The electric chair was first deployed in New York in 1890. It was developed by employees of Thomas Edison. Edison advocated the use of alternating current (AC) for the chair in order to demonstrate how dangerous AC was (remember his competition with George Westinghouse, where Edison wanted household current to be direct current (DC) while Westinghouse was a proponent of AC). Since one of the officers of Edison's company was the head of the committee appointed by the State of New York to approve the design and specifications of the chair, Edison was able to get his way, and the chair was in fact powered by alternating current.
Westinghouse refused to provide one of his AC generators for use on the project, so Edison purchased one using subterfuge. Westinghouse thought that his generator was being shipped to a South American university for research, but it ended up being sent back to the USA to Edison's labs.
Edison attempted, and succeeded for awhile, to introduce a new verb in the English language--"westinghouse," which was defined as "to be killed by electrocution."
After reviewing reports of the first execution by electricity, Westinghouse remarked that it would have been far more humane to kill the prisoner (a wife-murdering dentist) by chopping him up with an axe.
Prior to his death in 1930, Edison admitted that AC was better than DC after all for most applications. He further confessed that he had known that fact all along
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