First Electric Chair Execution: A Grim New Method

William Kemmler, a Buffalo vegetable peddler who had murdered his common-law wife with a hatchet, became the first person executed by electric chair on August 6, 1890, at Auburn Prison in New York. The execution was supposed to demonstrate a humane advance over hanging. Instead, it became a gruesome spectacle that horrified witnesses and ignited a debate about capital punishment that continues to this day. The first jolt of current, applied for 17 seconds, failed to kill Kemmler. He was still breathing. A second, longer application was required, during which witnesses reported the smell of burning flesh and singed hair. The electric chair was born from the "War of Currents," the bitter commercial rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over whether direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC) would power the nation's electrical grid. Edison, who championed DC, secretly funded the development of an AC-powered execution device to convince the public that Westinghouse's alternating current was inherently dangerous. Harold Brown, an electrical engineer working with Edison's backing, designed the chair and conducted public demonstrations electrocuting animals to prove AC's lethality. Westinghouse was so alarmed by the association of his technology with death that he funded Kemmler's legal appeals, arguing that electrocution constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The case reached the Supreme Court, but the justices declined to overturn the sentence. New York proceeded with the execution. The botched killing drew widespread press coverage and international condemnation. A Westinghouse representative reportedly said, "They would have done better with an axe." Despite the horror, New York continued using the electric chair, and other states adopted it over the following decades. The device that was invented to make death painless instead created a new category of suffering, and its development remains one of the stranger episodes in the history of American technology.