That Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia from 1889 to 1913, used an electric chair as his imperial throne. He had been told that these were used for executing criminals in America and, rather than just killing prisoners, it first made their eyes pop out, their head smoke, their guts sizzle. He ordered a pair. Menelik claimed descent from the Biblical Solomon, but lacked his wisdom, because when the electric chairs arrived many months later, a condemned convict was strapped into one for a demonstration of killing by electricity and... nothing happened. Menelik was a moderniser, but there was no electricity generation in his kingdom. So he used them as his imperial thrones.
However, I read this in a book by Tahir Shah, who seems to be from the Chatwin-Kapuscinski school of travel writing, where the story telling is at least as important as the facts.