The Switch

By John Allen

The first person to die in an electric chair was William Kemmler. There was nothing unprecedented in Kemmler's crime or his personality to require a new form of execution - the Buffalo resident had hacked his lover to death with a hatchet. But he did so just as New York was revising its execution law - and while two of the country's most influential entrepreneurs battled over the future of business and technology.

In the 1880s, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were literal power brokers, and they competed for dominance of the country's fledgling electricity industry. Westinghouse's system relied on alternating current (AC), which could deliver electricity far more cheaply than Edison's direct current (DC) system. But Edison was convinced that his DC electricity was safer - as evidenced by several AC-related deaths.

Meanwhile, New York's prison system was suffering through a series of botched hangings. Some victims were decapitated. Others slowly, painfully strangled. The public and press cried out against such ugly deaths, and Governor David Hill called a commission to determine a more humane method for dispatching condemned criminals.

One member of this commission, Buffalo dentist Alfred Southwick, had witnessed an accidental electrocution in which the victim appeared to die immediately and without pain. He suggested that death by electricity would be the modern solution New York needed, and he called on technology oracle Thomas Edison to bolster his cause.

Edison quickly saw that legal electrocution was just the bludgeon he would need to drive home his point about the lethal nature of AC power. He agreed to support the electric chair and wrote to Southwick: "The best appliance [for execution] is, to my mind, the one which will perform its work in the shortest space of time, and inflict the least amount of suffering upon its victim.... [T]he most suitable apparatus for the purpose is that class of dynamo-electric machinery which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of these are known as 'alternating machines,' manufactured principally in this country by Geo. Westinghouse. . . . The passage of the current from these machines through the human body even by the slightest contacts, produces instantaneous death."

Edison testified before the commission, and as its head, Elbridge Gerry, said, they "had no doubt after hearing his statement." On their recommendation, New York's legislature voted to make that state the first in the world to employ legal electrocutions.

Kemmler, however, didn't appreciate being the subject of New York's experiment in humane killing. His attorneys fought to oppose the electrocution, aided by funding from Westinghouse, who had no desire to see his company and his generators grow famous for their ability to take life. But Westinghouse's money was no match for Edison's celebrity, and when Kemmler's appeal came before the state supreme court, Edison was there to stand up for electrocution. Though Westinghouse's lawyer forced Edison to admit that he didn't know anything about the structure of the human body or the conductivity of the brain, his "reputation made more of an impression than did his bioelectrical ignorance," says Bernstein.

The court rejected Kemmler's appeal, finding little evidence "that this new mode of execution is cruel, within the meaning of the Constitution, though it is certainly unusual." On August 6, 1890, Kemmler became the first person executed by electricity - and the first victim of a botched electrocution.

It took two applications of current to kill Kemmler, and by the end of the second, he was giving off vapor and smoke. A New York Herald reporter (who wasn't present) claimed that "strong men fainted and fell like logs to the floor." Southwick (who also wasn't present) countered that Kemmler's execution had been "the grandest success of the age."

Actual witnesses were less sanguine, and few seemed to think the electrocution was a success in any respect other than that Kemmler was dead. Physician E. C. Spitzka said it "can in no way be regarded as a step in civilization." Electrician Charles Barnes called it "a decided failure." Westinghouse (who also wasn't present) said simply, "They would have done better with an ax."*

*Westinghouse could at least take comfort in his ultimate victory over Edison. AC electricity, far cheaper and easier to transmit over long distances than DC, became the basis for the country's utilities - in spite of the chair.

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