The Electric Chair: America’s Experiment in Humane Killing

The electric chair was invented to be humane — that is the important starting point, because it colors everything that followed. In 1888, the New York state legislature established a committee to find a more humane method of execution than hanging. The committee considered several options and settled on electrocution, based partly on the recommendation of Harold P. Brown, an electrical engineer, and partly on the observations of dentist Alfred Southwick, who had watched a man die quickly and apparently painlessly after touching a live electrical terminal in Buffalo. The committee concluded that electrocution would produce an instant, painless death. The first execution by electric chair proved that conclusion wrong.

Edison Used a Competitor’s Execution to Win a Commercial War

The invention of the electric chair is entangled with one of American industry’s most famous commercial rivalries. In the late 1880s, Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) electrical system was competing with George Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC) system for dominance in the new electrical market. Edison, who opposed capital punishment on principle, nevertheless found himself supplying equipment and expertise to Harold P. Brown’s efforts to develop an electric chair — specifically because Brown was using Westinghouse’s AC current for the device. Edison’s hope was that a Westinghouse AC execution would associate the Westinghouse system with death in the public mind and damage his competitor commercially.^1^

Edison allowed Brown to use his laboratories at Menlo Park, New Jersey to experiment on animals — dogs, calves, and eventually a circus elephant named Topsy, who was electrocuted at Coney Island in 1903 in a widely photographed event. The purpose was to demonstrate the lethal capacity of AC current. Edison’s role in providing technical assistance for an execution device while publicly opposing capital punishment was one of the more revealing corporate maneuvers of the Gilded Age.

The New York legislature authorized electrocution in 1888, and Westinghouse’s current was designated for use. Westinghouse protested vigorously and refused to sell generators to prisons for execution purposes; the New York prison system obtained the necessary equipment through a third party. The first electric chair was built and installed at Auburn Prison.

What Did the First Electrocution Actually Look Like?

William Kemmler was convicted of murdering his common-law wife, Tillie Ziegler, with a hatchet in Buffalo, New York in March 1889. He was sentenced to death and designated as the subject of the first execution by electric chair. Before the execution could take place, Westinghouse and his lawyers attempted to block it through legal challenges, arguing that electrocution constituted cruel and unusual punishment — motivated at least partly by the desire to prevent the Westinghouse name from being attached to an execution method. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them in May 1890.

On August 6, 1890, at Auburn Prison, Kemmler was strapped into the chair and a current of approximately 1,000 volts was applied for 17 seconds. Kemmler was not dead. A second, stronger charge was applied for more than a minute. Witnesses reported the smell of burning flesh. Kemmler’s body showed burn marks. New York World reporter Charles Durston wrote afterward that the execution was “an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging.” George Westinghouse said publicly that they would have done better with an axe.^2^

The New York authorities declared the execution a success. Within three years, Ohio, Massachusetts, and New Jersey had adopted the electric chair.

The Chair Spread Because It Looked Modern, Not Because It Worked

By 1950, the electric chair was the dominant method of execution in the United States, used in the majority of states that practiced capital punishment. Its appeal remained consistent: it looked modern, scientific, and clean. The reality was more complicated. Death by electrocution involves a massive current that causes muscle contractions, cardiac fibrillation, and respiratory failure, along with heating of the body’s tissues that can cause internal burns. Whether the condemned person loses consciousness immediately is debated; some researchers have argued that the initial charge may not instantaneously destroy consciousness in the way its proponents claimed.

The most famous executions in the chair’s history exposed both its political uses and its physical realities. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., was executed at New Jersey State Prison on April 3, 1936, maintaining his innocence to the end in a case that some historians and legal scholars have since identified as involving significant prosecutorial misconduct. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953; Ethel Rosenberg required three charges, the first two insufficient to kill her, the third leaving witnesses to smell burning flesh.^3^

Lethal Injection Replaced the Chair Without Solving the Problem

The first serious legal challenges to the electric chair as cruel and unusual punishment reached federal courts in the 1990s. Executions had moved back behind closed walls after 1936, but journalists permitted to witness them filed accounts of what they saw. In 1990, Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida; the sponge atop his head caught fire, and witnesses saw flames and smoke. Derick Peterson’s execution in Virginia in 1991 required repeated shocks. The accounts accumulated.

The shift away from the electric chair accelerated in the 1970s when Oklahoma adopted lethal injection in 1977 as its primary method. Other states followed. By 2001, lethal injection had become the dominant method in every state that practiced capital punishment. Several states retained the electric chair as an option or a backup method if lethal injection was unavailable or ruled unconstitutional. Tennessee’s Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the electric chair was constitutional as a backup method, and the state executed David Earl Miller by electrocution in December 2018 — the first electrocution in the United States since 2013.^4^

The chair was supposed to end the spectacle of messy, public death. It produced its own decades of botched executions and public controversy. The problem it was invented to solve — how to kill people in a way the public could accept — turned out not to be a problem with the method. It was a problem with the act.

The same logic runs through the entire history of American punishment: each new method was adopted as an improvement, each improvement produced its own failures, and the underlying act continued unchanged. The Innocence Project has documented cases where people were executed by this system after being wrongly convicted.

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Sources:

1. Moran, Richard. Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair. Knopf, 2002.
2. Brandon, Craig. The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History. McFarland, 1999.
3. Radosh, Ronald, and Joyce Milton. The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983.
4. Death Penalty Information Center. Execution Methods in the United States. 2023.

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