The battery story: From frogs' legs to electric cars

Murderers in early 19th-Century London sometimes tried to kill themselves before they were hanged. Failing that, they asked friends to give their legs a good, hard pull as they dangled from the gallows to ensure their death. Their freshly hanged bodies, they knew, would be handed to scientists for anatomical studies. They didn't want to survive the hanging and regain consciousness while being dissected. If George Foster, executed in 1803, had woken up on the lab table, it would have been in particularly undignified circumstances.