William Kemmler entered Auburn Prison’s death chamber in 1890 to test a machine promoted as a modern, humane replacement for hanging. The first electric-chair execution instead became a gruesome public failure, entangling capital punishment with America’s battle over the future of electricity.

The tin foil hat existed in fiction before it became the universal uniform of conspiracy culture, appearing as protection against telepathic control in a startlingly prescient 1926 story. A century later, the homemade metal helmet has become visual shorthand for everything from alien signals and government mind control to Wi-Fi paranoia.

Antonin Artaud called his revolutionary idea the Theatre of Cruelty, a phrase that has been misunderstood almost ever since. What he actually wanted was stranger and more ambitious: theatre powerful enough to attack the senses, bypass polite reason and leave an audience genuinely changed.