A Buffalo Dentist and a Very Bad Idea

The electric chair was designed by a dentist. Not adapted by one, not suggested by one — designed, campaigned for, and built to his specification.

His name was Alfred P. Southwick, and he practiced dentistry in Buffalo, New York.

It started with an accident

In 1881, a drunk man in Buffalo touched the terminals of an electrical generator and died instantly.

Southwick heard about it and drew a conclusion that seemed reasonable at the time and turns out to be the central error in the whole story: that a death that fast must have been painless.

He was a dentist in the era before reliable anesthesia. His entire working life had been spent inflicting necessary pain on people and looking for ways to make it shorter. Instant looked like merciful.

So he lobbied for it

Hanging in the 1880s went wrong often. Too short a drop and the condemned strangled slowly; too long and the head came off. New York state convened a commission in 1886 to find something better.

Southwick was on it, and he had his answer ready.

He had already been experimenting — on stray dogs, in a wooden crate, with electrodes and a generator, measuring what killed them and how quickly. He published. He wrote to engineers. He pushed.

New York passed the Electrical Execution Law in 1888.

And the design gives him away completely

Look at the apparatus he specified.

A seated subject, in a chair with a high back. Straps at the wrists and forearms. A headrest to hold the skull in position. A footrest. Adjustable restraints so the same fixture works for different bodies.

That is a dental chair.

Southwick was not a mechanical engineer, and he did not sit down and invent a novel piece of furniture. He reached for the object he had spent twenty years working with — a chair that holds a person still while something unpleasant is done to their head — and specified that.

There are contemporary accounts of him referring to it as a death chair and describing execution in dental language, as an extraction.

Then Edison got involved, for money

Here the story stops being merely grim.

The 1880s were the middle of the war of the currents. Thomas Edison had built his business on direct current. George Westinghouse, with Nikola Tesla’s designs, was pushing alternating current, which transmitted over long distances far more cheaply and was winning.

Edison could not beat it on engineering, so he attacked it on safety — and when New York needed a current for its executions, he made sure it was Westinghouse’s.

He funded public demonstrations electrocuting animals with AC. He encouraged the verb “westinghoused” for being electrocuted. He supplied technical help to the state while publicly opposing capital punishment.

Westinghouse refused to sell a generator for the purpose and paid for the condemned man’s legal appeals. They lost.

So the first electric chair was a piece of dental furniture, wired according to a commercial smear campaign.

The first execution went as badly as possible

William Kemmler was executed at Auburn Prison on 6 August 1890.

The first current was applied for seventeen seconds. When it was switched off, he was still alive.

The generator had to spin back up while witnesses waited in the room. The second application lasted far longer. Reporters described smoke and the smell of burning. Several observers were physically sick, and one fainted.

Westinghouse’s reported comment afterwards was that they would have done better with an axe.

The chair stayed in use for over a century.

What Southwick did with the rest of his life

He went back to dentistry, and he was good at it. He taught at the University of Buffalo dental school. He is credited with improvements to dental practice that had nothing to do with any of this.

He also spent years defending the chair, arguing that Kemmler’s execution had been botched by inexperience rather than by the method.

He died in 1898. His obituary called him the father of electrical execution, which was accurate, and which he had wanted.

Why the story is worth keeping

Not for the ghoulishness. For the shape of the mistake.

A man whose profession was reducing suffering assumed that speed was the same thing as mercy, and that assumption was never tested — it was inferred from one accident he had only heard about.

It is a very old error and dentistry keeps a version of it. Fast is not the same as painless. Instant is not the same as humane. The distinction between how something looks from outside and how it feels from inside is the whole difficulty of treating other people’s pain, and getting it wrong on a Buffalo street corner in 1881 put a headrest on the electric chair.

The short version

Alfred Southwick, dentist, Buffalo. Saw a man die on a generator, concluded it was painless, and got a law passed.

He designed the chair out of the only object he knew — his own, with the straps and the headrest.

Edison wired it with his competitor’s current on purpose. The first attempt failed halfway. And the man who proposed it went back to filling teeth for another eight years.