H.T. Opsahl, History’s Worst High School Teacher

When 14-year-old Barnesville High School student Earl Tenneson irritated his science teacher, he didn’t get detention. Instead, he was sentenced to the electric chair.

In October 1924, Tenneson’s teacher, a 25-year-old ex-military service member named H.T. Opsahl, ordered a disruptive Tenneson to sit in a wooden chair in the classroom. The teen did as he was told and soon felt an electric shock running along his arms and legs.

Opsahl had rigged the chair with an electric current in what amounted to the most reckless form of corporal punishment imaginable. Tenneson’s father exploded in a rage and got Opsahl arrested. But the teacher was unruffled; so was the school board. Electrocuting children was, they argued, much ado about nothing.

1. Getting the Chair
2. Current Affairs

Getting the Chair

Barnesville High was located in Barnesville, Minnesota, a modestly-sized railroad town that later found success with its nearby potato crops. Barnesville High was erected in 1914. Come 1922, the school had a new science teacher: H.T. Opsahl, who hailed from Texas and reportedly had a military background.

Whether it was a stern attitude that gave Opsahl (sometimes spelled as Upsahl in contemporaneous newspaper accounts) a low tolerance for misbehavior is unknown. What is known is that at some point, Opsahl was struck by the idea of installing a metal bar in one of the classroom’s wooden chairs. The bar could conduct electricity generated by a Tesla coil, a high-voltage transformer that used low current that was invented by Nikola Tesla in 1891 and produced theatrical sparks reminiscent of Frankenstein.

According to Opsahl, the chair was originally intended as a science experiment, which later morphed into a deterrent for mischievous students. (A ruler across the knuckles was deemed too mundane.) Some of the girls in his class, he claimed, hopped on it for fun, as the voltage too low to cause any actual harm.

Earl Tenneson felt differently. Singled out for unspecified misbehavior on October 16, 1924, Opsahl ordered him to sit in the chair and an electrical current surged through him, as if he were a death row inmate whose appeals had finally been exhausted. He went home and told his father, Fred Tenneson, that his teacher had sentenced him to the chair. Tenneson, in turn, went to the police and had Opsahl arrested on assault charges.

Current Affairs

While electrocuting a child would seem to be something that would net a teacher a suspension, Opsahl was free to return to work as soon as he posted his $2000 bond. As the media descended on Barnesville High, both Opsahl and the school board seemed unfazed.

Board member N.B. Hanson claimed to a reporter that Opsahl had just “made a mistake though an attempt to scare the boys.” Not only that, but the outrage over it might have been misguided. “There is no cause for such excitement as prevailed yesterday over [his] mistake. It was a prank, apparently with no criminal intent,” Hanson said. The teacher, he added, was “a young man, full of life, and has a very good record … the situation is not such as to cause so much furor.” Hanson’s own son had even tried out the chair and experienced no ill effects, he claimed.

Opsahl had his own perspective: The chair only provided a “tingling sensation,” he said. If the student’s arms came loose from the armrests, there might be sparks, but “the student would not be injured.” The voltage was no more than what doctors used to treat rheumatism. Rather than outright harm students, he had merely wanted to cause a bit of emotional trauma.

“In short, I wanted to scare them,” he said. “Mental punishment, you know, is more effective than mere physical punishment.”

Opsahl admitted he had sent a total of three boys to the chair, with only Tenneson’s father causing a stir. This, Opsahl argued, was part of a larger issue, connected to parents taking their children’s side over that of teachers, which was creating disciplinary problems. In short, he blamed overly coddled children and their sympathetic parents for making a big deal about his homemade torture furniture.

Tenneson claimed his son had come home with severe burns on his legs from the chair. But in reviewing the case, prosecuting attorney W.G. Hammett could find no evidence of physical injury. At Opsahl’s hearing later in October, he asked the judge to dismiss the charges. The judge agreed.

Opsahl remained at Barnesville, undoubtedly carrying a reputation among students as someone whose science class demanded decorum. Within a few years, he had moved to Fargo, North Dakota, where he continued teaching science—presumably without any additional electricity experiments.

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