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The system was subject to numerous abuses. The agent and the keepers were bribed, in money and in goods, to offer special treatment to certain contractors; inmates were paid on the side to work beyond the prescribed hours, often at risk to their own health. James Brice, another white-collar perjurer who served time in Sing Sing in the 1830s and wrote a pamphlet about it, described contractors gathering in the blacksmith shop when new inmates arrived—they were there to have leg irons removed—to choose the ones they most wanted. Reports showed that at the behest of contractors, inmates were sometimes punished for poor work and that some contractors were even allowed to brandish the whip. The huge demand for inmate labor kept the prison overfull, while Clinton prison, far from downstate markets, was partly empty.

The contractor system was abolished in 1884, due in part to these perennial abuses but also because of the opposition of unions. Prison-made goods had an unfair cost advantage in the marketplace. (The state continued to use inmate labor but restricted it to products that the state itself could use—a practice that continues to this day, with the manufacture of license plates, garbage bags, office furniture, highway signs, and printed materials.)

That abolition made another group happy, too: businessmen in the town of Sing Sing. Ever since the prison had officially changed its name from Mount Pleasant to Sing Sing, shortly before the Civil War, local artisans and manufacturers had felt that the prison goods’ MADE IN SING SING labels stigmatized their products. In 1901, in fact, in order to more fully disassociate itself from the infamous prison, the town changed its name to Ossining.

Ironically, in 1970, the state—fleeing a similar historical burden—changed
the prison’s name to Ossining Correctional Facility. The new name didn’t fool anybody, though, and never entered common usage. Besides, the game of name tag was about to come full circle: By the early 1980s, a group of businesspeople decided that the name Sing Sing might attract tourists. Before long, they petitioned the state to change the prison’s name back to Sing Sing, and in 1983, the state did.

The arrival of the electric chair in 1891 marked the beginning of the grim period for which Sing Sing grew world famous: as a center for executions. From August of that year, when four men were executed in one day, to 1963, 614 people were electrocuted at Sing Sing.

The first execution by electrocution had actually taken place eleven months earlier, at Auburn. Though now considered anachronistic, in the late nineteenth century the chair was thought to be a bold and humane innovation. Electricity harnessed for the human good was making its debut, first in a lightbulb in Thomas Edison’s lab and then, gradually, in cities across the land that were equipped by the Edison Electric Light Company with power lines and generators. It was thought to hold promise for medicine, too: Edison marketed his inductorium, an induction coil, as a guaranteed cure for rheumatism, gout, nervous diseases, and sciatica.

At the same time, doctors and scientists were aware of electricity’s power to kill. In Buffalo in 1881, Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist, saw an elderly drunkard touch the terminals of an electrical generator; he was amazed by how quickly and apparently painlessly the man was killed and described the episode to a friend, state senator David McMillan. Also in Buffalo—soon to be dubbed the Electric City of the Future—Dr. George Fell developed a method to help the ASPCA electrocute unwanted dogs. McMillan spoke to Governor David B. Hill, who asked the state legislature to consider whether electricity might somehow replace hanging.

Around this time, in 1887, a New York murderer was put to death the old way—on the gallows. Roxalana “Roxie” Druse, of Herkimer County, New York, had murdered her husband in 1884 in a particularly grisly way. Following an early morning argument, she had enlisted their daughter to help her get a rope around his neck and then fired two shots into him. The bullets did not kill the
man, and Roxie somehow intimidated a fourteen-year-old neighbor boy into shooting him again. Still her husband lived. This time she wielded an ax, and despite his cries of, “Oh, Roxie, don’t!” she chopped his head off. After further dismembering him, she spent several hours burning the pieces in a stove.

Despite the lurid details, Roxie Druse became something of a cause célèbre—no woman had been executed in New York in thirty-nine years. Petitions arrived in the governor’s office, asking him to commute her sentence to life imprisonment. The governor postponed the hanging but ultimately refused to reduce her sentence, and in February 1887, Roxie Druse was hanged in the Herkimer County jail.

The hanging did not go well. In front of a large crowd of reporters and others, Roxie Druse, wearing a pretty dress decorated with roses sent by her daughter, began to moan, weep, and then, when the black hood was pulled over her head, to shriek. When the trapdoor fell, Druse was killed not by a quick snapping of the neck, as was supposed to happen, but instead by slow strangulation as she dangled and writhed, conscious, for fifteen minutes at the end of her rope.

The death of Druse gave new life to efforts to reform New York’s capital punishment, and in 1888 the legislature, hoping to burnish the reputation of the Empire State, established “electric execution”
(electrocution
was not in common usage yet) as the state’s official method. The law went into effect on January 1, 1889. In March of that year, a Buffalo fruit vendor named William Kemmler, enraged at his common-law wife, murdered her with a hatchet in front of her young daughter, and he soon became the first person in the world sentenced to die by electricity.

By this time, Thomas Edison was locked in a fierce fight with George Westinghouse over their competing technologies: Edison’s direct current (DC) was quickly losing ground to Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC), which, time would prove, held many advantages for long-distance transmission. Unlikely to win the battle on its merits, Edison devoted considerable resources to trying to discredit AC in the realm of public relations: AC, he and his supporters asserted, was much more lethal than DC.

In Kemmler’s death sentence, Edison heard the knock of opportunity. He wanted to make sure that what he called “the executioner’s current” would be George Westinghouse’s AC. Worried by the plans to use his company’s equipment in the execution of
Kemmler, Westinghouse apparently underwrote an expensive legal appeal of Kemmler’s conviction, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was argued that electrocution would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” Kemmler’s appeals were denied, however. On August 6, 1890, he entered the new AC-equipped execution chamber at Auburn prison.

Public excitement and controversy over the execution were said to approach that of a presidential election. Awaiting Kemmler in the chamber were twenty-six witnesses, including six doctors, the district attorney who had prosecuted him, and many journalists; they were arrayed in a semicircle around the electric chair. Kemmler appeared with the warden from a side door, dressed in yellow trousers, a gray jacket, and a black-and-white-checked bow tie. The top of his head had been recently shaved and “had the appearance of a great scar,” according to
The New York Times
. “Gentlemen,” the warden said, “this is William Kemmler.”

Kemmler bowed and said ceremoniously, “Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck. I believe I am going to a good place and I am ready to go.” He bowed again and started to sit in a normal chair next to the heavy three-legged oak electric chair. The warden redirected him, then cut a hole in the back of Kemmler’s shirt, near the base of his spine, where an electrode would go. He began to attach the electrode, and another, on top of Kemmler’s head, with leather straps.

“Now, take your time and do it all right, Warden. There is no rush,” said Kemmler, urging the warden to make the straps on the head electrode a bit tighter. “I don’t want to take any chances on this thing, you know.”

“All right, William,” answered the warden. When he was finished, he walked to a door behind the chair and whispered to the electrician working the generator, “Is all ready?” Then he turned back to the room and said, “Good-bye, William,” the words being a signal to the technician to throw the switch.

To the horror of the witnesses, the first seventeen-second shock did not kill Kemmler. Doctors thought it had, but then they noticed blood pulsing from a wound where his index finger had contracted and cut deep into his thumb—a sign that his heart was still pumping. Two minutes after the current had been shut off, Kemmler began to gasp and gurgle.

“Great God, he is alive!” someone cried as the witnesses rose from their seats.

“Start the current! Start the current again!” someone else shouted. This time the current was left on for more than two minutes, during which witnesses heard the grinding of Kemmler’s teeth and saw blood drops from burst capillaries form on his cheeks. The power occasionally ebbed due to problems with the generator, so Kemmler’s body would unpredictably slump, then sit upright again, every muscle straining against the straps. The D.A. ran for the door, gagging. A newspaperman from Washington fainted. The room smelled like cooking meat, and then like feces. Kemmler’s head started smoking and his clothes began to catch on fire. A blue flame flickered at the base of his spine.

The power was finally cut. For a long time, the body of Kemmler was left to cool; when finally it was taken from the chair, rigor mortis had frozen it in a sitting position.

Though the doctors later assured everyone that Kemmler had lost consciousness immediately, the newspapers were unforgiving. “An awful spectacle,” opined
The New York Times
, a “sacrifice to the whims and theories” of a “coterie of cranks and politicians.” “It is obvious that Kemmler did not die a painless death nor did he die instantly,” reported the
Buffalo Express
. “It would be impossible to imagine a more revolting exhibition,” said
The Times
of London. “The man was really killed by a clumsy stun,” reported
Scientific American
, “for which a dextrous blow from a pole ax would have been an expeditious substitute.”

Amidst the recriminations and finger-pointing from the doctors, scientists, and prison officials, one might have expected the demise of electrocution technology. Instead, it persisted and indeed at Sing Sing (which soon became the official execution site), the technology was refined. No newsmen were allowed in Sing Sing at the electrocutions of four men on July 7, 1891; prison officials claimed that each was dead within six minutes of entering the execution room. At the following execution, the electrodes were attached to the head and the calf, instead of the small of the back. A witness, though sworn to secrecy, revealed that “on the fourth application of current, the prisoner’s eyeball broke and the aqueous fluid ran down his cheek.”

Experimentation continued. In hopes of reducing the singeing of hair and flesh, a new electrode system—one originally proposed by Thomas Edison and Harold Brown to demonstrate the lethal nature of AC—was tried on the chair’s seventh victim: Instead of forcing electricity to pass from head to leg, officials immersed both
of the inmate’s hands in a conductive water solution. The first and only inmate to be subjected to this method endured fifty seconds of torture before the power was turned off and he was found to be very much alive. The staff then removed his hands from the water, attached electrodes as previously, and killed him the old way.

Slowly, the problems were solved. Voltage was increased to deal with the highly various resistances of different individuals, amperage was reduced so as not to “cook” the flesh, wet natural sponges were employed to improve the connection between scalp and skin, and diapers were placed on the condemned. In 1958, a New York State Department of Correction (as it was then called) history asserted that “the method of execution has been carefully worked out and standardized over the years.” As though in evidence, it offered a degree of detail that could have been of little use to anyone other than an executioner. “An initial shock of 2000 volts is given for 3 seconds, dropped to 500 volts for 57 seconds, built up rapidly again to 2000 volts, dropped again to 500 volts for another 57 seconds, and again instantly raised to the initial voltage. The entire application takes two minutes.” Over time, twenty-five states, plus the District of Columbia, adopted the chair. (Lethal injection has since become the preferred method; as of early 2000, only Alabama, Georgia, and Nebraska still use electrocution as their sole means of putting inmates to death.)

Of course, there had to be somebody to run these machines, to check the nuts and bolts of executions, to study it like an art. In New York and New Jersey in the years 1890–1914, it was Edwin D. Davis, a quiet man of “high cheekbones and drooping black mustache” who would arrive at Sing Sing wearing “a Prince Albert coat and black felt hat.” Perhaps because of threats on his life, Davis changed his address frequently and refused to be photographed. While electrician at Auburn prison, he designed both the first electric chair and testing procedures for it that involved large slabs of meat. Davis patented the helmet and leg electrodes, and always brought with him to executions a black satchel of secret equipment, which he would let nobody see. In fact, the state tried to purchase his patents and secrets, afraid that he might die before passing them along. The hangman of the age of electricity appears in accounts of Sing Sing history as a character out of the movies, coming in from a foggy night to perform his gruesome work, then leaving without a good-bye.