According to the caption of this picture from the June 1929 issue of Popular Mechanics, the gentleman shown above is merely “sick.” But he doesn’t look very good, and we suspect he may have already succumbed to electrocution.

He wanted to listen to the radio, but they didn’t want to drag the radio into his room. Nor did they want to run any wires. So someone came up with the bright idea shown here. There was already a perfectly good set of wires in place, namely, the house electric wiring. So they decided to put it into service by feeding the radio output into the power wires, and plugging in a set of headphones on the other end. A 2 μF capacitor was put in place as a gesture toward safety.

The first problem seems to be that it wouldn’t really work. Whatever audio made it through would be drowned out by the 60 cycle hum, assuming that the lighting current was AC, which it was in most of the country by that time.

And unless my back-of-the-envelope calculations are wrong, the capacitor will have a reactance at 60 Hz of only about 1300 ohms, meaning that a current of up to 90 mA could still flow through, which seems like plenty to deliver a lethal shock, especially if you’re placing the electrodes right next to the brain.

So in our estimation, this project is not one which should be attempted.  Kids (and adults):  Do not try this at home!