by Michael Daly
Rail transportation was not immediately available and Addie was required to walk his new purchase seventy-five miles to where a steamship was to take on seventy-eight other animals he had purchased. He offered some insight into his training philosophy as he described preparing Tip for the trek.
“Before I could do this I knew I should have to get acquainted with her, so I introduced myself with a pitchfork,” recounted Addie, this most expert trainer of animals apparently having failed to notice that the elephant was in fact a male. “She didn’t take kindly to me with being with her, and I had to be very severe.”
After a rough eighteen-day crossing during which two camels perished, the steamship Mosel arrived in Hoboken in January of 1882. Young Forepaugh told a New York Times reporter who covered the arrival that his travels in Europe had taken him at one point to England, where he had sought to purchase an even bigger elephant.
“While in London, I visited the Zoological Garden and offered $10,000 for the big elephant there, the largest elephant in the world, 11 ½ feet in height, but the Britishers wouldn’t part with it,” young Forepaugh recalled.
He apparently forgot for a moment that his father was touting eleven-foot Bolivar as “the biggest and heaviest elephant in the world.” The London elephant was an African so not surprisingly was indeed bigger than the Indian Bolivar, with outsize ears to match. This $10,000 offer was likely real, as it concerned not a beauty queen but an elephant whose name would become synonymous with bigness.
The rival Barnum show apparently got wind of the offer, though of course its official account would not mention Forepaugh. The Barnum show would say only that it made its own offer after one of its agents reported that an elephant that size was at the London Zoo.
“What is the lowest price you can take for the large African elephant?” the Barnum show’s telegram to the zoo inquired.
The Barnum show would likely have also met with a rebuff had a serious case of musth not visited the elephant with a name most likely derived from Swahili, from either jambo (hello) or jumbe (chief). The once docile Jumbo turned so violent and aggressive that nobody save his trainer dared go near him. Jumbo became a problem in direct proportion to his size and the zoo’s superintendent wondered if the elephant house was strong enough to hold him.
“I should be provided with, and have at hand, the means of killing this animal, should such a necessity arise,” the superintendent, Abraham Bartlett, wrote the zoo’s governing board.
As a boy, Bartlett had witnessed the execution of another musth-maddened elephant named Chunee, who had shrugged off a massive dose of poison and then been shot more than 120 times by a military firing squad before he finally fell dead. Bartlett was not anxious to see such a horror repeated with Jumbo. He also was less than fond of the elephant’s keeper, who could not be fired as long as the otherwise uncontrollable elephant was there.
“Will sell him for 2,000 pounds,” the zoo’s telegraph to Barnum read.
The sum translated to roughly what Forepaugh had been willing to pay, the zoo apparently not wanting to sell for less than it had already been offered. The Barnum show immediately paid the stated price and enjoyed another stroke of luck after its agents brought a huge shipping crate to the London Zoo for the start of the trip to New York.
Jumbo repeatedly balked at entering, perhaps due to subtle prompting from his trainer, Matthew Scott. The British press decided that Jumbo was refusing to leave England and whipped up a great public clamor for him to be allowed to stay.
“Jumbo is lying in the garden and will not stir. What shall we do?” a Barnum agent telegraphed his boss.
Barnum recognized a publicity boon when one presented itself.
“Let him lie there as long as he wants to,” Barnum telegraphed back.
The zoo also had an elephant named Alice whom the press now decided was Jumbo’s “wife.” Barnum is said to have helped spread a rumor that Jumbo was all the more determined not to leave because Alice was pregnant. All of Britain seemed possessed by “Jumbomania.”
A British newspaper telegraphed Barnum, saying, “All British children are distressed at elephant’s departure. Hundreds of correspondents beg us what terms will you will kindly release Jumbo.”
Barnum replied, “Fifty-one millions American citizens anxiously awaiting Jumbo’s arrival. My forty years invariable practice of exhibiting best that money could procure makes Jumbo’s presence here imperative. Hundred thousand pounds would not be inducement to cancel purchase.” He closed by wishing “long life and prosperity” to the “British nation . . . and Jumbo,” signing it, “the public’s obedient servant, P. T. Barnum.”
Barnum made sure the American newspapers got copies of the telegrams. The British clamor grew ever louder, as did the American reply.
“It seems a sad thought that a war between England and America might break out at any moment,” the New York Herald opined. “But we must have that elephant.”
The Barnum people informed Jumbo’s trainer that he would no longer be needed. They were bringing in their own team to take over and make Jumbo ready for the trip—unless, of course, he wished to come to America as well, with a generous salary. Jumbo developed a sudden willingness to enter the crate and soon he and Scott were crossing the Atlantic aboard the Assyrian Monarch, a new steamship designed to export grain and cattle from America after delivering 1,500 emigrants at a time, fewer when carrying an elephant. The American papers gave daily updates as the ship drew ever nearer.
Jumbo was apparently not at his happiest being thus confined and Scott was said to be leery of entering the box to clean it. An American newspaper reporter noted, “It seems that during all the time he has been with Jumbo Mr. Scott has never used even a whip upon him, and that the elephant has frequently taken advantage of Mr. Scott’s kindness of heart and displayed a strong disposition to do as he pleased.”
A Barnum trainer, William “Elephant Bill” Newman, was on hand. The reporter recounted, “Mr. Newman, the American trainer, tried the plan adopted by elephant trainers in this country. He prodded Jumbo with a hook such as trainers use, and spoke very harshly to the animal. The astonished beast stood aside, and permitted Mr. Newman to clean the box at his pleasure.”
Barnum enjoyed yet another bit of luck when U.S. Customs officials in New York notified him that he would be expected to pay the 20 percent duty imposed on the importation of all animals. The only exceptions were those that promised to be “for the good of the United States through an intention to improve the native stock.”
Barnum immediately announced that he had every intention of breeding Jumbo. An anonymous essay, “Home and Foreign Elephants,” appeared. The unnamed writer spoke of elephants much as others would of oil more than a century hence:
We now depend on the Old World for our supply of these noble animals. Were we to be engaged in a war with all the rest of the world lasting, say, a hundred years, we should become absolutely destitute of elephants, and the misery that would result therefrom would be appalling. What would our children do without elephants to amuse them? What would the sick do without the sight of elephants to invigorate them? What would the Nation do when the loathsome press of Europe would sneer at us as an elephantless people? To be truly patriotic we must rid ourselves of the abject dependence on other nations for our elephants.
The waiver was approved. More than ten thousand people cheered the arrival of Jumbo that April. The start of the 1882 season was just two weeks away and the chief animal trainer with the Barnum show stepped in to get the new arrival ready. George Arstingstall had started out as an animal trainer, then gone to hot air balloons until he fell sixty-eight feet and decided he preferred his initial vocation. He had worked under Craven for a time, but he operated with a very different philosophy. He viewed elephants as innately treacherous and deceitful, determined to take advantage of any latitude.
“Mr. Arstingstall has very fixed opinions about elephants,” one reporter noted. “He has no faith in the good effects of being kind to them.”
Within his first hours ashore, Jumbo repeatedly felt the sharp end of Arstingstall’s always handy elephant hook, applied until the elephant cried out in pain.
Jumbo was lucky he had not arrived three years before, when the Barnum circus was still employing what it termed “the burning method,” which consisted of sticking a hot poker up an elephant’s trunk. That ended in 1879, after Bergh of the ASPCA ordered the arrest of a Barnum trainer for engaging in this practice. Bergh was poised to arrest Barnum himself the following year, when the show announced that Salamander the Fire Horse would be leaping through blazing hoops. Bergh sent five ASPCA agents and twenty police officers to intervene, but when the big moment came Barnum himself jumped through the hoops, followed by a dozen clowns, the flames proving to be artificial. Bergh was amused despite himself and was further placated by the numerous occasions Barnum lauded the ASPCA for its tireless efforts. Barnum went so far as to let it be known that he had made provision in his will to erect a monument in Bergh’s honor. Bergh was generally so taken in that he actually defended Barnum when some tender-hearted souls protested the show’s use of bull hooks. Bergh endorsed Barnum’s entirely false contention that elephants do not suffer pain from the pointed prods because their hide is two inches thick. A moment’s thought should have told Bergh that the hooks are persuasive only because they inflict hurt, particularly on the ears and anus and other tender places trainers liked to target. The goads were used so liberally that the word “Jumbo” may have become more synonymous with fury had the British trainer not been there to share bottles of stout with him and otherwise soothe his charge.
Jumbo drew huge crowds, becoming a bigger celebrity than the first of his kind in America, bigger even than the first American-born baby, with the press dutifully exaggerating his size in the absence of any specific measurements from Barnum. One of Jumbo’s more sensational moments came when he was led over the Brooklyn Bridge. Twelve people had died there during the first week of its opening in a stampede triggered by a sudden fear it would collapse. The structure’s safety was demonstrated to all by the crossing of the creature who was bigger than simply big.
“Jumbo!” people cried out wherever he went.
He had his own specially built railroad car, but that did little to change the ride itself.
“The shaking and jar of the train, the worrying noises, etc., keep him in a constant ferment of nervous excitement,” his British trainer wrote.
The same conditions were suffered day after day by less celebrated elephants, including the twenty-five now with the Forepaugh show, among them Topsy, her guardian Bolivar, and the one formerly owned by three kings, now called Tip.
ELEVEN
The Wizard
As America’s best-known showman toured the country with his bigger-than-big sensation, America’s best-known inventor was preparing a sensation of his own with a half dozen twenty-seven-ton dynamos of such size they were nicknamed Jumbos. Edison’s ultimate goal was literally to electrify the nation and give full luster to what would be called the Gilded Age.
Edison had finally tried a carbonized cotton thread as a filament in his lightbulb. And what had been right at hand all along proved to be the historic solution that would make him known as the father of the electric light even though at least twenty-two other inventors had preceded him with less practical systems.
“His name was synonymous with that of the incandescent lamp,” his private secretary, Alfred Tate, would note. “Although many had attempted it, he alone had succeeded in converting this inventive dream into an industrial reality.”
Edison had studied the gas illuminating system with an eye toward replacing it and he had created a test electrical lighting system at his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. A crowd worthy of a big top had taken special trains there on New Year’s Eve of 1879 to see the future presaged by eight miles of wires and magically glowing bulbs. The actual system in New York was to service fifty-nine customers in a half square mile. And to run it Edison was installing the Jumbo dynamos in what was to be America’s first central power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan.
In the meantime, Edison undertook a much smaller electrical project with William Vanderbilt, coincidentally Barnum’s partner in the ongoing plans to replace Madison Square Garden with an entertainment colossus. Edison contracted to make Vanderbilt’s new mansion the first private residence with electric lighting. But that baby-sized private dynamo was removed before it was put to any real use, by one account because Vanderbilt’s wife refused to live with the noise, by another because the system started a small fire.
The honor then fell to the mansion of tycoon J. P. Morgan. This was more appropriate anyway, as he was a major investor in the much bigger project down on Pearl Street, not far from his financial district office. Morgan pronounced himself delighted with the revolutionary new lighting at his home uptown despite early troubles resulting in a scorched carpet as well as noxious fumes from the personal dynamo.
The six Jumbos downtown stood ready and when the big moment came on September 4, 1882, they roared into action with such a fiery fury that Edison wrote, “It was as if the gates of the infernal region were opened.” Edison turned a switch that had been installed in Morgan’s office a half dozen blocks away and the fury of the dynamos translated to a bright glow in each of the bulbs, what the inventor declared to be “light without flame and without danger.” Edison promised that this new marvel would soon be so cheap and easily available that “only the rich will burn candles.”
With a showman’s flair, the Wizard dramatized the safety of his incandescent lamp by replacing what was to have been a traditional torchlight parade down Madison Avenue for presidential candidate James Blaine with some four hundred Edison employees, each wearing a helmet with a lightbulb of sixteen candlepower affixed atop. A wire ran down the back of the helmet, under the wearer’s coat and out a sleeve to one of a pair of twelve-hundred-foot copper cables that extended the length of the procession. The cables were in turn connected to a dynamo and a steam engine on a wagon drawn by six powerful horses on loan from a safe company. That wagon was followed by two horse-drawn water tanks holding nine hundred and fifty gallons each and all went well until one of the hoses clogged with sediment. The avenue was plunged back into darkness, but soon the helmet lights were shining again, not saving Blaine from subsequent defeat but offering their own promise for the years to come.
“The illumination was intense and beautiful, the light flooding every nook and cranny of the streets,” Scientific American reported.
Edison was again the showman at the Philadelphia Electrical Exhibition. The lightbulb helmets this time were worn by African-American “Edison Darkies” who distributed leaflets as they danced Juba-style. These wires ran down their pant legs to copper plates affixed to the heels of their shoes. The plates made periodic contact with electrified ribbons of copper set into the floor, each time lighting the bulb atop the helmet, translating tap dance into literal flash dance. The resulting crowd would have been the envy of any circus attraction filling the hall shoulder-to-shoulder and spilling outside.
At the Centennial in Philadelphia eight years and seemingly an age before, a gaslight chandelier had been presented as the latest advance in illumination. Edison now stood at this new exhibition before a tower festooned with some two thousand bulbs powered by another of his Jumbos. He was holding the hand of his eldest child, twelve- year-old Marion, whom he called Dot in reference to Morse code. The lights spelled out the name that he had chosen to be spelled out in lights as no name had ever been spelled out before.
“EDISON.”
As any showman might, Edison subscribed to a newspaper clipping service. His private secretary, Alfred Tate, would recall him taking umbrage to
a particular article that called him a scientist. Edison objected to being lumped with those such as Michael Faraday who had done pioneering work in electricity and magnetism and had famously said he did not worry about financial gain because he could not afford the time.
“I’m not a scientist, I’m an inventor,” Edison said by Tate’s recollection. “Faraday was a scientist. He didn’t work for money. Said he hasn’t time. But I do. I measure everything I do by the size of a silver dollar. If it don’t come up to that standard, then I know it’s no good.”
Yet in the view of Tate and various ensuing biographers and historians as well as by the Wizard’s own account, Edison’s great desire was not to grow vastly rich but to become preeminently necessary.
“He was a utilitarian inventor, and money was the only barometer that could be employed to indicate success,” Tate would write in his memoir. “If his work would sell, if the public would buy and pay their silver dollars for it, then he would know it was useful. And that was his vocation—the production of new and useful inventions.”
Edison shunned even fabulous sums that did not derive directly from his work.
“The idea of incorporating under his name anything that did not represent the product of his own labors impressed him as a fraudulent device designed only to achieve wealth and he wanted no wealth that he himself did not create,” Tate wrote. “Money could not tempt him. He scorned that kind of money.”
At the same time, Edison was seemingly incapable of managing the sums his inventions did bring in. Tate would note that Edison had remarkable hands, “more sensitive than those of a woman,” that the secretary would watch “hovering over an instrument to make delicate adjustments, with the rest of the body as rigid as a statue.” But, Tate would add, “there was one thing these hands were unable to accomplish. They could not count money.”
