The High School Teacher With an Electric Chair

Up through most of the 20th century, school discipline could involve paddling, rapping your knuckles with a ruler, or forced labor. That last one might still be in use. But science teacher H.T. Opsahl had an electric chair, and he used it to punish unruly students. 

The chair began as a science experiment. A 25-year-old military veteran, Opsahl had rigged the wooden chair with a metal bar that would conduct electricity from a Tesla coil into the body of whoever sat in it. Opsahl had punished at least two other misbehaving students with time in the chair before 14-year-old Earl Tenneson, but it was Tenneson who told his father about it. The elder Tenneson stormed into Barnesville High School in Minnesota demanding an explanation. This was in 1924, and the school authorities said it was no big deal, the student was alright. Read about the classroom electric chair used as punishment at Mental Floss.