Lovecraft was fascinated by astronomy from his youth, and the "new star" that is featured at the end of "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" was a real nova that appeared in 1901, now known as GK Persei. The description Lovecraft quotes at the end of the story was from Astronomy with the Naked Eye, a book about astronomy for laypeople by Garrett P. Serviss. Serviss was the author of numerous books and newspaper columns to popularize science, as well as early science fiction. Lovecraft was a fan.

The first electric execution was carried out in New York in 1890: the condemned man was William Kemmler, who had axed his wife/girlfriend to death. The chair used to kill him (pictured at left) was invented by a Buffalo NY dentist named Alfred Southwick, after a series of botched hangings made people question the humaneness of execution in general. The chair was inspired by his dental chair.

As it happened, the development of the electric chair coincided with the "War of Currents" between the camps of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, to see whose system of electricity would win out. The Edison company (which developed direct current (DC)) advocated for the use of Tesla's alternating current for the chair, to try to make sure that the public associated AC with death. Edison participated in the electrocutions of numerous dogs and horses in his attempt to defeat Tesla and Westinghouse.

Although electric execution was developed as a "humane" alternative to hanging, the execution of William Kemmler took about eight agonizing minutes. Witnesses said it was a horrible spectacle and it would have been better just to use an axe.

The bizarre contraption described in Lovecraft and DeCastro's story reminded us of Hugo Gernsback's Isolator, invented in 1925. Gernsback was an ardent science and technology buff who founded, among other things, Amazing Stories magazine and gave the science fiction genre its first home.

When we chose to set the framing narrative for "The Electric Executioner" in a jury room, we had to ask ourselves if women were allowed to serve on juries in the 1920s. It turns out that the answer is a little complicated. Women only won the right to vote nationwide in 1920, but it did not automatically mean they won other rights of citizenship at the same time. They had to fight again for the right to serve on juries. It was argued that women were "too sensitive", would be "too sympathetic" or would be somehow sullied by hearing about crimes, and that their primary duty was in the home. Women were first allowed to sit on juries in California in 1917. It wasn't until 1975 that it became a right nationwide.

Two of the characters in our framing narrative for "Winged Death" are completely fictional, but Dr. Louise Pearce was a real medical specialist who developed cures for sleeping sickness in the Belgian Congo in the 1920s. We don't know if Lovecraft's co-author, Hazel Heald, knew of Dr. Pearce, but the many details in the story certainly suggest that she, or Lovecraft, did their homework on African diseases.

Below is a map from 1909 showing the distribution of tsetse flies and sleeping sickness in Africa. Click it to see a bigger version. We briefly considered making this map one of the bonus props for the episode.

Tesla and Lovecraft have long been linked in fans' imaginations, with some believing he was an inspiration for the human avatar of Nyarlathotep. Nikola Tesla certainly fit the archetype of mad scientist, with his many genius contributions to technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and we could not resist adding him to "From Beyond". If you don't already know about him, you should definitely start checking him out. And while you're at it, you should take a look at the science behind "From Beyond" at Fred Lubnow's Lovecraftian Science blog.

As we were working on this episode, we paid a visit to the Brown University Library website. We took a look at the typescript for "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and were delighted and amazed to discover that it had all been typed on the backs of letters that Lovecraft received from other people. A picture of one of them is below. You can see the whole thing in amazing high-resolution scans at the Brown Digital Repository.

Science won wars, cured diseases, connected the planet and put humans on the moon. But in recent years it seems like science is increasingly marginalized, and madness is taking over. Mankind faces challenges that science can help us overcome, and science education is critically important for our future. HPLHS Founding Member Philip Bell is now a Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Washington, and he is on the front lines of this very important fight. One of his many ongoing efforts is to develop science, technology, engineering and math teaching tools for educators across the country.