The First Man to Face the Electric Chair!

On August 6, 1890, inside Auburn Prison in New York, history took a dark and unsettling turn. William Kemmler, convicted of murdering his lover Matilda Ziegler with an axe, was chosen to test a brand-new method of execution — the electric chair. Officials promised it would be quick, clean, and more “humane” than hanging.

It wasn’t.

Kemmler was strapped tightly into the wooden chair, leather restraints biting into his wrists and ankles. A metal electrode was fixed to his back, another to his head. When the switch was thrown, a surge of roughly 700 volts shot through his body.

Sparks.
The smell of burning hair.
His skin began to smolder — yet he lived.

Witnesses stared in horror as doctors stepped forward and whispered urgently:
“He is still breathing.”

The machine was recharged for a second attempt. This time, more than 1,000 volts tore through him for nearly two full minutes. Smoke curled up from the top of his skull. His flesh burned so deeply that the electrode on his back seared through skin, tissue — and into his spine.

Only then did they pronounce him dead.

The invention once touted as the future of “civilized execution” had revealed its true nature — not clean, not painless, but a slow destruction of the human body by fire from the inside out.

William Kemmler’s execution became the first electric chair killing in history… and a nightmarish warning of what would follow.