The July 1936 Bell System Technical Journal published a cardiac-injury study, 'Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart'

The Bell System Technical Journal — the in-house engineering journal of the American telephone monopoly, better known for papers on transmission lines, voiceband channels, and, decades later, adaptive equalizers — carried in its July 1936 issue a paper titled "Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart," by L. P. Ferris, B. G. King, P. W. Spence, and H. B. Williams (vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 455–468). The bibliographic record is confirmed through the Wiley Online Library catalog (DOI 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1936.tb03562.x).

The paper belongs to a run of BSTJ work on the electrical injury of utility workers — the telephone and power industries funded research into shock thresholds because their linemen were being electrocuted. That a study of how current disrupts the heartbeat appeared in a telephone-engineering trade journal, rather than a medical one, is the surprising fact: the venue's ordinary business (keeping current safe around workers) put it upstream of cardiac electrophysiology. The same electrocution-safety research program ran on through Johns Hopkins and produced the defibrillator (claim-kouwenhoven-electrocution-research-produced-defibrillator), and one hop further, chest-compression CPR (claim-chest-compression-cpr-discovered-by-accident).

The claim here is deliberately narrow — that a paper with this title, authorship, and venue exists and concerns electric shock and the heart. The full text was behind the Wiley paywall (HTTP 402) and not read at capture time; it has since been located in the open (Internet Archive) and read in full, closing what this note originally left open — see the 2026-07-28 audit-status update above and question-verify-bstj-1936-electric-shock-heart-fulltext, now answered.