Life and Death by Electricity in 1890: The Transfiguration of William Kemmler

Abstract

Considerable speculation has heretofore attended precise location of soul, but, according to Electrical World, mystery now solved. Dr. A. H. Stevens, of Philadelphia, has located it in corpus a little spongy body situated at base of brain, which has defied efforts of physicians in their endeavors to ascertain its uses in human anatomy. corpus callosum, says doctor, is seat of imperishable mind, and great reservoir and storehouse of electricity, which abstracted from blood in arteries, and conveyed through nerves up spinal cord to corpus callosum. (Scientific American 25 Jan. 1890: 25) An Ax-Murder in Buffalo William Kemmler, who also called himself John Hart, a fruit-peddler about forty years old, returned drunk and quarrelsome to his squalid apartment in Buffalo, New York, on night of 28 March, 1889. Waiting for him, and in a similar frame of mind, was Matilda (Tillie) Ziegler, the woman who passed as his wife (New York Times 7 Aug. 1890: 2). An argument ensued, ending when Kemmler struck Tillie with a hatchet, killing her. He was quickly arrested, expressed no remorse for his deed, underwent a trial lasting four days in early May, and was sentenced to death by electricity in state prison at Auburn, near Syracuse, New York. The execution was set for week beginning 24 June 1889. The American Way of Life By 1890, electricity had become spirit and symbol of modernity, and Americans in particular had begun to live by electricity in a manner surprising even to themselves-if they had opportunity, in electric-powered rush of modem life, to stop long enough to think about it. The New York Sun noted that a businessman might breakfast on coffee ground by electricity and on fruit evaporated by it. He might put on clothes electrically ironed, and ride to work on an electric streetcar. He might go to his seventh-floor office by electric elevator and conduct his affairs with electrically-made pens on paper ruled by electricity. His lunchtime sausages, bread and butter, iced water to wash them down, and his ice cream for dessert, would all be prepared or preserved using electrical energy. He might be summoned to church service by an electric bell, and sing hymns to an electric organ. Somewhat later, he might be buried in an electrically-made coffin, and, last of all, have his name carved on his tombstone by same, subtile, mysterious, all-pervasive, and indefatigable agency (qtd. in Scientific American 22 Nov. 1890: 321 ). Yet few people in 1890 had a clue about what electricity was in scientific terms. Today, many might venture that electricity involves electrons, but as these particles would not be discovered till 1897, descriptions in 1890 even among scientific community tended toward mystical. Thomas Alva Edison, great American inventor, was celebrated everywhere as King of Science for his practical applications of electricity. But when in 1889 Robert Sherard, dining with Edison in restaurant in newly-opened Eiffel Tower, asked Napoleon of Invention what electricity was, reply was vague: a mode of motion, a system of vibrations (Sherard 185). To most people, electricity was known by its effects. It was a marvelous fluid that could travel down a wire in almost no time at all,' carry a message across an ocean or a voice across a city, kill suddenly, or cure miraculously. It was, in short, wonder of age.' The American Way of Death If Americans were first to live by electricity, why should they not be first to die by it? The world's first Electrical Execution Law, under which William Kemmler was first to be condemned, came into effect in New York State on I January 1889. Behind it were certain citizens of Buffalo, a city which saw itself at forefront of new technology as a result of its proximity to Niagara Falls, where construction of a hydroelectric plant had begun in 1886. …