Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

by Michael Daly

  The pamphlet ended by declaring a kind of jihad: “All electricians who believe in the future of electricity ought to unite in a war of extermination against cheapness in applied electricity, wherever they see that it involves inefficiency and danger.”

  And lest there be any doubt about who right-thinking people should support, the pamphlet quoted an Edison-friendly inventor, albeit from three years before, when Westinghouse was not yet a significant factor: “Mr. Edison has led the way by making his supply station in New York a practical undertaking and a commercial success. If we wish to be successful with the future electric light supply stations in this country, we should act wisely by following in his footsteps.”

  But those footsteps still could lead no farther than a mile from a DC power plant even if the WARNING were not largely humbug. One actual advantage Edison did have was that the only motors capable of running on AC truly were unreliable and otherwise inferior to those that used DC. Nobody was more keenly aware of this than Westinghouse and nobody could have been more excited to hear that a brilliant Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla had designed an AC motor that promised to be superior to any DC counterpart.

  Tesla had arrived at Castle Island in 1884 with a letter of introduction from Charles Batchelor, the head of Edison’s operations in Europe. Tesla had gone to work for Edison in New York and decided to offer his idea for a revolutionary new motor despite the great inventor’s feelings regarding AC.

  “He was not interested in alternating current,” Tesla later wrote, adding that in Edison’s view, “there was no future to it and anyone who dabbled in it was wasting his time.”

  The problem for Tesla was finding the right opportunity to tell Edison of his breakthrough. The very high-strung Tesla was Edison’s opposite on the sensory level, once noting, “I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable.”

  The opportunity finally seemed to present itself in late 1884 after Batchelor returned stateside and took Tesla on a jaunt to meet up with Edison at Coney Island. The seaside resort at the far side of Brooklyn was by then the site of several hotels, the latest of which was then under construction, a 122-foot structure in the shape of the jumbo-est of elephants. The big sensation there that year was the world’s first roller coaster, the “switchback railway,” opened that June by LaMarcus Thompson, who called himself “The Inventor of Gravity.” The two luminaries of electricity were visiting in the off-season and there was little noise to hamper further the hearing-impaired Edison or to jangle the hypersensitive Tesla.

  “The moment I was waiting for was propitious,” Tesla would remember.

  Of course, Edison was not likely to listen even when he could hear, but a chance however slight remained that he might have recognized Tesla’s invention as an opportunity to prevail in the War of Currents. And that could have saved Topsy from becoming the one pachyderm more famous on Coney Island than the Elephant Hotel. Tesla was just working up the nerve to speak to Edison about his breakthrough when a man whom the Serb would describe as “a horrible-looking tramp” approached and made a fuss, apparently recognizing the celebrated Wizard. Tesla was jarred and Edison was distracted and the moment passed. Tesla still had not told Edison about his revolutionary motor some days later, when the two had a falling-out over a promised payment.

  Much as Forepaugh had pledged to pay Craven if he could train the best elephants around, Edison had promised Tesla $50,000 if he could overhaul the Jumbo generators at his flagship plant on Pearl Street in Manhattan within a certain time. Tesla managed to do as requested, but Edison is reported to have stiffed him just as Forepaugh had Craven.

  “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor,” Edison supposedly told him.

  Tesla set off on his own, working as a laborer for a time while establishing his own laboratory and pressing ahead with his electrical explorations. He was invited to deliver a lecture at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York, which he titled “A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers.” The resulting buzz reached Westinghouse, who sought out Tesla and quickly came to the conclusion that the Serb’s motor was superior to anything that ran on direct current. Tesla, on his part, found Westinghouse to be a distinct improvement over Edison and many other strivers he had encountered in America.

  “Always smiling, affable and polite, he stood in marked contrast to the rough and ready men I met,” Telsa later said of his new benefactor. “Not one word which would have been objectionable, not a gesture which might have offended—one could have imagined him as moving in the atmosphere of a court, so perfect was his bearing in manner and speech.”

  Yet, Tesla soon learned, this perfect gentleman was not always genteel. Telsa noted, “No fiercer adversary than Westinghouse could have been found when he was aroused. An athlete in ordinary life, he was transformed into a giant when confronted with difficulties which seemed unsurmountable [sic]. He enjoyed the struggle and never lost confidence. When others would have given up in despair he triumphed.”

  Edison said of Westinghouse, “The man has gone crazy over sudden accession of wealth or something unknown to me, and is flying a kite that will land in the mud sooner or later.” And Edison dismissed Tesla as “a poet of science . . . magnificent but utterly impractical.”

  Even so, Edison must have understood the implications of Westinghouse acquiring the new motor. Alternating current’s practical advantage was already proving to outweigh any safety concerns that Edison had managed to arouse with his WARNING pamphlet.

  And under Edison’s mask of unconcern there was a growing desperation and a willingness to compromise his most decent impulses for the sake of besting his rival. The proof was in an exchange of letters with a Buffalo dentist.

  Back in 1881, a drunk had managed to electrocute himself after ignoring a guard’s warnings to stay away from a Brush company arc light generator in Buffalo. Local dentist Alfred Porter Southwick is variously reported to have either witnessed the death or simply studied the autopsy results. He in any event declared that the drunk’s demise must have been lightning quick, so fast as to be virtually painless.

  Southwick then undertook a series of private experiments, electrocuting stray dogs in the name of progress and humanity. He offered his services to the City of Buffalo after a burgeoning stray population prompted it to offer a twenty-five-cent bounty for every cur, and it suddenly had many more than the pound could handle. He dispatched twenty-eight dogs using a zinc-lined wood box, with one electric wire running to an inch of water at the bottom, the other to a metal muzzle. The method was deemed more humane than the usual shooting and more efficient than the “lethal box” in which the Philadelphia branch of the ASPCA administered carbon monoxide.

  Southwick thereupon decided that a variation would work just as well on his own species. He convinced a friend in the New York State legislature to introduce a measure establishing a commission to examine alternatives to hanging.

  One of the commission’s three members was Southwick himself. Another was Matthew Hale, grandson of Nathan Hale, who was said to have uttered the famous words “I only regret I have but one life to lose for my country” before the British hanged him as a spy during the Revolutionary War. The third and most prominent member was Elbridge T. Gerry, grandson and namesake of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Gerry was legal counsel to the ASPCA and had joined Henry Bergh in cofounding the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

  The mandate of the new commission was to “investigate and report the most humane and practical method of carrying into effect the sentence of death in capital cases.”
It began by diligently cataloging the various methods of execution down through history:

  Beating with clubs, beheading, blowing from a cannon, boiling, breaking on the wheel, burning, burying alive, crucifixion, defenestration, dichotomy—i.e., cutting into two parts, dismemberment, drowning, exposure to wild beasts (especially serpent’s fangs), flaying alive, flogging, garrote, guillotine, hanging, hari kari, impalement, iron maiden, peine forte et dure—i.e., placing a heavy weight on the chest, which gradually reduces breathing, pounding in mortar (Proverbs 27:22), precipitation—from a lofty precipice, pressing to death, rack, running the gauntlet, shooting, stabbing, stoning or lapidation, strangling and suffocation.

  Hale concurred with Southwick that electrocution was the best method, but Gerry of both the ASPCA and the SPCC leaned toward lethal injection with morphine. Southwick wrote to Thomas Edison in November of 1887, ostensibly seeking his opinion regarding “the necessary strength of current to guarantee death with a certainty in all cases and under all circumstance.” He also solicited Edison’s thoughts regarding the best way to administer this fatal shock.

  “My own opinion has been that a chair constructed for the purpose with metal arms to which the wires were attached passing the current across the chest would be all sufficient,” Southwick wrote.

  Southwick’s real hope in writing almost certainly was that advice from Edison would constitute an endorsement and that the de facto backing of the famous Wizard of Menlo Park would sway Gerry. But Edison replied that he had long opposed capital punishment, believing that the state should not punish killing by killing and that life behind bars was no less a deterrent.

  The response did not deter Southwick from sending a second letter a month later, saying that “science and civilization demand some more humane method than the rope.” Southwick fancied himself a man of modern science and was appealing to Edison as one of its deities. He was also—either knowingly or not—allowing Edison to rationalize going against a long-held and oft-stated belief.

  Edison wrote back that while he would welcome any effort “to totally abolish capital punishment,” he also felt that so long as it was administered, the state was indeed obligated to employ “the most humane method available.”

  “The best appliance in this connection is, to my mind, the one which will perform its work in the shortest space of time, and inflict the least amount of suffering upon its victim,” Edison wrote. “This, I believe, can be accomplished by the use of electricity.”

  Edison went on, more transparent than he likely imagined as to his real motive for reconsidering his initial response to Southwick.

  “The most suitable apparatus for the purpose is that class of dynamo-electric machinery which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of these are known as ‘alternating machines,’ manufactured principally in this country by George Westinghouse.”

  Edison was contriving to slow his foe’s sales with a show.

  Not even a circus with a real baby elephant aroused public interest like an execution. These gruesome spectacles had ended officially in New York with the 1826 hanging of murderer Jesse Strang, who used his last moments to urge the thirty thousand spectators to purchase a pamphlet he had published about his crime. But the citizenry still continued to come by the thousands on just the chance of being admitted as a witness or catching even a glimpse of a hanging.

  The Forepaugh circus visited the small upstate New York town of Fonda in 1883 on a fine day with Topsy and Bolivar and the other performing elephants, yet did only middling business. The 1878 hanging of Sam Steenburgh in Fonda drew more than fifteen thousand gawkers of both sexes and all ages even though it was held behind a high fence. Three special trains ran. Surrounding buildings nailed cleats to their pitched roofs so people could watch at one dollar a head as Steenburgh, a black man known as Nigger Sam, was put to death for killing a white farmer.

  “All of the places afforded an excellent view of the scene of execution,” the New York Times reported on its front page.

  The Times further noted, “Acres of space were blackened with people. . . . Stands have been erected for the sale of sundaes, gingerbread, chewing gum and soda pop.”

  The enterprising sheriff and town clerk had paid the condemned one hundred dollars to write a supposed confession to seven murders, six of which he almost certainly did not commit. They almost lost their investment when Steenburgh twice attempted suicide the night before he was to be hung, once with a knife, once by biting into his wrist. Steenburgh survived and, on the morning of the execution, young boys went through the crowds selling twenty-five-cent copies of his “confessions.”

  As gawkers clambered up every tree and pole and a violinist played “The Sweet By and By,” the big moment came and went. The body was placed in an open coffin afterward for public viewing in the execution yard. The corpse seemed to elicit a more primal fascination than even the greatest circus attraction.

  “Men and women, boys and girls, the very aged and the very young fought and swore in the narrow entrance and trampled over each other in their efforts to be first,” the Times reported.

  An electrocution was almost certain to be held behind prison walls where no rooftop or tree would afford a view, but there seemed sure to be frenzied popular interest in an entirely new and modern means of administering the ultimate sanction. And, as two of Edison’s advisers proposed, a publicist could make Mr. Westinghouse the lexiconic equivalent of Dr. Guillotin, with people speaking of a condemned criminal being strapped into the Westinghouse and being Westinghoused. Surely the public would not want that same deadly current in the home.

  The new method of execution was recommended by the special commission, thanks to Edison’s second letter to Southwick, which was attached to its final report to the New York State Legislature. Just as the dentist had hoped, the missive from the Wizard had convinced Gerry, the commission’s blue-blood chairman. Gerry was asked during a subsequent hearing on the matter if he regarded Edison as “some sort of an oracle.”

  “He knows more about electricity than any other living man,” Gerry replied.

  “How did you come to consider [electrocution] as a means of inflicting capital punishment?” he was asked. “You never heard of its use for such a purpose by any other nation on the face of the globe, did you?”

  “One of my colleagues, Mr. Southwick, who had carefully examined the subject, suggested it,” Gerry replied.

  Gerry’s eminent opinion persuaded the legislature along with the governor. The Electrical Execution Act, largely written by Gerry, became law in June of 1888. The measure replaced hanging with electricity as the sole method of execution in New York State, though to Edison’s disappointment it did not specify which type of current was to be employed.

  Elephants in an Asian forest such as where Topsy

  thudded from womb to earth, circa the time of her birth.

  A captured baby elephant, Sri Lanka,

  around the time of Topsy’s capture.

  Hachaliah Bailey’s monument to Old Bet, the second elephant

  in America and the first to meet a violent end.

  The Elephant Hotel, once headquarters of the circus in America,

  home of the Flatfoots.

  P.T. Barnum, the one and only.

  The Barnum Museum, with the world famous Egress.

  Tom Thumb, giant attraction, so small he was huge.

  Poster for the Greatest Show on Earth on its way to actual greatness.

  Barnum and Bailey — a partnership forged after

  the first viable birth of an elephant in America.

  Barnum and Bailey were the bosses, but without the elephants,

  the showmen could not have boasted of having the greatest show.

  A bigger draw than an execution. The Forepaugh elephants take to the

  water in 1898 before a crowd of 35,000.<
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  The circus would arrive and up would spring a canvas realm where

  the laboring multitude could escape into the exotic and the fabulous.

  Jolted, jangled, and jarred, the lot of the elephants of any railroad circus,

  this one the upstart Ringling Bros., 1907.

  The Peerless Prodigies of Physical Phenomena!

  Jumbo and his keeper, partners in many a libation.

  The great Jumbo has fallen.

  Jumbo still selling tickets in death; his bones on display.

  Adam Forepaugh, of the crooked tale as well as Topsy’s crooked tail.

  Addie Forepaugh, the Crown Prince.

  Stewart Craven, the elephant whisperer.

  Mother Hebe and the first viable American-born baby elephant.

  Topsy, the character who “just grow’d” and gave the baby elephant her name.

  The Forepaugh & Sells Bros., keeper of Topsy’s last herd,

  marital, musical, clown, boxing, athletic, quadrille, polite, bicycling,

  equilibristic, aldermanic, mimicking, juggling, posing, mirthful elephants.