Invention In the late 1870s to early 1880s, the introduction of
arc lighting, a type of outdoor street lighting that required high voltages in the range of 3000–6000 volts, was followed by multiple stories in newspapers about how the high voltages used were killing people, usually unwary linemen; it was seen as a strange new phenomenon that seemed to instantaneously strike a victim dead without leaving a mark. One of these accidents, in Buffalo, New York, on August 7, 1881, led to the inception of the electric chair. That evening, a drunken dock worker named George Lemuel Smith, looking for the thrill of a tingling sensation he had noticed when grabbing the
guard rail in a
Brush Electric Company arc lighting power house, managed to sneak his way back into the plant at night and grabbed the
brush and
ground of a large electric dynamo, then dying instantly. The coroner who investigated the case brought it up that year at a local Buffalo scientific society. Another member attending that lecture,
Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist who had a technical background, thought some application could be found for the curious phenomenon. Southwick joined physician
George E. Fell and the head of the Buffalo ASPCA in a series of experiments electrocuting hundreds of stray dogs. They ran trials with the dog in water and out of water, and varied the electrode type and placement until they came up with a repeatable method to euthanize animals using electricity. Southwick went on in the early 1880s to advocate that this method be used as a more humane replacement for hanging in capital punishment cases, coming to national attention when he published his ideas in scientific journals in 1882 and 1883. He worked out calculations based on the dog experiments conducted, trying to develop a scaled-up method that would work on humans. Early on in his designs, he adopted a modified version of the dental chair as a way to restrain the condemned, a device that from then on would be called the
electric chair.
Gerry Commission After a series of botched hangings in the United States, there was mounting criticism of that form of
capital punishment and the death penalty in general. In 1886, newly elected New York State governor
David B. Hill set up a three-member death penalty commission, which was chaired by the human rights advocate and reformer
Elbridge Thomas Gerry and included New York lawyer and politician
Matthew Hale and Southwick, to investigate a more humane way of executing condemned criminals.
illustration of what the electric chair'' suggested by the Gerry Commission might look like. The commission members surveyed the history of execution and sent out a
fact-finding questionnaire to government officials, lawyers, and medical experts all around the state asking for their opinion. A slight majority of respondents recommended hanging over electrocution, with a few instead recommending the abolition of capital punishment. The commission also contacted electrical experts, including
Thomson-Houston Electric Company's
Elihu Thomson (who recommended high voltage AC connected to the head and the spine) and the inventor
Thomas Edison (who also recommended AC, as well as using a
Westinghouse generator). They also attended electrocutions of dogs by George Fell who had worked with Southwick in the early 1880s experiments. Fell was conducting further experiments, electrocuting anesthetized
vivisected dogs trying to discern exactly how electricity killed a subject. At this point, the state's efforts to design the electric chair became intermixed with what has come to be known as the
war of the currents, a competition between
Thomas Edison's direct current power system and
George Westinghouse's alternating current based system. The two companies had been competing commercially since 1886 and a series of events had turned it into an all-out media war in 1888. The committee head,
neurologist Frederick Peterson, enlisted the services of
Harold P. Brown as a consultant. Brown had been on his own crusade against alternating current after the shoddy installation of pole-mounted AC arc lighting lines in New York City had caused several deaths in early 1888. Peterson had been an assistant at Brown's July 1888 public electrocution of dogs with AC at Columbia College, an attempt by Brown to prove AC was more deadly than DC. Back at West Orange on December 5, 1888, Brown set up an experiment with members of the press, members of the Medico-Legal Society including Elbridge Gerry who was also chairman of the death penalty commission, and Thomas Edison looking on. Brown used alternating current for all of his tests on animals larger than a human, including 4 calves and a lame horse, all dispatched with 750 volts of AC. Based on these results the Medico-Legal Society recommended the use of 1000–1500 volts of alternating current for executions and newspapers noted the AC used was half the voltage used in the power lines over the streets of American cities. Westinghouse criticized these tests as a skewed self-serving demonstration designed to be a direct attack on alternating current and accused Brown of being in the employ of Edison. At the request of death penalty commission chairman Gerry, Medico-Legal Society members;
electrotherapy expert Alphonse David Rockwell,
Carlos Frederick MacDonald, and Columbia College professor Louis H. Laudy, were given the task of working out the details of electrode placement. They again turned to Brown to supply the technical assistance. Brown asked Edison Electric Light to supply equipment for the tests and treasurer Francis S. Hastings (who seemed to be one of the primary movers at the company trying to portray Westinghouse as a peddler of death dealing AC current The electric chair was built by
Edwin F. Davis, the first "
state electrician" (
executioner) for the State of New York.
First execution , August 6, 1890 The first person in line to die under New York's new electrocution law was Joseph Chapleau, convicted for beating his neighbor to death with a sled stake, but his sentence was instead commuted to life imprisonment. The next person scheduled to be executed was
William Kemmler, convicted of murdering his wife with a hatchet. An appeal on Kemmler's behalf was made to the
New York Court of Appeals on the grounds that use of electricity as a means of execution constituted a "
cruel and unusual punishment" and was thus contrary to the constitutions of the United States and the state of New York. On December 30, 1889, the writ of
habeas corpus sworn out on Kemmler's behalf was denied by the court, with Judge Dwight writing in a lengthy ruling: We have no doubt that if the Legislature of this State should undertake to proscribe for any offense against its laws the punishment of
burning at the stake,
breaking at the wheel, etc., it would be the duty of the courts to pronounce upon such attempt the condemnation of the Constitution. The question now to be answered is whether the legislative act here assailed is subject to the same condemnation. Certainly, it is not so on its face, for, although the mode of death described is conceded to be unusual, there is no common knowledge or consent that it is cruel; it is a question of fact whether an electric current of sufficient intensity and skillfully applied will produce death without unnecessary suffering. Kemmler was executed in New York's Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890; the "state electrician" was Edwin Davis. The first 17-second passage of 1,000 volts AC through Kemmler caused unconsciousness, but failed to stop his heart and breathing. The attending physicians,
Edward Charles Spitzka and
Carlos Frederick MacDonald, came forward to examine Kemmler. After confirming Kemmler was still alive, Spitzka reportedly called out, "Have the current turned on again, quick, no delay." The generator still needed time to recharge, however. In the second attempt, Kemmler received a 2,000 volt AC shock. Blood vessels under the skin ruptured and bled, and the areas around the electrodes singed; some witnesses reported that his body caught fire. The entire execution took about eight minutes. George Westinghouse later commented, "They would have done better using an axe", and
The New York Times ran the headline "Far worse than hanging".
Adoption The electric chair was adopted by Ohio (1897), Massachusetts (1900), New Jersey (1906), and Virginia (1908), and soon became the prevalent method of execution in the United States, replacing hanging. Twenty-six states, the District of Columbia, the federal government, and the U.S. military either had death by electrocution on the books or actively executed criminals using the method. The electric chair remained the most prominent execution method until the early 1990s, when it was downgraded to a backup method that an inmate could choose in several states, but was rarely used. Other countries appear to have contemplated using the method, sometimes for special reasons. The
Philippines also adopted the electric chair from 1926 to 1987. A well-publicized triple execution took place there in May 1972, when Jaime Jose, Basilio Pineda, and Edgardo Aquino were electrocuted for the 1967 abduction and gang-rape of the young actress
Maggie de la Riva. The last electric chair execution in the Philippines was in 1976 and was later replaced with lethal injection when executions resumed in that country.
Key events in the United States execution chamber at the
Red Hat Cell Block in the
Louisiana State Penitentiary,
West Feliciana Parish. The electric chair is a replica of
the original.
Martha M. Place became the first woman executed in the electric chair at
Sing Sing Prison on March 20, 1899, for the murder of her 17-year-old stepdaughter, Ida Place.
Leon Czolgosz was executed in the electric chair at New York's Auburn Prison on October 29, 1901, for the
assassination of then-President William McKinley. The first photograph of an execution by electric chair was of housewife
Ruth Snyder at Sing Sing on the evening of January 12, 1928, for the March 1927 murder of her husband. It was photographed for a front-page story in the
New York Daily News titled "DEAD!" the following morning by news photographer
Tom Howard who had smuggled a camera into the death chamber and photographed her in the electric chair as the current was turned on. It remains one of the best-known examples of
photojournalism. A record was set on July 13, 1928, when seven men were executed consecutively in the electric chair at the
Kentucky State Penitentiary in
Eddyville, Kentucky. On June 16, 1944, an African-American teenager, 14-year-old
George Stinney, became the youngest person to be executed in the electric chair when he was electrocuted at the
Central Correctional Institution in
Columbia, South Carolina. His conviction was overturned in 2014 after a circuit court judge vacated his sentence on the grounds that Stinney did not receive a fair trial. The judge determined that Stinney's legal counsel was inadequate, thus violating his rights under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On May 3, 1946, an African-American teenager named
Willie Francis became the first person known to have survived the electric chair in the
Saint Martin Parish Prison in
Saint Martinsville, Louisiana. His appeals to the death penalty failed, and was executed again on May 9, 1947, at age 18. His trial has claimed to be unfair, which the trial also violated his Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights to the U.S. Constitution. On May 25, 1979, in Florida,
John Spenkelink became the first person to be executed by the electric chair after the
Gregg v. Georgia decision by the
Supreme Court of the United States in 1976. He was the first person to be executed in the United States in this manner since 1966. The last person to be executed by electric chair without the choice of an alternative method was
Lynda Lyon Block on May 10, 2002, in Alabama. The most recent execution by electric chair was of
Nicholas Todd Sutton on February 20, 2020, in Tennessee. ==Process and mechanism==