Question

Following the first execution by electrocution, experts on electricity, such as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, publicly debated whether electrocution was so horrible that it should never have been invented.
True/False

Answer 1

The correct answer is True

On August 6, 1890, in Auburn prison, in New York, the first execution takes place in an electric chair in the United States. The victim was William Kemmler, found guilty of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with a pickaxe.

Electrocution was suggested as a more humane means of execution for the first time in 1881, by dentist Albert Southwick. He watched a drunken elderly man die without apparently showing pain after touching the terminals of an electric generator in Buffalo, New York. Before that, there was death by hanging, according to which the convict was considered executed with a broken cervical spine even though he would only succumb after 30 minutes of suffocation.