William Kemmler is executed by electric chair - August 6th, 1890

On this day in 1890, convicted killer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed by electrocution.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that uncovers a little bit more about history every day.
I'm Gabe Lucier, and today we're looking at the origin
of the electric chair, including how it became the most

(00:22):
widely used method of execution in America for nearly a century.
As a warning, today's episode includes descriptions of state executions
and may be disturbing for some listeners. The day was

(00:43):
August sixth, eighteen ninety Convicted killer William Kemmler became the
first person to be executed by electrocution. The German American
produce vendor had been found guilty of murder after flying
into a drunken rage and hacking up his girl friend
Matilda Ziegler with a hatchet. He was sentenced to die

(01:04):
by a new method of capital punishment known as the
electric chair, and the sentence was carried out, though with
some difficulty, at the Auburn Prison in New York. Like
the guillotine before it, the electric chair was conceived of
as a more humane alternative to execution by hanging. The

(01:24):
idea was first suggested by doctor Albert Southwick, a New
York dentist who happened to witness the death of a
drunken man who accidentally stumbled into an electrical generator. Southwick
was surprised by the quickness of the stranger's death, especially
in contrast to the leading form of execution at the time, hanging,

(01:45):
which was known to take up to half an hour
in some cases. This experience led Southwick to wonder if
delivering an electrical shock might be a more humane way
to execute condemned prisoners. To test his theory, southward Wwick
began electrocuting stray animals in Buffalo, New York, finding that
once again, they seemed to die instantly and seemingly without pain.

(02:10):
Now convinced that he was on to something, Southwick began
thinking of ways to standardize the procedure so that the
lethal shock could be administered properly each and every time.
This led him to the idea of some kind of
specialized chair, not unlike a dental chair, through which an
electrical current could be channeled. Southwick spent several years lobbying

(02:32):
state officials to adopt electrocution as New York's primary method
of execution. The Governor thought the idea had merit, so
he appointed a three man commission, which included doctor Southwick,
to further study the matter. The committee compared and contrasted
numerous forms of capital punishment throughout history, and eventually concluded

(02:53):
that electrocution would indeed allow prisoners to quote die as
pleasantly as possible, and so, in eighteen eighty nine, New
York's electrical execution Law went into effect, and Edwin Davis,
the Auburn State Prison electrician, was tasked with designing the
world's first electrified chair. Davis was quietly joined in this

(03:18):
endeavor by prolific inventor and electrical pioneer Thomas Edison. At
the time, Edison and his company were engaged in a
smear campaign against their competitors, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla,
both of whom favored alternating current. Edison, whose own products
used direct current electricity, claimed that alternating current was fundamentally unsafe,

(03:43):
and to prove that to the public, he and his
team worked behind the scenes to help build an electric
chair using a Westinghouse generator. After all, what better way
to prove that a product is dangerous than by using
it to kill someone? This early model of the electric
chair closely resembled the modern device. It was a custom

(04:04):
wooden chair fitted with two electrodes, small metal disks held
together with rubber and covered with a damp sponge. Once
the condemned was strapped into the chair, the electrodes would
be applied to their head and back, with the goal
being to electrically destroy the brain and nervous system before
any pain signals could reach them. Once again, like the

(04:27):
guillotine before it, and like the gas chamber and lethal
injection after it, the electric chair was touted as quick
and painless, but those claims were less than convincing once
the method was put into practice. Because William Kemmler was
the first to die in the electric chair, his execution
was made into a public spectacle. On August sixth, eighteen ninety.

(04:50):
He was strapped into the chair before an audience of
prison officials, doctors, and curious reporters. The generator was charged
with a thousand vaults and the current was passed through
Kemler's body for seventeen seconds. That amount of time had
been deemed more than sufficient by the attending physicians, but
to everyone's surprise when Kemler's body was unfastened from the chair.

(05:14):
He began to groan and gasp for breath. Witnesses reportedly
screamed turn on the current, at which point Kemler was
put back into the chair and shocked a second time,
this time with two thousand vaults and for several minutes.
The New York Herald published a first hand account from
a journalist who'd been in the room that day. He

(05:35):
recounted the grizzly ordeal, writing that the scene of Kemmler's
execution was too horrible to picture. Men accustomed to every
form of suffering grew faint as the awful spectacle was
unfolded before their eyes. Those who stood in the sight
were filled with awe as they saw the effects of
this most potent of fluid's electricity, which is only partially

(05:59):
understood by those who have studied it most faithfully, as
it slowly, too slowly, disintegrated the fiber and tissues of
the body through which it passed. The heaving of the chest,
which it had been promised, would be stilled in an
instant of peace as soon as the circuit was completed,
the foaming of the mouth, the bloody sweat, the writhing

(06:20):
of shoulders, and all other signs of life. Horrible as
these all were, they were made infinitely more horrible by
the premature removal of the electrodes and the subsequent replacing
of them for not seconds, but minutes, until the room
was filled with the odor of burning flesh, and strong
men fainted and fell like logs upon the floor. Other

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newspapers called the execution disgusting, sickening, and inhuman, but proponents
of the electric chair were quick to claim the demonstration
as a win, including doctor Southwick, who declared, quote, we
live in a higher civilization from this day on. His
reaction was a stark contrast to that of George Westinghouse,

(07:05):
who sullenly observed that the executioners would have done better
to use an ax. Despite the horror show that had
been Kemmler's execution, the electric chair remained in use in
New York and was quickly adopted by several other states.
In the years ahead, the chair itself was modified and
refined as electricity became better understood, but botched electrocutions still

(07:29):
occurred with alarming regularity. The chair's spotty track record led
many to question whether electrocution violates the US Constitution's eighth Amendment,
which prohibits the use of cruel and unusual punishment. The
Supreme Court has never weighed in on the matter one
way or the other, but based on witness accounts and

(07:51):
autopsy reports, there is evidence to suggest that the chair
meets the definition. Kemler himself argued as much in a
court challenge just before his death, and many others have
echoed the charge in the decades since. The controversy eventually
led most states to do away with electrocution in favor
of lethal injection, but at the time of recording, using

(08:13):
the electric chair is still an option in seven US states, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi,
South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In addition, two other states,
Arkansas and Oklahoma, have passed laws to immediately reinstate the
electric chair should lethal injection ever be declared unconstitutional. To date,

(08:36):
there have been more than forty three hundred electric chair
executions in the United States, the last of which so
far was carried out in Tennessee in twenty twenty. At
this point, the method of execution can no longer be
considered an unusual punishment, but whether or not it's a
cruel one is still open to debate. I'm gay, Blues gay,

(09:03):
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep
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any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my
way by writing to this Day at iHeartMedia dot com.

(09:24):
Thanks to Kasby Bias for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
tomorrow for another day in history class.