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[by Tom McNichol]

[Previous Page: "Long before there was VHS vs. Betamax, Windows vs. Macintosh, or Blu-ray vs. HD DVD formats, the first and nastiest standards war of them all was fought between AC and DC.'"]

It would be more than a year before the death chair was called upon to claim its first victim. Edison and Brown used the time to press their momentary advantage and stir up more bad publicity for alternating current. A New York World reporter asked Edison, “What about the rumor that some of your batteries were sold to the State of New York to use in the execution of criminals?” Edison smiled and replied, “Oh, that was the Westinghouse engines, not mine.”

Brown peppered the New York newspapers with accounts of the latest horrors caused by the deadly alternating current. In July 1889, Brown wrote in a published letter that ten people had recently killed by AC, and warned that the list was growing daily. According to Brown's figures, deaths from alternating current had jumped from just three in 1887 to 24 in 1888-89.

George Westinghouse dispatched several men to see if Brown's figures bore any relation to the truth. The Westinghouse investigators found that of the nearly 30 deaths Brown attributed to alternating current, only one could be confirmed as caused by AC. In 12 of the supposed AC deaths, there were no Westinghouse plants in the city at the time of the accident. In 16 cases, arc lighting– which ran on the DC system – was the culprit. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of those killed by electricity were electrical linemen installing or servicing power lines. The deaths Brown cited were more an argument for safer working conditions in the electrical industry than for limiting the spread of AC. The information gathered by Westinghouse's investigators was sent to all of the company's sales agents to reassure customers.

Brown's spectacular claims, however, made good copy. He was now a fixture in the New York papers, variously described as “a prominent electrical engineer” or “New York State expert on electrical execution.” It was heady stuff, and Brown took full advantage of his growing reputation. He began to present “serious” papers to medical and legal groups, filled not only with dire warning about AC but also with visions of a grand future powered by safe, reliable direct current. In a speech given to the International Medical Jurisprudence Congress in New York, Brown described the coming DC-powered utopia: “The air will no longer be polluted with smoke, for one immense station provide with triple or quadruple expansion engines and furnaces in which combustion is complete will supply heat, light, power, and motion. The consequent addition to human health, comfort, and length of life by the banishment of dirt and noise will be enormous. Electrical disinfection and sewage purification are already in use and since we can command immense volumes of electricity, it is not improbably that a better understanding of the laws of meteorology will enable us at least partially to control the weather, and thus avoid the evil effects of severe changes and extreme temperatures.”

Naturally, such a future would be impossible unless alternating current was regulated out of business. “Earth and air are filled with wires, many of which may be charged with swift and invisible death,” Brown declared. “It is clearly the physician's duty to point out the dangerous currents and it remains for the lawyer to secure wise legislative action preventing the adoption of systems or apparatuses which needlessly jeopardize human life or health.”

According to Brown, alternating current companies were being allowed “to enmesh our cities with wires carrying death-dealing currents – currents which can escape and produce death through any known insulation.” Special legislation limiting AC voltages was the only answer. Without such safeguards, electricity would never achieve its fantastic potential.

For his part, Edison revealed that his own company, over his vigorous protests, had purchased the patents for a complete AC system. “Up to the present time I have succeeded in inducing them not to offer this system to the public, nor will they ever do so with my consent. My personal desire would be to prohibit entirely the use of alternating currents. They are as unnecessary as they are dangerous.”

In fact, Edison's company had purchased an AC system based on a Hungarian design that was being operated successfully in several cities in Europe. The company purchased the AC patents in 1886, and a report by one of Edison's top electricians strongly urged him to adopt the AC standard because of its economy in long-distance transmission.

Even at this late date, Edison could have shifted some of his company's resources to the AC standard and quickly made up lost ground on Westinghouse. Edison had built up a manufacturing and marketing organization second to none in the electric industry; a strong move into AC would have made the Edison companies hard to beat. Furthermore, Edison's investment in DC didn't have to go entirely to waste. Edison could have adopted a hybrid system that would transmit power over long distances by alternating current and then convert the power to direct current for use in homes and offices.

But Edison stubbornly refused to budge; the AC patents his company had purchased were allowed to lapse. Edison had been handed his best chance of defeating Westinghouse and petulantly threw it away; he had become a defender of the old order rather than someone who challenged it. Edison had sunk too much money – and always more importantly for him – invested too much of his reputation on the direct current system. The louder the clamor for AC, the more Edison turned his famously deaf ear to the din.

It was a rare failure of imagination on Edison's part. Edison's direct current distribution system was the sort of plan that came naturally to someone who grew up in a small town. Under the Edison system, every hamlet in the country would have its own self-contained DC power station, serving local needs, like the village blacksmith or butcher. The Westinghouse AC system, by contrast, was conceived on a national scale, more like the railroads with which George Westinghouse was so familiar – a large network of long-distance routes.

By now, Edison's only hope of defeating AC was to make people afraid of it. Brown's experiments had seen to it that AC was chosen as the executioner's current. Now, all that was left was to select the death chair's first victim.

It came in the person of William Kemmler, an illiterate, alcoholic vegetable peddler from Buffalo. On the morning of March 29, 1889, Kemmler drunkenly accused his common-law wife Tillie Ziegler of planning to leave him. A bitter argument ensued, and Kemmler picked up a hatchet and struck Ziegler until there was no more arguing. Kemmler immediately walked to his neighbor's house and confessed.

“I killed her,” Kemmler said. “I had to do it. I meant to. I killed her and I'll take the rope for it.”

But the rope was soon to be as dead as Tillie Ziegler. Six weeks after the killing, Kemmler was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to die in Auburn prison. As the first criminal sentenced to death in New York State in 1889, Kemmler would be the first to be killed by electricity.

W. Bourke Cockran, a prominent and high-priced lawyer of the day, took on Kemmler's case. Cockran assured reporters that he had taken the case in the interests of humanity, failing to mention that his own interests were being taken care of by George Westinghouse. Fearing that the Kemmler execution could hurt his company's standing, Westinghouse quietly handled Cockran's fee, estimated to be as much as $100,000.

Cockran managed to delay Kemmler's execution for more than a year by arguing that death by electricity would violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In July 1889, Cochran initiated proceedings against Charles Durston, the warden of the state prison in Auburn. A state judge conducted hearings to examine Cockran's claims; Thomas Edison and Harold Brown were among those who were called to testify.

Cockran's main argument in Kemmler's behalf was that electricity was far too unpredictable to be a reliable or humane means of execution. The deadly effects of electricity were little understood, and there was great variation in how much voltage could be safely taken into body. During the hearing, Cockran called several witnesses who testified to having received massive bursts of electricity, yet had walked away unharmed. Dr. Landon Carter Gray, a New York physician and medical expert, testified that the effect of electricity on the human body was far too unpredictable for the death chair to be a reliable means of capital punishment.

“Men have been killed by electricity, it is true, both in the artificial form and by lightning, but other men have been struck by thunderbolts or come in contact with large artificial currents without injury,” Gray testified. “To attempt to put a person to death with our present knowledge of the fatal effects of electricity might lead to horrible scenes and even great fraud….If the current were not powerful enough or if the resistance of the criminal was very great, he might merely be tortured and racked and suffer the agonies of death without its relief.”

Harold Brown took the stand on July 8th, and recounted the results of his animal experiments, which he said proved that AC could kill a human being quickly and painlessly. Kemmler's lawyers hammered away at Brown's credibility, noting his lack of formal training in electricity or medicine. On the witness stand, Brown held firm to his expert status:

Q. And you have got no medical knowledge?
Brown: Except in an electro-medical way.
Q. Describe what you mean by an electro-medical manner.
Brown: Except in a general way, except as to the application of electricity to the human body.
Q. That is to say, you have seen experiments of the application of electricity to the human body?
Brown: Yes sir, and I have taken part in them.

Thomas Edison took the stand of July 23, and quickly dismissed the defense's arguments about electricity as “nonsense.” As long as sufficient voltages were used, Edison said, the electrified chair would do its work quickly and painlessly. Place the criminal's hands in jars filled with a solution of potash and water, Edison suggested, and deliver a 1,000-volt burst of alternating current to the man's head and spine. Edison said he was certain of the results; he had seen experiments on animals for himself that proved the deadliness of the alternating current. When asked to describe the experiments, Edison cagily replied that he'd rather have his chief electrician testify on that point.

On October 9, the court denied Kemmler's appeal, clearing the way for the murderer to be executed as planned. A last minute appeal to the US Supreme Court only delayed the inevitable; Chief Justice Melville Fuller ruled that the New York electric execution law did not violate the Constitution and should stand. William Kemmler would be the first human being to be executed with electricity.

The execution was scheduled for sometime between August 3 and August 6, 1890, the precise time kept secret until hours before the sentence was carried out. When the call went out for the state's official witnesses to report to the prison on August 5, crowds began to assemble outside the prison gates.  Kemmler was informed that he would be executed the following morning at 6:00 a.m. 

Kemmler was taken out of his cell before dawn and was led to the death chair, the fruit of Harold Brown's dark labors. “Gentlemen,” Kemmler said, “I wish you all good luck. I believe I am going to a good place, and that I am ready to go.” Kemmler finished his speech with a bow and was placed into the chair. “Now take your time and do it all right, Warden,” Kemmler said. “There is no rush. I don't want to take any chances on this thing, you know.”

A headpiece was affixed to Kemmler's skull, which made the contraption look like a medieval torture device. Leather bands were wrapped around Kemmler's forehead and chin, partially concealing his features. Eleven leather straps were tightened around Kemmler's arms, legs and torso. The connections were checked and rechecked. The moment had come.

“Good bye, William,” the Warden said, which was the signal to a man standing by the power switch. The lever was thrown and Kemmler's body stiffened as 1,700 volts of alternating current from a Westinghouse dynamo surged through ever nerve ending. Kemmler's body was rigid “as though cast in bronze” a New York Times reporter wrote, save for the index finger of his right hand, which closed up so tightly that the nail pierced the skin and blood trickled onto the arm of the chair. A doctor stood next to Kemmler holding a stopwatch. Five seconds passed, ten seconds, fifteen. At 17 seconds, the warden pressed a signal button and the Westinghouse dynamo whirred to a stop. The doctor pronounced Kemmler dead.

The announcement, however, proved to be premature. Kemmler stirred in the seat and let out a low animal groan. “Great God, he is alive!” one witness cried. “Turn on the current!” screamed another. A reporter from one of the press associations, unable to bear the sight, fainted on the spot.

The Westinghouse dynamo was hastily restarted, and Kemmler was subjected to another 1,700 volt burst. This time, the dynamo wasn't running smoothly, and the current crackled as it entered Kemmler's body. Blood began to appear on Kemmler's face like crimson sweat, and smoke rose from the top of his head. The skin and hair beneath the electrodes began to sizzle as the sickening odor of burning flesh filled the room. No one knew exactly how long the second jolt of current was applied – witnesses wearing watches were too horrified to consult them. When the current was finally switched off, William Kemmler's name had been forever burned into the history books as the first person to die in the electric chair.

A reporter tracked down George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh and asked about the execution. “I do not care to talk about it,” a shaken Westinghouse said. “It has been a brutal affair. They could have done better with an axe.” Then, perhaps sensing he had not defended alternating current enough, Westinghouse added, “The public will lay the blame where it belongs and it will not be on us. I regard the manner of the killing as a complete vindication of all our claims.”

Both Edison and Harold Brown maintained that Kemmler had been killed painlessly in the first seconds that the current flowed – the rest of the procedure was merely applying current to a dead man. Edison suggested, however, that future executions be conducted with even more powerful Westinghouse generators that would be kept running continuously. And he suggested a new name for the procedure. Henceforth, condemned men would be Westinghoused.

The name, of course, never caught on. Condemned men were electrocuted, fried, zapped, baked, burned, and made to ride the lightning, but never Westinghoused. By the time New York's second electrocution took place the following spring, the death chair sported a more powerful Westinghouse dynamo and thicker wires. The electrodes were placed on the condemned man's calf rather than at his spine, so the current would pass through the heart, and the dynamo was kept running continuously. 

The next several executions went comparatively smoothly, and in a surprisingly short time, the electric chair came to be considered an acceptable and even humane means of carrying out death sentences. Edison's home state of Ohio introduced electrocution in 1896, followed in by Massachusetts in 1898, and Edison's adopted state of New Jersey in 1906. Soon, more than twenty states were using electric chairs, quickly making it the most popular means of execution.

Old Sparky, people called it. New York State would go on to use the electric chair for 72 years, eventually sending 695 people to their deaths. The executioners settled on a formula for the condemned: 2000-2200 volts of alternating current at 7-12 amperes for 60-90 seconds, lowered and reapplied at various intervals until death. But prison officials learned what Harold Brown already had discovered, that electricity was very unpredictable, to say nothing of the people charged with administering it. In 1946, convicted murderer Willie Francis was severely shocked but not killed by the Louisiana electric chair, reportedly shrieking "Stop it! Let me breathe!" as the current was applied. It turned out that an intoxicated guard had improperly wired the chair. After an unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Francis was returned to the chair a second time and executed.

The horrors continued. The May 4, 1990 electrocution of murderer Jesse Tafero was marked by an unexpected power surge that caused a six-inch long tongue of flame to shoot from the condemned man's head. Alabama killer Horace Dunkins was burned to death before the electric shock could kill him after the cables were connected to the wrong wall receptacles.

Positive and negative. For the electric chair, the flow began to reverse in the late 1970s. After a string of botched electrocutions, the one-time scientific wonder seemed a barbarous relic; it was the same argument that had retired the hangman's noose a century before. In 1982, Texas abandoned the electric chair in favor of lethal injection, and many states soon followed suit.

Currently, there are only six places on the planet that still use electricity to kill criminals, all in the United States: Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In Nebraska, electrocution remains the only method of execution; inmates in the other states are given a choice between the electric chair and lethal injection. So far, everyone given the choice has chosen lethal injection.

October 21, 2006