada. And they are trying to figure
out how to humanely execute a man named Gee John.
Right. They wanted to move away from the traditional
methods. Exactly. They want to get away from
the firing squad and the gallows. So they come
up with what they honestly believe is this brilliant,
highly civilized solution. They decide they're
just gonna wait until he falls asleep and literally
pump lethal poison gas under the door of his
drafty, standard -issue prison cell. Which is
just, I mean, it's mind -boggling. It really
is. I mean, spoiler alert, for anyone who knows
literally anything about how air works, it was
a complete disaster. It was essentially this
grim, terribly thought -out plumbing experiment
that just failed completely. Yeah. bizarre, deeply
misguided attempt birthed a piece of technology
that would go on to define some of the darkest
chapters of human history. It really is the ultimate
paradox of human engineering because we naturally
associate technological advancement with... the
betterment of humanity. But when you look at
the evolution of the gas chamber, you see how
the very desire to be humane and civilized can
seamlessly pave the way for the most industrialized
forms of cruelty. And that is exactly our mission
for this Deep Dives. Today, we are looking at
a really extensive stack of historical and technical
sources detailing the complete evolution of the
gas chamber. We're going to trace this apparatus
from that botched 1920s criminal justice experiment
in the United States. follow its horrific weaponization
into an instrument of mass murder in Nazi Germany,
and then track its incredibly heavily debated
applications right up to today. Yeah, both in
modern human executions and, surprisingly, in
everyday industrial agriculture. Right. I think
we have to acknowledge right up front that this
is an undeniably heavy topic for you to dive
into with us today, but it's an essential one.
Because if we want to understand how our modern
society operates, we really have to look at how
we attempt to ingenuity solutions to the grim
realities of death. We have to look at the mechanics
of these machines to understand how easily those
technologies can be profoundly corrupted. OK,
let's unpack this by going back to that first
attempt in Nevada, because the origins really
are almost absurd. They really are. The first
proposal for a gas chamber in America came from
a toxicologist named Alan McLean Hamilton. and
the overarching goal was to sanitize the execution
process. Right, they wanted a method that didn't
physically mangle the body. Yeah, and didn't
traumatize the witnesses. So February 8th, 1924,
they attempt this execution on Gijon. But like
I mentioned, they didn't even build a chamber
at first. They just tried to pump it into his
regular cell. Which, from a purely scientific
standpoint, shows a profound misunderstanding
of fluted dynamics and, well, just how gases
behave in an unsealed environment. Right. I mean,
it's like trying to fill a colander with water.
You cannot just pump a lethal, lighter -than
-air gas into a standard room with drafty windows,
brick walls, gaps under the door, and expect
it to, you know... stay contained to lethal levels.
No, of course not. The gas just dissipated right
into the Nevada night air. And when that inevitably
failed, the officials were forced to scramble
and build a specifically sealed makeshift chamber
just to carry out that single sentence. What's
fascinating here is the psychological shift that
was taking place. The state wasn't necessarily
trying to make the death physically painless
for the condemned man. Okay, so what were they
trying to do? What they were desperately seeking
was a method that felt clinical. They wanted
to separate the executioner from the visceral,
bloody reality of taking a life. By using a gas,
the executioner just throws a switch or turns
a valve from a completely different room. Wow,
so it's about distancing themselves. Exactly.
The chemical reaction does the actual killing.
It totally rem - moves the human agency from
the act of violence. And reading through these
historical accounts, it wasn't just an American
fixation either. Like in 1937, Lithuania adopted
the gas chamber at the Kaunas fortress. Oh, right.
Yeah, they explicitly moved away from hanging
and shooting because gas was viewed by their
politicians as more civilized. Now their engineering
was slightly different. They built a dedicated
brick chamber and pumped in compressed lethal
gas from an external storage cylinder, unlike
the chemical reaction the Americans used. But
the core mindset was identical. It was this.
desperate desire for clinical detachment. And
if we connect this to the bigger picture, that
specific desire for detachment is exactly what
paved the way for the apparatus to be staled
up. How so? Well, when a government successfully
removes the human element from the act of killing,
when they manage to turn execution into a mere
logistical process of containment, airflow and
ventilation, they completely open the door to
mass atrocities. Which brings us to the darkest
chapter. And I really want to understand the
mechanics of this escalation, because how does
a state justify moving from the execution of
individual convicted criminals. as misguided
as it was, to the kind of massive industrialized
engineering we saw during the Holocaust. Like,
how does that leap actually happen on a logistical
level? It happens through the cold, calculated
logic of engineering problem solving, completely
divorced from morality. Under totalitarian regimes,
the goal shifts from justice to efficiency. Right.
In Nazi Germany, the shift began in 1939 with
a program called Action T4. This was an involuntary
euthanasia program where they murdered people
with physical and intellectual... actual disabilities,
people the state just deemed a burden. And they
started with carbon monoxide, right? Yes. They
started by simply piping bottled pure carbon
monoxide into improvised sealed rooms. But bottling
pure carbon monoxide is expensive and really
difficult to transport in massive quantities.
So the concept goes mobile. I was reading about
the Soviet NKVD in the late 1930s who faced a
similar, quote unquote, logistical problem. Exactly.
Under a Soviet officer named Izai Berg at Bitov,
they were executing so many political prisoners
by firing squad that the traditional methods
were becoming logistically impossible. They just
couldn't keep up. Right. They were running out
of time and ammunition. So Berg's team modified
bread trucks. They rerouted the exhaust pipe
directly into the sealed back compartment where
the prisoners were held, basically utilizing
the carbon monoxide from the engine. They called
them Dushyagubki or soul takers. The justification
is just staggering to me. He claimed there was
no other way to execute so many people, and that
it was a precautionary method to prevent the
prisoners from rioting on the way to the execution
site. Yeah, totally. They'd create this entirely
fabricated quota of death, and then complain
about the logistics of meeting it. Precisely.
And that exact same mobile gas van concept was
mirrored later by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen during
the invasion of the Soviet Union. But the vans
had major engineering flaws from the perspective
of the architects of the Holocaust. What kind
of flaws? Well, they broke down frequently. The
exhaust output varied based on the weather and
the engine. And the process of unloading them
was deeply traumatic for the soldiers. The mobile
vans just weren't efficient enough for them.
So they iterate. They moved to stationary extermination
camps, the Operation Reinhardt camps. Belgec,
Spobabor, and Treblinka. Right. And to solve
the unreliability of the trucks, they used massive
stationary diesel engines ripped from captured
tanks or submarines, piping the exhaust fumes
into large brick chambers. But even that was
eventually deemed too cumbersome. The massive
engines required fuel. They required constant
maintenance. The chilling culmination of this
engineering process happened at Auschwitz and
Majdanek. They abandoned carbon monoxide entirely
in favor of a commercial fumigant called Zyklon
B. Explain how Zyklon B actually changed the
mechanics of this, because it wasn't an engine
exhaust at all, was it? No, not at all. Zyklon
B is a hydrogen cyanide -based pesticide. It
came in these small, highly transportable canisters
filled with porous pellets. The horrific genius
of it, from a purely engineering standpoint,
is that hydrogen cyanide vaporizes into a lethal
gas at just about 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Which
is roughly room temperature. Exactly. So they
didn't need heavy engines, exhaust pipes, or
complex plumbing. simply drop the pellets through
vents in the roof of the chamber, and the body
heat of the terrified victims packed inside would
raise the ambient temperature enough to vaporize
the poison? Just to pause here for a second,
because the scale we're talking about now is
almost impossible to comprehend. By streamlining
the technology down to a simple pellet drop from
the roof, they were able to murder up to 6 ,000
victims in a single day. Yeah. It completely
strips away the initial humane intent of the
1920s and shows how quickly clinical detachment
becomes a weapon of mass extermination. The scale
is horrific. And you would hope that after 1945,
the world universally agreed to dismantle this
kind of technology. But the historical records
point to chilling modern allegations that the
twisted science of the gas chamber didn't end
with the fall of the Third Reich. You're talking
about the reports coming out of North Korea.
Yes. We have very disturbing allegations from
North Korean escapees, including a man named
Kwon Hyuk, who was a former head of security
at Camp 22. What did he describe? He described
underground laboratories equipped with glass
-observed gas chambers. He alleged that whole
families, parents, and children were placed inside
and used as subjects for suffocation gas experiments.
Oh, my God. Scientists literally observed from
above, taking clinical notes while parents desperately
tried to give their children to mouth resuscitation
as the gas filled the room. It's the ultimate
corruption of science. To use the very tools
of observation and chemistry to inflict and study
maximum cruelty. It really is. But I want to
pivot back to the American justice system. To
understand the actual mechanics of this machine
in a modern legal context. Because for decades,
the US maintained this persistent illusion that
the gas chamber was a clean, peaceful, and highly
controlled way to execute someone. Right. But
looking at the actual procedure, the reality
was incredibly dangerous and messy. Without a
doubt, the hydrogen cyanide gas chamber is widely
considered by penal experts to be the most dangerous,
most complicated, and most expensive method of
administering the death penalty ever devised.
I'm looking at these schematics for the mid -century
American chambers, and it looks insanely complicated
compared to, like, a simple firing squad, or
even the electric chair. I don't understand how
they actually trigger the lethal reaction without
exposing the executioner or the witnesses. Walk
us through the actual plumbing. How does it work?
It relies on a very precise isolated chemical
reaction. The condemned person is strapped into
a specialized chair inside a heavy airtight steel
and glass chamber. Directly beneath that chair
is a specialized receptacle filled with a bath
of distilled water and sulfuric acid. OK, so
acid under the chair. Right. Now, the executioner
is stationed in a completely separate room. They
activate a mechanical lever or a pulley system,
which drops a cheesecloth bag containing pellets
of either potassium cyanide or sodium cyanide
directly into that acid bath below the chair.
That causes the gas. Exactly. The instant the
cyanide hits the sulfuric acid, a violent chemical
reaction generates lethal hydrogen in cyanide
gas, or HCN, which rises up into the chamber.
Here's where it gets really interesting, structurally
speaking. It's like turning over an hourglass.
Yes. Once those pellets drop into the acid, gravity
takes over, and the physics are locked in. Yes.
You cannot unmix the chemicals. There's no pause
button, no antidote. You can pump in quickly.
Which had tragic legal consequences, right? Absolutely.
Because the chemical reaction is impossible to
halt once the lever is pulled, last -minute stays
of execution became literally impossible to carry
out. That actually happened, didn't it? It did.
This happened tragically in the executions of
Burton Abbott in California in 1957 and Carol
Chessman in 1960. The governor's phone call or
the legal reprieve came through to the warden's
desk, but the lever had already been pulled.
Wow. The pellets had dropped into the acid. The
chemical reaction was already filling the room
with lethal gas. It was finalized. And the aftermath
of the execution is a whole other layer of logistical
danger. You can't just open the heavy steel door
and carry the person out once they passed away.
No. The extraction process is extremely hazardous.
First, the entire chamber has to be mechanically
purged with exhaust fans, venting the lethal
gas up a very tall pipe into the outside atmosphere.
Then, the residual lethal gas inside the chamber
has to be chemically neutralized. They do this
by pumping in anhydrous ammonia. And anhydrous
just means without water, right? I use that specific
chemical. Because pure ammonia gas chemically
binds with the hydrogen cyanide molecules, rendering
them largely inert. But even after all that venting
and neutralizing, the guards tasked with removing
the body have to wear specialized hazmat suits
and oxygen tanks. Really? Even after neutralizing
it? Yes, because they have to exercise extreme
caution and literally ruffle the victims' hair
and clothes because deadly pockets of hydrogen
cyanide gas can remain trapped in the fabric.
A single deep breath of that could be lethal
to the guard. Okay, so that's the danger to the
staff. But what about the experience of the condemned?
Because for decades, wardens would tell the prisoners
to take several deep breaths as soon as they
smelled the gas, which smells like bitter almonds,
right? Right. They'd claim it would speed up
unconsciousness and put them peacefully to sleep.
But the physical reaction is anything but peaceful.
The physiological reality completely contradicts
the clinical goal of a peaceful death. Hydrogen
cyanide doesn't just put you to sleep, it attacks
the body on a cellular level. It binds to the
mitochondria in your cells, preventing them from
using the oxygen that is actually circulating
in your blood. So you're suffocating even though
you're breathing? Exactly. You essentially suffocate
from the inside out even while your lungs are
pumping. This causes severe violent physical
reactions. We are talking about intense convulsions,
heavy drooling, violent vomiting, and complete
loss of bodily control. The prisoner is visibly
agonizing, fighting for air that their cells
literally cannot use. Which is exactly what eventually
shattered the public illusion of the civilized
gas chamber. I mean, the historical records detail
some highly publicized, horribly botched executions
that changed everything. Very much so. Like in
1983 in Mississippi, a man named Jimmy Lee Gray
gasped for air and violently banged his head
against a steel pole for eight straight minutes
while horrified officials had to actually clear
the viewing room of witnesses. It was incredibly
grim. And in 1992 in Arizona, Donald Eugene Harding's
execution took 11 agonizing minutes. It was so
visually traumatic that the prison warden publicly
threatened to quit his job if the state ever
forced him to conduct another one. Deniable visual
realities are what ultimately forced the legal
system to act. Following the execution of Robert
Alton Harris in California, a federal court ruled
in 1996 that the state's lethal gas protocol
was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, specifically
because of the visible suffering. So that was
the end of it. That ruling essentially ended
the era of hydrogen cyanide executions in America.
The last person executed this way was a German
national named Walter LeGrand in Arizona in 1999.
So the legal and scientific search for a better,
less visually disturbing gas continued right
into the 21st century. Because if hydrogen cyanide
is visibly torturous, states still wanted a method
that at least looked peaceful. And that brings
us to the modern pivot, which is inert gas asphyxiation.
Specifically, excluding oxygen by using pure
nitrogen gas. Right. We actually just saw Alabama
use this exact method on a man named Kenneth
Eugene Smith on January 25, 2024. Yes. And Oklahoma
tried for years to design a workable nitrogen
protocol before temporarily abandoning it. But
the concept of nitrogen hypoxia is currently
gaining massive legal traction across several
states as the primary alternative to legal injection,
which obviously has its own supply chain and
botched execution issues. But physiologically,
I need you to clarify this for me. Why is nitrogen
considered fundamentally different by these states?
Why do they argue it's better than cyanide or
carbon dioxide? If we connect this to the bigger
picture of human biology, there is a fascinating
fundamental loophole in how our bodies detect
suffocation. When you hold your breath right
now, that burning, panicky feeling you get in
your chest isn't actually your body detecting
a lack of oxygen. Wait, really? Really. Humans
don't have biological sensors for low oxygen.
That panic is actually your body detecting a
dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream.
It's called hypercapnia. Your brain senses the
CO2 rising and triggers the panic response to
force you to breathe. Oh, wow. Okay, so how does
nitrogen bypass that? Well, nitrogen is an inert
gas that already makes up about 78 % of the ambient
air we normally breathe every day. If you are
placed in a sealed mask or an environment pumping
pure nitrogen, you continue to exhale carbon
dioxide normally. So the CO2 escapes. Right.
Your lungs are still working, moving gas in and
out, so your CO2 levels never spike. Because
the CO2 isn't building up, your brain's alarm
system never goes off. But crucially, you aren't
taking in any new oxygen. That is wild. Theoretically,
the victim detects very little abnormal sensation
as the oxygen level in their blood quietly falls.
They simply slip into unconsciousness and succumb
to hypoxia without the traumatic, painful feeling
of suffocation. That is a staggering biological
loophole. It's literally tricking the body's
alarm system into staying quiet while the body
dies. But, you know, while human executions using
gas are incredibly rare and highly publicized
events, the exact same concepts using gas to
engineer death at scale are used every single
day in a completely different sector. Absolutely.
One that most people listening to this have probably
never even thought about. We are talking about
industrial agriculture. The sheer scale of this
is mind bending. According to the data in 2024,
In England and Wales alone, 90 % of pigs killed
in slaughterhouses and 77 % of broiler chickens
were stunned or killed using mass gas chambers.
It has become the global industry standard because
it solves a massive logistical problem. Handling
hundreds of thousands of live terrified animals
individually is dangerous, it's expensive, and
it's highly stressful for both the animals and
the slaughterhouse workers. Gas allows the facility
to process massive groups of animals efficiently
without human ever having to manually wrestle
a live animal. Let's talk about the mechanics
for pigs because the engineering here is something
straight out of a dystopian sci -fi movie. It's
a mechanism called the Patternoster system. Slaughterhouses
build a deep concrete pit, usually four to eight
meters straight down, and they fill the bottom
of it with a high concentration of carbon dioxide
gas. Right. Now, because CO2 is significantly
heavier than the ambient air, it doesn't float
away. It just sits in the bottom of this pit.
So imagine an invisible, incredibly heavy pool
of water. That's the perfect analogy. The heavy
gas settles and behaves exactly like a fluid.
Right. And the pigs are loaded into these open
-air metal gondolas at the top of the pit. The
gondola descends down into the pit on a conveyor,
literally dipping. the live animals into this
invisible pool of CO2. They stay submerged in
the high concentration gas at the bottom for
a set amount of time, and then the gondola slowly
ascends back up the other side. By the time they
reach the top, the pigs are deeply stunned or
completely dead and they are mechanically unloaded
for processing. And the poultry industry uses
a similar concept called controlled atmosphere
stunning or CAS. These are massive sealed tunnels
or closed cabinets where the birds are exposed
to increasing concentrations of CO2 while they
are still sitting in their plastic transport
crates. So nobody handles them. Exactly. It completely
eliminates the need for human workers to handle
the live panicking birds, speeding up the processing
line immensely. But wait, I have to push back
on the welfare aspect of this because earlier
you just explained that Humans panic intensely
when carbon dioxide builds up in their blood.
The burning chest, the hypercapnia. Well, biologically,
pigs are very similar to humans. Don't they react
the exact same way to being dipped into a pool
of high concentration CO2? They absolutely do.
This raises an important question about the ongoing
tension between industrial efficiency and animal
suffering. High concentration CO2 is highly aversive
to mammals. It is genuinely painful. How so?
When it mixes with the moisture in the animal's
eyes, mouth, and airways, it forms a mild carbonic
acid, causing severe irritation and burning to
the mucous membranes. And under clinical test
conditions, it takes an average of 47 to 60 seconds
for the pigs to actually lose consciousness in
that pit. Wow. So a full minute. Yes. That is
a full minute of violent gasping, vocalization,
and active panicked attempts to escape. The European
Food Safety Authority has explicitly stated and
published that this is absolutely not optimal
for animal welfare. So if everyone knows it causes
pain, why on earth do they use it? Why not use
an inert gas like the nitrogen we talked about
earlier or argon? I was reading that argon gas
has been tested extensively and because it's
inert, it works just like nitrogen. It strongly
reduces the animal's panic and aversion because
it doesn't trigger that CO2 alarm system. It
all comes down to the brutal, inescapable math
of industrial processing. Inert gases like argon
take much, much longer to induce deep unconsciousness.
If the animal takes longer to go to sleep, you
have to slow down the entire mechanical processing
line. Oh, I see. That slowdown alone raises the
cost per pig by two to three times compared to
using CO2. Furthermore, the longer stunning time
with argon has been shown to cause higher numbers
of microscopic blood spots in the meat. So it
actually affects the product. Exactly. This visibly
impacts product quality and consumer sales at
the grocery store. So the entire global food
industry is caught in this massive unresolved
tension between minimizing animal distress and
maximizing economic efficiency and pristine meat
quality. So what does this all mean? We started
this deep dive looking at a makeshift drafty
prison cell in 1920s Nevada where officials naively
thought they could just pump poison gas under
a door to create a civilized execution. Yeah.
And we've ended up looking at massive highly
mechanized invisible pools of heavy gas processing
millions of animals a year to protect our supply
chains. For you listening, I think this journey
reveals something profound and honestly a little
unsettling about human nature. We are constantly
desperately wrestling with the moral weight of
death. Whether we are looking at the criminal
justice system, the horrors of war, or the food
supply, we try to use complex engineering to
mask the grim reality of taking a life. We want
the end result, but we demand that the process
be clean, invisible, and detached from our conscience.
And as we've seen, the very definition of what
constitutes a clean or humane death has constantly
shifted over the last century. It is never truly
objective. It is always dictated by the limits
of our current technology and our society's shifting
tolerance for visible suffering, which leaves
us with a lingering question to consider long
after this deep dive ends. What's that? If the
supposedly civilized, cutting -edge solutions
of the 1920s are viewed as barbaric and absurd
by us today, what entirely standard, heavily
engineered practices of our modern world will
future generations look back on with the exact
same horror?