William Kemmler, the first person to die…
1890 CE
Kemmler, of Buffalo, New York, a peddler and known alcoholic, had been convicted of murdering Matilda "Tillie" Ziegler, his common-law wife.
On January 1, 1888, New York had instituted death by electrocution, the first such law ever.
After Kemmler's conviction, it had been determined that his sentence was to be carried out at New York's Auburn Prison via the new electric chair, a device invented in 1881 by Buffalo, New York dentist Alfred Southwick.
After nine years of development and legislation, the chair was considered ready for use.
Kemmler's lawyers had appealed, arguing that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment.
The plan to carry out Kemmler's execution via electric chair had drawn the situation into the AC/DC "war of currents" between George Westinghouse, the largest supplier of alternating current equipment, and Thomas Edison, whose company runs its equipment on direct current.
The alternating current that powers the electric chair (a current standard adopted by a committee after a demonstration performed at Edison's laboratory by anti-AC activist Harold P. Brown showing AC's lethality) is supplied by a Westinghouse generator surreptitiously acquired by Brown.
This had led to Westinghouse trying to stop what seemed to be Brown and Edison's attempt to try to portray the AC used in Westinghouse electrical system as the deadly "executioners current", actively supporting Kemmler's appeal by hiring lawyer W. Bourke Cockran to represent him.
However, the appeal had failed on October 9, 1889 and the U.S. Supreme Court had turned down the case on the grounds that there is no cruel and unusual punishment in death by electrocution.
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