On the hot night of July 13, 1881, tens of thousands of people noticed a strange purplish glow in the South Buffalo sky. Drawn by curiosity, many left the dim gas lamps of their homes and began walking south, over the Michigan Street Bridge toward the source of the otherworldly light.

It was emanating from an industrial area on Ganson Street, on the small strip of land that sits between the Buffalo River and the Buffalo Ship Canal. There, as they crossed the bridge, they saw to their left a long colonnade of a dozen metal poles, 20 feet high, topped with humming, buzzing balls of glaring light. Between each pole ran a couple of wires, spanning each long interval as they stretched over a mile down the shoulder of the wood plank road. As word spread, thousands of people converged on the area. Late into the night they gathered to look at the splintered road, the docks, the grain elevators and each other, amazed by the artificial day.

The Brush Electric Company had installed these arc lamps. They were roughly 200 times more powerful than typical filament lamps of the time. Over the previous few years, Brush Electric had put up streetlights in Cleveland, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and Manhattan. The Ganson Street lights were an instant conversation piece that brought people down near the Buffalo waterfront.

But it wasn’t just to look at streetlights. Wanting to foster good publicity, Brush Electric welcomed people into their big wooden structure to view the coal-fired, steam-powered alternating current dynamos that generated the voltage needed to power the lights. Soon, visitors discovered that a small amount of electricity was leaching out from the dynamos into the metal railing that surrounded them. By holding hands, a small semi-circle of thrill-seekers could feel a gentle tickle of electricity pass through their bodies when the people at either end of the line grasped the rail. This pastime grew in popularity over the next few weeks, until the night of August 7.

That night, a man named Lemuel (or Samuel, or Edward, depending on the source) Smith visited the Brush Electric Company building with three friends. The four of them performed the custom, laughing at the strange tingling sensation. They then continued the evening out at a nearby saloon where they drank many growlers of beer.

Later that night, an emboldened Smith would return to the dynamos alone. This time, he was ordered away by plant manager G. W. Chaffee for attempting to touch one of the huge generators. A police officer escorted him out initially, and after a few more drunken attempts to return, he was bodily removed. He headed out into the darkness to hide, awaiting another chance. When the officer finally left to continue his beat, Smith ran back inside. He snuck past Chaffee and bolted for one of the dynamos where he successfully grabbed one of the poles with straining, outstretched fingers. He expected to experience a thrilling rush, but was disappointed to find that he felt nothing.

He then reached out with his other hand and grasped the other pole.

Read all about it

The next day, newspaper reports proclaimed it a painless death, noting that Smith was the first American to be killed by a dynamo. The official Buffalo coroner Joseph Fowler performed an autopsy and said that if he’d not known the circumstances of the death he would’ve been unable to tell what had killed the man. Only after peeling away the skin of the dead man’s chest and arms did he notice a faint line of darker cells a few inches in width running roughly along the route of his outstretched arms (when positioned as if on a cross) and along his collarbones: the path of the current.

The story spread across the country like wildfire, and suddenly the miracle promise of harnessed electricity was clouded by a gruesome example of the real danger that came with it. During this period, rival electric companies—notably Edison (who promoted direct current, or DC) and Westinghouse (who promoted alternating current, or AC)—were challenged to show both the effectiveness and safety of their different systems to a wary public.

Details of the weird mishap were not lost on a respected Buffalo dentist and prominent faculty member of the fledgling University at Buffalo Dental School named Alfred Porter Southwick. An engineer for the Great Lakes Steamboat Company, and later the chief engineer for the Western Transit Company, he abruptly turned to dentistry at the age of 36. Brought up a Quaker in Ashtabula, Ohio, Southwick sported a beard with no mustache, giving him a stern, ecclesiastical look. Like many learned gentlemen of the Gilded Age, he subscribed to eugenics—the belief that the human race could be improved by selective breeding. Interestingly, Southwick and his wife adopted their only daughter, Mary.

Southwick was enterprising and curious. For years he had been following the latest developments in electricity and was determined to discover a practical use for its primal power. He’d worked with it on Great Lakes steamers, and he wondered if it might have a useful application in his new profession, perhaps as an anesthetic for agonized patients in the dental chair.

When Southwick read the articles and the accounts of Smith’s autopsy, a light bulb went on above his head. Although it clashed with his Quaker upbringing, Southwick was an advocate of capital punishment. He wondered: If this poor unfortunate could exit the world in the blink of an eye, wouldn’t his sort of death be a more humane alternative for a condemned man than, say, the hangman’s noose?

An imprecise science

In the late 19th century, the ritual of hanging was not the art form in America that it had become in Britain. There, skilled executioners paid attention to details like a condemned person’s weight, for example. This detail determined the necessary length of rope to be used. Coupled with proper placement of the hangman’s knot against the prisoner’s neck, it was the key component to ensuring that the spinal cord was quickly severed, constituting a successful hanging.

Too short a rope caused the condemned to dangle, slowly strangling between choked appeals for mercy before the stunned crowd for up to half an hour. Too long a rope resulted in decapitation—an effective means of provoking death, but too messy for audience sensibilities. In America, the standard protocol was to use six feet of rope for all hangings. Body types being what they are, the predictable results were becoming too common, and there were outcries, including from New York Governor David B. Hill, who noted that “the present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us from the dark ages” and called upon the scientific community to discover a more humane way for the state to end a human life.

It was also noted that in various places, many of these gory, bungled public executions actually provoked a spike in public violence on the days they were held, with some among the “lower classes” going so far as to attempt a rescue of the condemned during the proceedings. These increasingly common incidents were thereby cutting into the argument that capital punishment was a deterrent to violent crime; in fact the ritual was increasing it.

Three men in a room

To satisfy his curiosity, Dr. Southwick began a pioneering series of experiments on stray neighborhood dogs. When he threw the switch on his primitive contraption, they were killed with an electric shock that to his purposes seemed painless. After a few years of experimentation, he sensed that his newfangled method of execution might be the solution the governor was seeking. The well-connected Buffalonian urged his friend, State Senator Daniel McMillan, to introduce a bill calling for the formation of a commission charged with determining the “most humane” form of human execution.

After much political wrangling, the legislature approved Chapter 352 of the Laws of 1886, entitled “An act to authorize the appointment of a commission to investigate and report to the legislature the most humane and approved method of carrying into effect the sentence of death in capital cases.” Three men were named to the Death Penalty Commission. They included a prominent Albany lawyer named Matthew Hale, a grandson of American Revolutionary War hero Nathan (“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”) Hale, who was hanged by the British for treason. The chairman of the committee was Elbridge T. Gerry, the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Gerry moved freely in the most celestial circles of New York City society. Among his many impressive titles, he served as the chief counsel for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The third member of the commission was Southwick himself.

The Gerry Commission began its work in earnest, compiling a list of execution methods handed down through history. Among them: crucifixion, guillotine, garrote (strangulation with a cord tightened by a wooden screw), iron maiden, precipitation (thrown off a cliff), drowned, boiled in oil, poisoned, boiled in lead, drawn and quartered (limbs pulled off by draught-horses), crushed, stoned, beaten with sticks, carbon monoxide, torn apart by wild animals, burned at a stake, bitten by venomous reptiles, firing squad, shot out of a cannon, coup de grace (death blow to head), impalement, disembowelment, burying alive, defenestration (thrown out a window), rack, peine forte et dure (stopping breathing by placing a heavy weight on the chest), pounding in a giant mortar, running the gauntlet, stabbing, dichotomy (cutting in two), flaying, flogging and other means besides the gallows including a ghastly, spectacular method known as “illuminated body,” which called for boring countless tiny holes in the condemned person’s flesh, filling them with oil, inserting a taper into each and lighting them all at once.

They also sent out a survey to judges in the New York State Supreme Court, along with county judges, district attorneys, sheriffs and various medical men, inquiring into their feelings on the most appropriate form of execution. The questions were heavily slanted to favor death by electricity if, in fact, another method of execution were to be adopted by the state. Still, when the opinions were tallied, Southwick’s brainchild failed to beat hanging as the recommended form of killing the condemned.

Philadelphia Billy

Meanwhile, in the teeming streets of Philadelphia in the 1880s, an illiterate young man named William Kemmler was becoming successful as a huckster. The term didn’t carry quite the negative connotation it does today: It was simply used to describe the occupation of a man who drove a vegetable cart. He became a familiar face in many neighborhoods, chatting with the ladies of various households as they gathered around his wagon to buy beans, potatoes, onions, apples, eggs—whatever might be available to stock the supper table. Although the work was hard, Kemmler learned how to turn a profit and became a shrewd small businessman, finding good produce at decent prices and cultivating a loyal clientele. He was also becoming quite recognizable to various saloonkeepers along his horse-drawn route.

One of his customers was a young mother named Matilda Ziegler, whose sister, Bertha Tripner, was married to Kemmler’s brother Henry. Matilda, or “Tillie” as she was commonly known, was trapped in an unhappy marriage to a Philadelphia railroad man and cabinetmaker named Fred Ziegler. After the birth of their daughter Ella, Fred increasingly gravitated toward the company of “lewd women.” He finally contracted a “loathsome disease” that put him out of work. With that, Tillie had had enough and left him after nine years of marriage, although she was thereby penniless with a young child to support.

Kemmler was 27 in the summer of 1887, when he literally stumbled into a marital dilemma of his own. Blind drunk, he was seduced by a young Philadelphia woman named Ida Forter who convinced him to marry her in Camden, three miles away across the state line in New Jersey. He then discovered that Forter had left a previous husband in Pennsylvania without bothering to divorce him.

Back in Philadelphia two days after his wedding ceremony to an already married woman, Kemmler and Tillie Ziegler took solace in each other’s arms. Although she, too, was technically a married woman, they decided to flee their circumstances, and in less than 10 days, Kemmler would sell his business, wagon and horses for $1,200, and move west with Tillie and her daughter Ella to Buffalo, via the Erie Canal. They eventually settled in the back four rooms of a single-story cottage at 526 South Division Street, a busy German neighborhood at the time. He was drawn to the place because of its small barn out back—perfect for keeping horses and wagons. He adopted the alias John Hort (the name of a Philadelphia acquaintance) on his new huckster license, and they settled down as John and Matilda Hort. It wasn’t long, however, before his rapidly widening circle of crazed drinking buddies bestowed upon him the nickname “Philadelphia Billy.”

Further research

In order to conduct further research into killing by electricity, Southwick was able, in the summer of 1887, to work out an arrangement with the City of Buffalo and the SPCA to conduct more experiments on stray dogs. That summer, the city council placed a 25-cent bounty on all strays—or six bucks a pup in today’s dollars. Soon young boys began bringing in more dogs than the pound could handle. At the time, drowning was the solution for unwanted dogs. Concerned about the welfare of the animals in overcrowded conditions at the city pound, the SPCA stepped in and allowed Southwick and another Buffalo physician named George Fell to try out their newly constructed “dog killing cage” to put the animals away.

Constructed in an old police station, the device consisted of five small fenced areas with a common pine box at the base. The floor was a zinc plate, which was filled with an inch or so of water. Wires were run from an arc light cable. One end connected to the pole of the zinc plate, the other ran to a muzzle outfitted with a metal bit. For the benefit of the press, a small terrier was led sloshing into the cage. The muzzle was strapped onto the dog’s face, pressing the iron bit into his teeth and tongue. As the dog stood there looking confused at the serious gentlemen staring intently at him, a switch was thrown. In an instant, the dog collapsed with a splash onto the floor of the apparatus, expelling urine and feces.

Southwick and Fell continued to amass the results of their experiments in scientific papers. They were building a body of evidence to illustrate the effectiveness of their revolutionary means of killing, to pair with the information they continued to collect from members of the law enforcement and medical communities.

Unfortunately for Southwick, Elbridge Gerry, the chair of the Death Penalty Commission, was not easily convinced. He advocated a massive overdose of morphine, delivered by injection, which would put the prisoner to sleep before arresting his or her heart. But this method was also problematic because the use of hypodermic needles was relatively new. Physicians did not support their use in executions for two primary reasons. One, it would scare regular patients unnecessarily if they came to associate needles with capital punishment. Two, participating in executions would be a violation of the Hippocratic oath, which reads in part: “To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug.”

One of the respondents to the commission’s questionnaire was Dr. J. Mount Bleyer, who gave his detailed opinions at great length. Writing about morphine injection, the visionary doctor sidestepped Hippocrates by explaining that the injection of six grams of morphine was a simple technique that could easily be learned by a sheriff, for example. After eerily predicting the present-day method of lethal injection, Bleyer then went on to envision death by chloroform. Years later, a variation on this idea would manifest itself as the gas chamber on February 8, 1924, in Carson City, Nevada with the execution of a hit-man for a Chinese gang named Gee Jon.

Bleyer also weighed in as a proponent of the electric chair. Many years later, he would become a staunch opponent of capital punishment, going so far as to publish an essay condemning the custom for all civilized societies in the New York World on November 25, 1906. Clearly he was haunted in later life by the urgent opinions of his younger days.

The Battle of the Currents

Much has been written about the competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse in the final two decades of the 19th century. This episode of corporate warfare is often referred to as the Battle of the Currents. It was an all-out fight to see which company, and which form of current, AC or DC, would become the standard of the future. Much was at stake. In the Gilded Age, scientific advances translated to unprecedented profits for many companies. Many more went under trying to compete in the unfettered corporate environment that gave rise to huge railroad, steel and oil companies.

Edison, dubbed the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” was already an American icon because of the constant flow of patents generated from his lab in New Jersey. He was a clever and practical inventor with a wholesome Midwestern work ethic. Credited with the invention of the light bulb, phonograph and electric vote recorder among other things, Edison’s crew excelled at churning out improvements to existing technologies like the telegraph and telephone. Among the gargantuan list of patents his lab turned out, many during the late 1880s were concerned with systems of electrical distribution, which in Edison’s case meant direct current systems.

Had Edison properly recognized the genius of one of his staff named Nikola Tesla, he may not have alienated the young immigrant to the point of quitting. Tesla had devised an alternating current system that had distinct advantages over DC, notably the potential to send electricity over vast distances. Direct current could only be used by homes and businesses within several hundred yards of a power station, and thick, expensive copper wires were necessary, making it much more cost prohibitive.

Westinghouse saw the potential of Tesla’s invention and would eventually purchase the patent from him. On November 30, 1886, Buffalo gained the distinction of receiving the first Westinghouse AC power station. Ten years later, in 1896, Buffalo would become the “Electric City of the Future” when the first citywide AC system was completed, harnessing the power of Niagara Falls, 26 miles away.

Looking back many years later, Edison would admit that the AC system was, in fact, superior. But at the time, he was a proud businessman with investors to please. The lengths he would eventually agree to go in order to promote direct current would compromise his own most personally held beliefs.

Trouble in paradise

Things were not going smoothly at 526 South Division Street. William Kemmler (a.k.a. John Hort) was again finding success as a huckster, and was able to hire workers to help him work the streets with his horse-drawn wagons of produce. But, although he was turning a profit, he was also prone to daily drinking bouts that saw him routinely incapacitated by nightfall. Other times he would simply continue to drink, pouring them down late into the night in a disturbingly unresponsive state. His escapades were becoming the stuff of legend among the other alcoholics who frequented the taverns along his route. He once attempted to jump his horse over an eight-foot-tall wooden fence—with the wagon still attached to the horse. He was not successful.

According to neighbors, Tillie would rage at him day and night, complaining of his drinking and threatening to “send him back to his old bitch”—the married woman he’d eloped with in Camden. Tillie, for her part, was discovered to be welcoming male visitors for “parties” while Kemmler worked the streets during the day. For all this, Mrs. Reid, their landlord, who lived in the front of the cottage, “never heard him speak cross to her.” Ella, Tillie’s little daughter, was witness to all the proceedings.

Living with them in the cramped four rooms was another huckster named John “Yella” De Bella, a Spaniard who’d gained his nickname thanks to his jaundiced complexion. While Kemmler retained ownership of the wagons and horses and kept all the books, they split profits equally. On Thursday, March 28, 1889, Kemmler, “Yella” and another huckster under Kemmler’s employ named Charles A. Spang spent the afternoon and evening playing games of checkers for drinks of hard cider and beer, followed by whiskey. Incapacitated by alcohol, Kemmler passed out late in the night.

The following morning, Kemmler, shaking with delirium tremens, became irritated by what he perceived as the overly affectionate tone Tillie was using with De Bella. He noted that her traveling trunk was packed, with a lot of his money in it. She protested that she’d merely been straightening out her things.

Kemmler then went out to the small barn and began to prepare his wagons for the day’s work. De Bella went out and remarked to Spang that the boss seemed mad at him, and he confessed his mounting concern. As she often did, Tillie went out and requested some fresh eggs of Kemmler, so she could prepare breakfast. He fetched some and put them in a basket for her.

After she went back inside, Kemmler walked into the barn and continued to ready his wagon for the day’s work. He then picked up a hatchet and used the hammer end of it to make some small repair to the barn door. When he was done, he turned toward the house.

Off to see the Wizard

Concerned that commission chairman Gerry was going against his recommendation, Southwick decided to send a flattering letter from his home at 456 Niagara Street to Thomas Edison in Menlo Park dated November 8, 1887. Appealing to the inventor’s reputation as a respected scientist and electrician, he asked Edison about his opinions on details like the strength of current necessary to provoke a quick death. In a flight of ego, he went on to describe to the great inventor his own vision of a chair, similar to a dental chair, but with wired metal arms designed for the purpose of execution, and solicited Edison’s thoughts on the idea.

A month later Southwick received a disappointing reply from Edison. A lifelong opponent of capital punishment, he did not believe that the law had a right to kill.

Southwick picked up his pen again, and wrote in his florid, stylized script that since capital punishment always had and always would exist, it would therefore be best to find its most civilized and humane form. Stroking Edison’s ego, he went on to assure him that his opinion would greatly influence the Gerry Commission.

Edison must have experienced a revelation. Either that, or he recognized a devious public relations angle. This time he replied that he’d thoughtfully considered Southwick’s letter, and though he would prefer a world without capital punishment, he appreciated the necessity of using the most humane method possible. To that end, he heartily recommended electricity as the means to extinguish life. Further, he believed that the best machine for the purpose was the AC dynamo manufactured by George Westinghouse.

Swayed by the great inventor’s stance, committee chairman Elbridge Gerry relented, and on January 17, 1888, after two years of study, the Gerry Commission submitted its 95-page report recommending that New York State become the first place on earth to kill criminals with electricity.

Charles T. Saxton, chairman of the Assembly’s judiciary committee and friend of Southwick, introduced a bill to turn the recommendation into law in the spring of 1888, making an impassioned plea for its passage. Two contentious parts of the bill called for a gag order on the press at all future executions, and the expeditious disposal of the condemned person’s remains in the prison yard where they were to be buried without religious rites and covered with quicklime to speed decomposition. Hotly debated, the subject drew particular fire from Catholic members of the legislature, who objected first to capital punishment in general, and then to the lack of a sacred burial for the condemned.

The passage of the Electrical Execution Act on June 5, 1888, put into place the veil of secrecy that surrounds US executions to this day, taking them out of the realm of public spectacle and into the high security rooms we know today as death chambers. The new law went into effect on January 1, 1889.

I’ll take the rope

Mary Reid, the landlord, was going about her routine in the front part of the cottage when Kemmler entered early on the morning of March 29. His hands and shirtsleeves were covered in blood. “I had to do it,” he exclaimed, “there was no help for it. Either one of us had to die. I’ll take the rope for it.” Then, six-year-old Ella rushed into the room hysterically crying, “Papa has killed Mamma!”

Terrified, Reid snatched up her two children and rushed out of the house for help. Kemmler picked up Ella, his hands dripping with her mother’s blood, and set her down in a chair. He returned to the kitchen in the back where he’d struck Tillie 26 times in the head, neck and chest with the blunt end of the hatchet. As Kemmler wiped his hands with a towel, a neighbor, Asa King, confronted him. King was stunned by the gruesome scene and appealed to Kemmler to call for a doctor. Kemmler declined. He then stepped over Tillie’s body on his way to Thomas Martin’s Saloon, as he did every morning, in search of a beer. It was not yet nine o’clock.

King tailed him to the bar, where he prevailed upon the bartender not to serve Kemmler, saying he’d “brained” his wife. Unperturbed, Kemmler continued on to the next saloon where he successfully ordered his beverage. As he began to drink it, Officer John O’Neill from the Third Precinct apprehended him.

O’Neill took him back to the scene of the crime, where blood stained the walls, ceiling and floor of the kitchen and adjoining bedroom. Dishes were smashed, tables overturned, fried eggs broken on the floor. There, swaying on hands and knees was Tillie, gently keening, her long hair matted with blood and dragging on the floor. Somehow she was still alive. She was taken a few blocks to Fitch Accident Hospital at the corner of Michigan and Seneca with her skull fractured in five places. In order to relieve pressure on the brain, Dr. Roswell Park extracted 17 broken pieces of bone until the organ started oozing out. Miraculously, she lived another 16 hours. Later, during testimony, Park was asked if Tillie had been an attractive woman. “Not as I saw her,” was his reply. She was not quite 31 years old.

At the police station, Kemmler was given brandy. He gave them his real name but coolly refused to offer a motive aside from his “quick temper.” Lieutenant Daniel E. Barry questioned him, and Kemmler admitted to heavy drinking since arriving in Buffalo 18 months before. He also admitted to butchering Tillie with a hatchet, saying, “I wanted to kill her, and the sooner I hang, the better it will be.” A confession was prepared, and Kemmler, illiterate, signed it with an X.

Brown vs. the Board

On June 6, 1888, the day after the Electrical Execution Act was passed, an obscure, self-educated engineer named Harold Pitney Brown sent a long, scorching letter highlighting the dangers of AC to the New York Evening Post. In it, he condemned Westinghouse for championing a “damnable” system that sacrificed public safety for stockholder dividends. He urged the New York Board of Electrical Control to follow the lead set by Chicago when that city banned the use of alternating current.

Brown’s letter sent sparks flying all over Gotham. Within three days the Board of Electrical Control would meet and hear heated discussion over the allegations. Commissioner Daniel L. Gibbens ordered that copies of the letter be sent to all electric lighting companies in the city, targeting George Westinghouse in particular.

To bolster his argument, Brown was given use of Edison’s laboratory. Edison immediately procured a number of dogs for the upcoming experiments from the SPCA. In Menlo Park, Brown worked with Edison’s chief electrician to explore the “death points” of the animals—that is, the amount of voltage required to kill them.

Several prominent electricians began poking holes in Brown’s claims. He dismissed these as inaccurate assertions of the wealthy and powerful (meaning Westinghouse) and decided to stage a dramatic experiment. On July 30, 1888, he invited 75 electricians to a display at the Columbia College of Mines. There, a 76-pound Newfoundland dog was brought out onto the stage. He was led into a metal cage, muzzled and tied down while electric cuffs were tightened around two of his legs. Brown assured the audience that the friendly dog they saw before them was in fact a violent beast that had already bitten two people. The dog’s name was Dash.

To illustrate the comparative safety of direct current, he initially sent 300 volts through Dash, which provoked a yelp and then whimpering. Next, 400 volts were applied, which caused him to struggle, howling fiercely. When the charge reached 700 volts, the powerful dog ripped off the muzzle, broke the straps and nearly escaped from the cage. He was again tied down amid protests from the audience, who were angered by the brutal display. Brown threw the switch sending 1000 volts of direct current through Dash’s body. He was now just barely alive.

According to a New York Times article, Brown then attempted to soothe the offended onlookers. “[Dash] will have less trouble when we try the alternating current. It will make him feel better.” With that, he sent 330 volts of alternating current through the dog’s body, which finished the grim task. Witnesses gagged at the horrific stench. Brown was ready to continue his display on several more dogs when the superintendent of the SPCA put a stop to the proceedings.

The leading electricians of the day continued to refute his claims, but Brown continued his experiments in killing with electricity at Edison’s lab. In the Sunday edition of the New York Sun on August 25, 1889, however, Brown’s credibility suffered a blow from which it would never recover. Based on more than 50 letters that had been burglarized from Brown’s Wall Street office, the story published details of correspondence between him and Edison that showed Brown to be a paid spokesman for direct current.

Among other things, the letters documented a complex plan that he and Edison engaged in to procure a Westinghouse dynamo for use in the first electrocution. While New York’s electrical execution law recommended alternating current, it didn’t specify a particular brand of generator. Westinghouse would not sell one of his dynamos to be used for that purpose, but Brown, with Edison’s blessing and money, was able to acquire one slightly used and arrange for its secret delivery to Auburn Prison.

A bad rhymester

Five weeks after the murder of Tillie Ziegler, jurors were selected and the case against Kemmler went to trial, prosecuted in Buffalo by District Attorney George T. Quinby. Because Kemmler had admitted to the gruesome act that was also witnessed by six-year-old Ella, there was no doubt as to his guilt. What remained to be determined was whether or not he’d committed murder in the first degree—deliberate and premeditated—thereby punishable by death.

Quinby opened the case for the state by accurately predicting that the defense would attempt to illustrate temporary insanity due to chronic alcoholism. The prosecution presented its case the first day, and on the afternoon of the second day the defense brought a colorful parade of characters to the witness stand, each with a more outrageous anecdote of Kemmler’s drinking habits to share with the jury. Laughter pealed through the courtroom as the portrait of Kemmler the hopeless drunk took shape. The jury heard of one night in particular where he dropped $50 (over $1,000 today) in the wine room of the Olympic Theatre, on Canal Street, buying drinks for all the showgirls. Plastered, the huckster playboy finally had to be carried out and hoisted into his wagon.

Defense attorney Charles W. Sickmon then called upon medical witnesses. Dr. T. D. Crothers, head of a private inebriate asylum, testified that excessive alcohol abuse caused brain defects and destroyed a man’s character. He further stated that delusions of persecution and spousal infidelity were hallmarks of alcoholic insanity. Upon cross-examination, DA Quinby asked Crothers if even small amounts of whiskey could cause brain defects. Crothers said that in his opinion this was so. His opinion implicitly accused mostly everyone in the courtroom of having a defective brain.

On Monday, May 13, 1889, the sky grew steadily darker until the moment the jury was to pronounce its verdict. With a bright flash, a mighty thunderclap rattled the courtroom windows as William Kemmler was found guilty of murder in the first degree. The next day he was sentenced to “suffer the death punishment by being executed by electricity, as provided by the code of criminal procedure of the State of New York, and that [he] be removed to and kept in confinement in Auburn State prison” until the week of Monday, June 24, 1889, when the punishment was to be delivered.

He spent the next nine days in the Buffalo jail as curiosity mounted about his mood. How did a man facing such a hideous fate behave? For one thing, he continued to receive whiskey and tobacco from his jailors, as he had since his arrest. He even turned to writing songs, one of which was published in the Buffalo Evening News on May 27, 1889:

I used to live in Buffalo,

The people knew me well,

I used to go a-peddling,

A plenty did I sell.

My old clothes were ragged and torn,

My shoes wouldn’t cover my toes.

My old hat went flippity flap

With a schuper to my nose.

I can’t sing sing,

I won’t sing sing,

I’ll tell you the reason why.

I can’t sing sing,

I won’t sing sing

For my whistle is getting dry.

The newspaper added that in addition to committing a bloody murder, Kemmler deserved the electric chair because he was a bad rhymester.

Cruel and unusual?

Kemmler’s attorney filed an immediate appeal of the sentence and received a stay of execution. On July 9, 1889, as the condemned man sat in solitary confinement at Auburn Prison, hearings began in New York City to determine if death by electricity constituted cruel and unusual punishment. This time his defense was led by a stellar attorney named Bourke Cockran, whose oratorical skills had won him notice from Tammany Hall Democrats, who made him a US Representative for New York in 1887. A tall Irishman with a musical brogue, his speaking style would come to be mimicked by a young Winston Churchill. Cockran had resigned his seat in Washington after one term in order to return to his lucrative private law practice.

Although it was widely charged that Cockran had been hired by Westinghouse as a final attempt to block electrical executions using his company’s dynamos, the respected litigator denied this. “I believe the law to be unconstitutional and inhuman, and deem it due to the honor of the State and for the welfare of justice that it should be tested. No electrical company has retained me, and I am doing this without hope of financial remuneration,” he explained. Few believed him.

Notably absent from the proceedings was Elbridge Gerry, the death penalty commission’s chairman. He was too busy sailing on his yacht (christened the Electra because it was outfitted with every electrical appliance then available) to attend.

Cockran began his case by questioning Harold Brown. He first established that Brown, while listing his occupation as an electrical engineer, had never gone to school for it and was not a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. He’d worked as a salesman for the Western Electric Company in Chicago. Cockran also established that Brown was not a physician, and therefore had no special knowledge that would qualify him to speak with authority on the subject at hand.

Still, Brown explained that each individual has a unique resistance level to electricity and therefore not every person would be killed by the same degree of electrical shock. The key, according to experts Brown referred to as “electro-medical” men, was to determine the condemned individual’s level of resistance with the use of a device called a Wheatstone Bridge, and tailor the voltage level to the subject strapped into the chair.

Cockran’s defense was that too many variables were at play to guarantee the electric chair would produce a quick and painless death, rendering it a cruel and unusual punishment. He repeatedly attacked witnesses for the state on both their credentials and their professional positions. He continued to point out, through the testimony of experts and survivors of lightning strikes, that electricity remained a mysterious and undependable means of taking a life.

He asked Brown if he could supply a drawing of the electric chair, so that people could visualize the new device. This was an impactful move. From the start, one of the goals of the death penalty commission was to move execution out of the “dark ages” and the “terror-giving paraphernalia” of the gallows, into a more modern and humane era. What the public saw was a wooden chair with sturdy arms laced with hideous straps, a skullcap and an electrode at the base of the spine that would hold sponges wet with saline solution—the better to conduct the lethal current. A wide mask covered the prisoner’s face. The seat was perforated to allow bodily fluids to drain, a feature thoughtfully included as a result of experiments on hundreds of dogs. Progress, it turned out, resembled a phantasmagoric torture relic from the Spanish Inquisition.

The New York City hearings featured a long line of witnesses, including Edison, who underscored the dangers of AC. On July 31, the hearings were moved to Buffalo, into the law offices of Fullerton, Becker & Hazel, located at 23 West Eagle Street, in order to accommodate witnesses at the other end of the state. Dr. George Fell, who had worked with Southwick on the “dog killing cage,” was called to testify and admitted that his experiments failed to determine what voltage would be required to kill every human being and the only way to make such a determination would be through conducting human experiments. Charles Durston, the warden of Auburn Prison, then testified that the first actual human test of the electric chair would, of course, be Kemmler.

After collecting more than 1,000 pages of testimony, Judge Edwin Day punted, citing a “diversity of opinion” among the many experts. The Supreme Court of the State of New York heard Kemmler’s case next and upheld the sentence, too. In the end, the process of appeals would extend all the way to the US Supreme Court. There, Chief Justice Melville Fuller ruled that the US Supreme Court could not overrule the highest court in the State of New York unless that court had made a big enough mistake as to constitute a denial of due process, which he ruled it hadn’t done.

In the meantime, New York State Assemblyman Newton Curtis, a decorated Civil War veteran of the Union Army, introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment altogether, as he had for the previous seven years. Now a top-of-mind issue, the Assembly approved the measure by a vote of 74 to 29. However, the Senate Judiciary Committee stepped in and voted it down, seven to two. It could not be reintroduced for a vote again until the following legislative session.

On July 12, 1890, with all appeals exhausted, Kemmler arrived back in Buffalo handcuffed to his jailor, Daniel McNaughton, one of the only people he’d had contact with since arriving in Auburn over a year before. State Supreme Court Justice Henry Childs explained to Kemmler that he’d reached the end of the line and informed him his execution would take place the week of August 4, 1890, closing the meeting with the traditional blessing: “May God have mercy on your soul.”

Clean living

For all the barbarity of his crime, the final year of Kemmler’s life produced marked changes in the man. It was in solitary confinement on America’s first secluded “death row” at Auburn that he experienced his most prolonged period of sobriety since adolescence. Gertrude Durston, the warden’s wife, took particular interest in him, schooling him in the Bible and teaching him how to write. He began to take pride in his personal hygiene and appearance. His friend and guard McNaughton would sit up late at night reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables to him.

Before his execution, he thoughtfully executed his last will and testament. To McNaughton, a picture Bible that had given him comfort. To Reverend Houghton, who baptized him into the Methodist faith, a handheld puzzle, the object of which was to lead a marble through a maze. To Mrs. Durston, 50 autographed cards for the woman who’d taught him, at the age of 29, how to write his name. Recognizing the trappings of his own infamy, he hoped that after his death the cards might accrue significant monetary value for her.

It was Mrs. Durston who assured him he would be going to a better place. There is an episode relayed by prison personnel and recorded in newspapers of the day that Kemmler experienced a vision of Christ in his cell. At their last meeting she told him that God would be with him and urged him to be strong; everything would come out all right. She then tearfully boarded a train for Long Island, unable to bear staying in town while he was put to death.

It’s time

In the pre-dawn hours of August 6, 1890, several guests were stirring in the Osborne House, the nice hotel in Auburn. Among the witnesses in town to watch the proceedings were Doctors Southwick and Fell, excited to witness their invention in action on a human being—though Fell was likely disappointed that the warden would not let him try out his electrical resuscitation machine on Kemmler, once he was dead. Fell had tried it on several dogs he’d killed, hoping to reanimate them, without success.

In his cell, Kemmler finished his morning meal of dry toast and coffee. He then washed himself, grooming his hair and beard, and dressed in yellow patterned trousers, white linen shirt with a checked bow tie, and a grey vest with a matching jacket. The night before he’d been allowed to stay up until 9:30, singing songs with Frank Fish, the other man on death row, who played the banjo.

Frank Velling, a deputy sheriff who’d befriended Kemmler during his imprisonment in Buffalo, arrived to say goodbye and to shave the crown of Kemmler’s head, the better to conduct the electricity from the wet sponge concealed in the skullcap of the electric chair. Kemmler reluctantly received the indignity. Velling then cut a hole in the back of Kemmler’s pants to facilitate contact with the electrode that would be held in place with a spring at the base of his spine as he sat in the chair.

At the prison gate, Warden Durston’s agitation was mounting. He resented this facet of his job and could not believe that many of the witnesses were arriving casually late. Durston only had a small window of time in which to conduct the execution before the other inmates were released from their cells and led to various workstations around the prison. The motor that would be used to spin the Westinghouse dynamo would then be needed to power other equipment.

The 27 witnesses were brought into the small death chamber and seated in a semi-circle around the ghastly chair that was bolted to the floor. With the procedure now at hand, Warden Durston felt a nauseating chill: He did not know, and had never thought to ask, how long the electric current should be applied to the victim. He quickly asked the advice of the assembled medical men in the room. Dr. Edward Spitzka, a neurologist, offered the period of 15 seconds. Pioneers all, they looked dumbly at one another. Spitzka was handed a stopwatch and Durston walked down the short hallway to fetch Kemmler. Already the dynamo was humming 1,000 feet away in another part of the prison.

When they returned, a hush fell over the room. For an awkward moment, Kemmler didn’t know whether he should sit in the device or remain standing. Durston asked for a couple of chairs, and he sat down beside Kemmler facing those in attendance. He placed his arm around the prisoner’s shoulder and introduced him. Durston then explained that he’d read the death warrant to Kemmler and told him he had to die. He then asked him if he had anything to say. Kemmler uttered three short sentences: “Well, I wish everybody good luck in the world. I believe I am going to a good place. I’m ready.”

He then stood and took his seat in the electric chair as Velling and Durston—who was visibly shaking—hastily fumbled with the heavy leather straps. Kemmler calmly asked that they take their time and make sure everything was done right. Durston used a pair of scissors to cut a hole in Kemmler’s shirttail to properly expose the base of his spine to the electrode. Finally the broad leather mask was put over his face and strapped tightly against the back of the chair. Durston then moved back and said, “Goodbye, William.” “Goodbye,” came the garbled farewell from behind the mask.

Durston gave a signal, rapping twice on the door. In another room, a switch was thrown that sent over 1,000 volts of alternating current into the electric chair. Kemmler convulsed, his chest straining at the force of the shock. His muscles contracted uncontrollably, causing a fingernail to tear through the flesh of his palm. For 17 seconds he writhed, until Spitzka called for the electricity to be shut off. “He is dead,” the doctor proclaimed.

Kemmler slumped in the chair as the medical men gathered around. Southwick took the opportunity to deliver his prepared statement: “This is the culmination of 10 years work and study. We live in a higher civilization today.”

Not so fast

Imagine the horror among the men assembled when it was noticed that blood from the cut on Kemmler’s palm was pulsing out onto the arm of the chair, indicating a heartbeat. Imagine too the panic when he let out a horrible groan, sputtering bloody mucus from his lips as his chest began to rise, struggling for breath.

The dynamo was ordered restarted, but there was a problem. New leather belts had been used on the secondhand device and as they stretched they began slipping badly. After a delay of several minutes that allowed Kemmler time to continue recovering, the voltage had built up enough to give it another try. The switch was thrown again and this time 2,000 volts of current were allowed to flow through Kemmler until blood began to run down his arms and face, dripping from behind the quivering mask. The room began to fill with the smell of burning human flesh. DA Quinby, who had prosecuted Kemmler in Buffalo, became so sickened he stood and burst from the death chamber, against regulations. He staggered a few steps toward the stairs before collapsing in a dead faint. The machine ran for more than a minute, until Kemmler’s body caught fire. This time, he was really dead.

It would be three hours before his remains had cooled enough to remove him from the chair for an official autopsy. When it was finally performed, they found that his skull had been charred and the muscles at the small of his back had attained the appearance of “well-cooked beef.”

Outside the prison, witnesses began telling their experiences to reporters who’d gathered to collect details of the historic event. “Kemmler Westinghoused” read one headline. Both here and abroad, reaction was one of outrage. Westinghouse himself said the job could have been done better with an axe.

Waltzing Matilda

Despite its ugly beginning, the electric chair went on to become the preferred method of execution in most of the US during the 20th century, accounting for the deaths of more than 4,500 people. We get the word electrocution as a compound of electricity and execution. The word was born with the chair. The iconic device is still approved for use today in 10 states, though Nebraska is the only one that still uses it exclusively. That’s down from a high of 26 states. It’s a uniquely American invention, conceived during a time when scientific advances were changing virtually every aspect of life. It has never been used in any other country on earth. Ushered in under the pretense of providing a more civilized way to deliver capital punishment, it instead became one of the most feared and reviled instruments of torture ever devised by mankind.

After a hundred years of use, horribly botched executions still occur, such as that of Pedro Medina in Florida’s chair (nicknamed “Old Sparky”) in 1997. It seems the owner’s manual did not specify the use of natural sponges in the skullcap. When Medina was given his jolt, the replacement synthetic sponges melted and caught on fire, shooting flames a foot long out the side of the leather mask.

While the roots of the electric chair are firmly planted in Buffalo, there are few historical markers remaining where one can visit and learn about this shocking chapter in local history. Both the cottage where Kemmler perpetrated his dreadful crime and the home of Alfred Southwick are gone. Southwick’s address is a conspicuous little parking lot between two businesses on Niagara Street. No trace remains of Martin’s Saloon, Fitch Accident Hospital or even the law offices of Fullerton, Becker & Hazel. The Brush Electric Company is long gone, and the memory of a time when streetlights were novel seems flatly impossible in our blinking, flashing modern world. Kemmler, of course, was buried according to the law and covered with quicklime. Locally, our best connection to the story exists in records, books and photographs stored at the downtown branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Library.

But there are still tangible traces of this past to be found and reflected upon. In Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo’s beautiful city of the dead, where a former president resides with an Indian chief, and a 19th-century business titan is just down the road from a recent victim of a driveby shooting, citizens from every strata of society have settled down quietly into permanent neighborhoods of marble and granite. Among these personalities, on a small hillside in section 31, you can visit the final resting place of Alfred P. Southwick, beside his wife and only adopted daughter, Mary, who appears to have died unmarried in 1919 at the age of 72.

Toward the outskirts of the cemetery near the Scajaquada Expressway, there is another grave worth visiting. You will need a map of the gravesites, available at the cemetery office, if you want to find the final resting place of Matilda “Tillie” Ziegler. She is not featured in the official field guide to notable people buried there, as Southwick is, but if you ask to find Matilda Ziegler, you can be directed. I visited the general area of her grave, but was unable to locate it exactly. I then discovered that in the 118 years since her death, no one has ever honored poor Tillie with a headstone.

She has rested there alone, unvisited and forgotten through all the harsh seasons that have passed since the day of her horrible murder. She was buried there as a convenience by Kemmler’s brother. A victim of grievous domestic violence, Tillie was a woman done brutally wrong—yet no one seems to have mourned her death, even as the state delivered the ultimate punishment to the man who ended her life.

Standing there in the quiet, open field, thinking of her among the other anonymous graves in section 39, it’s hard not to feel small, helpless and alone, in a cold, terrifying world that’s impossible to understand and even harder to control. It’s a weird, desolate sensation that may have been shared by Tillie’s poor, haunted little daughter, Ella, as she silently watched them taking her mother to the hospital and her stepfather to jail. None of the many accounts I researched gave any indication of the little girl’s fate. A fair assumption would have been that she landed in an orphanage, and that her identity would have dissolved into sealed adoption records.

That’s how the story ended

Until I found, in an August, 1890 Buffalo Express article, a small mention that Ella Ziegler had been transported back to Philadelphia, probably with Kemmler’s brother, the one who was married to Tillie’s sister, Bertha. Upon checking records for Ella Ziegler near Philadelphia, I found some interesting stuff. I came across a 1941 death notice for a shoemaker named Christopher Klebe in The Morning Call newspaper out of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Klebe lived at 354 Jefferson Street in East Greenville, 50 miles outside of Philadelphia. The notice identified him as the husband of the former Ella Ziegler.

He rests in the cemetery of the New Goshenhoppen Reformed Church in East Greenville, and the church happens to have excellent records of the people buried there right on its Web site. Under the surname Klebe, there are nine entries. One is for a woman named Ella, who was born in 1882—the same year our little Ella was born.

I decided to call the pastor of the church, Homer Royer, to see if he knew of any legends in the small town. He said that he did not, but that he knew of some old-timers he could ask. Considering the magnitude of the story in the press at the time, it’s entirely conceivable that Ella would have been sent out of the city to be raised by another relative in the sheltered, rural environment of East Greenville. Especially since her biological father, Fred Ziegler, was in dreadful health.

If that is in fact the case, there is at least one lovely event to include in this long horror story. It was reported in the December 26, 1903 issue of Pennsburg Town and Country, that 25-year-old Christopher Klebe promised to love, honor and cherish 21-year-old Ella Ziegler, full of the youthful blush of life, in a marriage ceremony in East Greenville on the sunny Christmas Day of that year. They would be blessed with four healthy children. And though she sadly passed before him in 1921, at the young age of 39, Klebe, heartbroken, would never remarry for the remaining 20 years of his life.