Did you know the electric chair was invented in Buffalo?

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — Chicken wings, pacemakers, the electric chair — all invented in Buffalo.

That last one might surprise you the most. Here’s another interesting fact: it was invented by a dentist.

Buffalo City Historian Lindsey Lauren Visser says the electric chair is credited to Dr. Alfred Southwick, created as a “more humane” execution method.

“Interestingly, there’s a court case about whether or not it was a violation of the 8th Amendment because it was initially unclear if it constituted a cruel or unusual punishment,” Visser said. “Thomas Edison even had to testify. It played into the whole ‘war of the currents’ between Edison and [George] Westinghouse/[Nikola] Tesla.”

Nikola Tesla might be best known to Western New Yorkers for how his work contributed to hydroelectricity in Niagara Falls near the end of the 19th century.

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It was around this time that the electric chair first came into use. In 1890, one year after it was adopted in New York as a method of execution, William Kemmler, a man convicted of killing his common-law wife, was the first to be put to death this way.

“The execution was pretty terrible because they weren’t entirely sure what voltage they needed to kill him,” Visser said. “It took 8 minutes and they, basically, cooked him to death.”

The idea for the electric chair first stemmed from what the National Library of Medicine (NLM) called “a freak accident.” In 1881, Dr. Southwick was in Buffalo when he witnessed the death of an intoxicated man who “inadvertently touched a live generator terminal,” the NLM says.

“Southwick’s initial reaction was shock,” the NLM said. “Later, as he pondered this tragic event, he concluded that electrocution was, at least, a quick and seemingly painless way to depart from this earth.”

Kemmler’s death, ironically, did not fit that description. But Southwick’s intention was to create an alternative to brutal methods such as hanging, beheading and suffocation. This led Southwick, who died in 1898, to push for the passage of laws mandating electrical execution in roughly 20 states, including New York, the NLM says.

In this state, nearly 700 people were put to death between 1890 and 1963, Eddie Lee Mays being the last of them, according to a 1995 publication in Brooklyn Law School’s Journal of Law and Policy.

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With each decade that passed since the electric chair’s introduction, the number of executions increased. It peaked here in the 1930s, The Journal of Law of Policy said, noting that 153 people were killed. But after that decade, each that followed saw fewer executions.

Various changes to the law took place over the rest of the century, but New York, ultimately, never had another execution. Finally, in 2004, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional here, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

However, this type of sentence does remain legal at the federal level, so some crimes committed in New York can still result in capital punishment. One notable case is that of the Buffalo Tops mass shooting in 2022. The Department of Justice is seeking the death penalty against the shooter, who at the state level was given 11 life sentences.

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Evan Anstey is an Associated Press Award, JANY Award and Emmy-nominated digital producer who has been part of the News 4 team since 2015. See more of his work here and follow him on Twitter.

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