Aaron Mahnke

Clouds of hydrogen cyanide were pumped into an enclosed chamber.

Within minutes, the prisoner was dead.

As simple as that.

Honestly, things couldn't have gone any better, from a technical standpoint.

And okay, they probably would have been better if the now very dead man, a Chinese immigrant named Guy John, had actually been guilty.

Unfortunately, he was almost certainly innocent, sentenced not due to evidence, but rather a surge in anti-Chinese prejudice at the time.

But as for the gas itself, well, it seemed to have worked like a dream.

After that, what happened in Vegas definitely didn't stay in Vegas.

With the Guy John case deemed a success, gas chambers popped up all across America.

Could it be that after thousands of years and countless torments, humanity had finally discovered a painless ethical means of executing someone?

Go ahead, take a wild guess.

I think you know the answer.

It's a story that will sound chillingly familiar by now.

A white woman is assaulted, a black man with intellectual disabilities is arrested for the crime, in this case a black teenager, the 19-year-old Alan Foster.

In Alan's own words, "...I didn't know what I was arrested for, and they beat me till I was all bloody and then made me tell them what I did."

Hardly grounds for conviction, but young Allen received a death sentence nonetheless.

His mother begged for mercy, pleading for life imprisonment instead, but her pleas fell on deaf ears, and on January 24th of 1946, Allen Foster stepped into a North Carolina gas chamber.

Now, you might think that the room would have been stifling and warm, but the chamber was literally freezing, kept at around 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

As if that weren't bad enough, Foster was nearly naked and his head had been shaved bare.

You see, authorities were afraid that the deadly gas might permeate his clothes and hair, hurting the officials who would later remove the body.