January 4, 1903: When people want to call Thomas Edison a great man or a genius, they can point to any number of examples. When they want to call him unpleasant things, there are several examples of that, too.
The electrocution of Topsy was one of those things. Except he had almost nothing to do with it.
Topsy was a female Asiatic elephant, believed to have been born in 1875, somewhere in Southeast Asia -- an area encompassing the present-day nations of Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand (formerly Siam), Malaysia (formerly Malaya), Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. She was secretly brought into the United States soon thereafter, and added to the herd of performing elephants at the Forepaugh Circus, which who fraudulently advertised her as the first elephant born in the United States.
During her 25 years at Forepaugh, Topsy gained a reputation as a "bad" elephant and, after killing a spectator in 1902, was sold to Sea Lion Park in the seaside Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York City. Sea Lion was leased out at the end of the 1902 season, and during the construction of the park that took its place, Luna Park, Topsy was used in publicity stunts, and also involved in several well-publicized incidents, attributed to the actions of either her drunken handler or the park's new publicity-hungry owners, Frederic Thompson and Elmer "Skip" Dundy.
Their end-of-the-year plans to advertise the opening of their new park, by euthanizing approximately 27-year-old Topsy in a public hanging, and charging admission to see the spectacle, were prevented by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Apparently, though, there was no law preventing them from staging it and inviting people to attend for free.
The event was instead limited to invited guests and press only, and Thompson and Dundy agreed to use a more sure method of strangling the elephant with large ropes tied to a steam-powered winch, with both poison and electrocution planned as backup, a measure officially supported by the ASPCA.
On January 4, 1903 -- a Sunday, but no "Sabbatarians," people who tried to prevent, either by law or by force, various actions from taking place on the Sabbath, appear to have gotten involved -- in front of a small crowd of invited reporters and guests, Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide, then strangled, then electrocuted, which turned out to be what finished the job.
Among the invited press that day was a crew from Edison Studios, who filmed the event. Their film of the electrocution part was released to be viewed in coin-operated kinetoscopes, under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. It is probably the first filmed death of an animal in history -- and, though it was not a human being that was murdered, it counts as the first "snuff film," too.
The men worked for Edison. Edison was not there, and had no role in the execution itself, either the decision to do it or its carrying out. And it had nothing to do with his "War of the Currents," his determination that direct current (DC) triumph over alternating current (AC): Edison had already lost that war to George Westinghouse during the World's Columbia Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. Edison did not use the electrocution of Topsy to promote his position that DC was the better choice, because it would have done him no good by that point.
He still had to approve its filming. And he had no problem profiting from the film. So, while he was only a side character in this story, his tangential role in it still doesn't improve his image. Edison, on occasion, was a villain. This time, though, the villains were Frederic Thompson and Skip Dundy.
They didn't live much longer. Unlike Topsy, Dundy did not suffer much: He had a heart attack in 1907. He was 44 years old. Thompson did suffer: The kidney disorder Bright's disease, treatable today, killed him in 1919. He was only 45. Edison lived on until 1931, at 84.
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January 4, 1903, as I said, was a Sunday. There were no scores on this historic day: Baseball and football were in the off-season, professional basketball barely existed, and professional hockey only existed under the table. There were soccer games in England's Football League the day before, but not on this day.
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