"... alternating current will undoubtedly drive the hangmen out of business in this state."
New York Times, 1888, on a prototype
The word electrocution is actually a combination of the words electricity and execution, and was initially only applied to executions performed with electricity, ft was only later that this word was adopted to describe any death caused by electricity.
The original idea for the electric chair can be credited to Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist, who observed the death of a man who touched a live electrical terminal while sitting in his dentist's chair. At the same time, a fierce rivalry was developing between Edison and Westinghouse, both of them trying to market their own forms of electricity to the public. Edison (who favored direct current) wanted to show that alternating current was unsafe by having it used for executions. In the late 1880s, he and Harold Pitney Brown, holder of the electric chair patent, "researched" the viability of the invention by killing many different animals with electricity. From this they concluded that alternating current electricity worked best, and so the electric chair was made to run on AC.
The first electrocution, of William Kemler, took place in 1890 at Auburn prison. "The Chair" remained the most popular form of execution in the eastern United States and the Philippines for many years.
