Thomas Edison was probably an asshole. But he also probably didn’t kill that elephant.
Today’s Moment of Science… The life and death of Topsy the elephant.
To AC or to DC, that was the question during the so-called ‘war of the currents.’ It’s both accurate and a drastic oversimplification to say that alternating current (AC) is the one you get from a socket while direct current (DC) is the one you get from a battery. AC is easier to maintain, transmit, and change the voltage. Importantly, this all means it’s cheaper.
Back in the 1880s though, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion which system would win those sweet electric lighting wizardry dollars. DC held the advantage of being less complicated. But if you were much more than a mile from those early DC power plants, you were reading by candle light. Not complicated, but also not useful.
Thomas Edison, noted dickbag, was a big proponent of DC. He didn’t fail at making a light bulb 2,774 times just to say “eh, whatever” when someone else started profiting off the electricity lighting them up. No, we’re dealing with the type of stubborn jackass who was prepared to fail another thousand times in a dirty, futile war for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company.
By the early 1890s, it already looked like AC would emerge the clear winner. Edison’s shareholders saw greener profits with their AC based competitors. When the price of copper started rising- a bigger financial hit to DC systems- Edison’s engineers suggested the company could perhaps consider switching to AC. But there had been a few fatalities caused by working on AC transformers and electrical poles. Not entirely surprising, but it was enough for Edison to use as propaganda in his little war.
“Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months,” the lightbulb inventor wrote in a private letter. George Westinghouse ran a rival AC power company. When the electric chair was conjured into existence, Edison continued his scorched earth campaign and referred to the procedure as being “Westinghoused.”
At Edison’s lab in New Jersey, animals from stray cats to horses were experimented on by electrical engineer, Harold Brown. By ‘experimented on,’ I mean killed dead with electricity to show that AC was deadly. Though it seems that Brown did most, if not all, of these euthanizations, Edison was a little too happy to sign off on animal torture for the cause.
I told you that story to tell you this story.
Named after an enslaved girl from the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy the elephant did not have a good life. Born in 1875 somewhere in Southeast Asia, she was just a baby when smugglers took her to the US. She was put to work entertaining crowds at a circus when she should have still been breastfeeding.
Frankly, the rumors of her being a killer elephant got a smidge out of hand.
If you haven’t seen an elephant in real life, however big you think they are? They’re bigger. They’re bigger than the average New York City apartment. They have prehensile noses, and male elephants have prehensile penises. If someone chooses to provoke an elephant, they will have the day they deserve.
A drunk spectator snuck into the elephants’ tent, threw sand in Topsy’s face, and burned her trunk with a cigar. Elephant’s gonna elephant, man. Topsy ended that fucker’s life. Reporting on the incident was greatly exaggerated, and people wanted to come see the killer elephant. When a spectator “tickled” her behind the ear with a stick, she picked that guy up with her trunk. Before she managed to break him entirely, trainers intervened. At this point, she was sold to new owners and moved to Luna Park, an amusement park at Coney Island, in June of 1902.
Dealing with an alcoholic handler, it seems the last incidents were due directly to his behavior. He stabbed her with a pitchfork to get her to pull equipment, and when confronted about this he just let her loose to roam the streets. A few months later, drunk of course, he rode Topsy through town to the police station. She attempted to Kool-Aid Man her way into the building while the officers nope’d on out of there.
The trainer was fired. The current owners said they couldn’t sell her, give her away, or find a trainer to work with her. It was decided that the elephant would be killed. The initial plan was to hang the elephant and sell tickets because people are goddamn monsters. Then the ASPCA president stepped in and was like “selling tickets to an elephant hanging is barbaric. Let’s do a private electrocution, and add some cyanide just in case to make sure it’s a super dead elephant.”
Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide, then hit with 6,600 volts of electricity for ten seconds. Her lifeless body collapsed into the two nooses that tightened around her neck, and she was gone.
Rumors of Edison’s involvement are just that: rumors. He never even went to Luna Park, and the current wars ended about a decade earlier. The event was filmed by employees of the Edison Film Company, which is why he may have received film credit. As satisfying to the narrative as it would have been, this was not Edison’s last attempt to show that AC is so bad it can kill an elephant.
This has been your Moment of Science, in desperate need of a shower and some happy thoughts after this one.
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