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

by Michael Daly

  Forepaugh felt secure enough in his contribution to the temporary merger that he left his “uglies,” including the huge Bolivar and the nearly as large Tip, behind at his show’s winter quarters in Philadelphia. He did not want his triumph dimmed by having the behemoths go wild without Thompson around to control them. Anyway, he still had what he figured to be his perpetual paternal edge in the person of his son, whom he put on prominent display. Let the sonless Barnum try to match that.

  The younger Forepaugh met the arriving trains at Harsimus Cove in Jersey City wearing a broad-brimmed hat and an overcoat that extended to his ankles. The New York Times dramatically reported that he had “slept the fitful sleep of the just who are compelled to obey duty’s disagreeable calls.”

  The son supervised as fifty men unloaded the 205 horses and thirty-five ponies. The eighteen elephants led off the cars two by two included Topsy, no doubt sorely missed by Bolivar. Basil and Jenny were the pair that took the fore. The newspapers assumed that the male Basil was the leader but it was almost certainly Jenny, as the senior female.

  Deckhands at a waiting ferryboat set up a gangplank on either side, hoping half the elephants would go up each, thereby evenly distributing the great weight. The combined power of the deckhands and the circus men proved insufficient to separate the elephants as they followed their matriarch, Jenny, up the gangplank to the left. Only a stiff wind out of the northwest saved the ferry as it listed dangerously near to the point of capsizing.

  The elephants arrived at the Twenty-third Street ferry dock and were led crosstown to the most prized of venues. The elder Forepaugh arrived, as did Barnum. The two prepared to present what truly would be the greatest show on earth at what many simply called the Garden.

  “Adam has tempted me and I have yielded,” Barnum said, making a biblical play on his rival’s given name.

  “We have both eaten of the Tree of Knowledge,” Forepaugh said, making a biblical play of his own.

  On the night of the premiere, the combined shows had a torchlight parade down Broadway, passing along a stretch below Thirty-fourth Street now lit by arc lights installed by one of Edison’s competitors and dubbed the Great White Way. Rich and poor jostled each other to glimpse what the New York Times described as “a combination seen but once in a lifetime. This happened to be their lifetime, and they wanted to see it.”

  The Times concluded, “The Barnum and Forepaugh combination had had their torchlight parade. Their blossoming forth at the Madison Square Garden will make the very electric lights seem pallid.”

  Even with a half dozen of Forepaugh’s herd left behind, the Garden held more elephants than had ever been in any one place in America. The senior Forepaugh elephant trainer was still young Adam, officially anyway. Barnum had replaced the despondent George Arstingstall with Elephant Bill Newman, who had introduced Jumbo to the use of the hook, American style, on the ship from England. Newman would have represented little change for the elephants were it not for his wife, who was identified only as Mrs. William Newman. She had grown up in the circus and occasionally tried her hand at training. She took a matriarchal approach much more in keeping with the Craven philosophy, delighting not in dominating the elephants but simply in working with them, relying not on physical force but on intuition.

  “A woman mastering the leviathans of the animal kingdom was one of the wonders of a circus in 1887,” wrote the press agent W. C. Thompson with what seemed to be genuine admiration. “She was a matronly looking person, quite stout and pleasant-mannered, devoid withal of the masculine traits that her occupation might seem to require.”

  Thompson described one of her rare performances.

  “At her command, the elephants, eight in number, marched, wheeled, countermarched, halted promptly and ‘grounded arms’ by lying on their sides. Then, like schoolboys delighted at a release from what they deemed duty, the huge beasts broke ranks and assumed different postures and occupations about the ring. One of them stood on his head, another turned a grindstone with his trunk, a third walked on a revolving barrel, and several others respectively engaged, to their own apparent amusement, in dancing on a pedestal, ringing a bell and ‘clapping hands.’”

  Thompson added, “Mrs. Newman gave few public exhibitions, and there has never since been a successful woman elephant trainer. For some reason, they fail in this branch of circus work, whereas in other departments they are fully the equals of the other sex.”

  In truth, Newman seems to have been more than the equal of her husband, as well as the other men so bent on mastering these biggest of beasts, on being the boss.

  In the meantime, Forepaugh seemed to have become Barnum’s equal thanks to the Madison Square ploy. Forepaugh may have even gained a little edge with his troupe of cowboys and Indians. Barnum, being Barnum, was plotting a publicity coup to restore what he viewed as the natural order.

  The stunt began one hundred miles up the Hudson River with a figure in an inflatable suit made of vulcanized India rubber. Captain Paul Boyton, known as the Fearless Frogman, had achieved fame paddling feet first across the English Channel and remarkable distances of open sea, as well as along many of the world’s most famous rivers, including the Thames and the Seine, and nearly the entire length of the mighty Mississippi towing behind him a floating locker containing necessities and even a little stove, so he could cook when he periodically paused to eat and sleep. He had received his captaincy from the Peruvian government, whose emissary had approached him as he strolled down Broadway and recruited him for a failed effort to paddle out to a Chilean warship and affix a torpedo. He now announced his intention to paddle down the Hudson River from Albany to New York Harbor.

  That plan had to be modified when much of the river at his starting point proved to be still choked with ice. He could have waited until the spring thaw progressed, but timing was important for reasons that would soon be apparent. He instead set off from the town of Hudson thirty-seven miles downriver from what was to have been his starting point. He was cheered by big crowds as he set off, and trailed by a boatload of reporters who recorded his progress past Catskill, Germantown, and Tivoli. The reporters felt compelled to take a break from the freezing temperatures by putting in at Saugerties but caught up with him at Barrytown. Two days then passed with nothing really new to report.

  “The voyage was not of unusual interest, outside of the difficulty of forging ahead through the ice floes and considerable suffering from the cold,” Boyton’s official biography would note.

  The reporters were then told that the rubber suit had developed a leak and that the ordeal had caused Boyton to lose thirty pounds and that doctors were advising him to abandon his effort. He put in at Sing Sing three days into his voyage and one day from his destination amid speculation as to whether the Frogman would prove so fearless as to continue. The drama was accompanied by an announcement in the next morning’s newspapers.

  “Boyton to Travel with Barnum,” read the headline in the New York Times.

  The article reported that Boyton had agreed to tour with the Barnum show, making his first appearance early the following week at Madison Square Garden. The announcement was followed the next day by dramatic reports of what the Times termed “an immense crowd” gathered at the steamboat pier in Ossining to watch Boyton resolutely return to the water to complete his journey against medical advice.

  An even bigger crowd, twenty thousand or more, was at the harbor’s edge in New York for Boyton’s arrival at the Battery the next day. Boyton reached into his floating locker. He drew cheers when he saluted the throngs by firing off rockets and blowing into a brass bugle.

  Boyton seemed to make an instant recovery from the exigencies that supposedly had the doctors so alarmed. He was described as “looking none the worse for his paddle down the Hudson” when he appeared at Madison Square Garden that Monday. A water tank was conveniently on hand, having been used during t
he first three weeks of the Barnum/Forepaugh joint appearance by the Beckwiths, a British family of swimmers.

  The man in the rubber suit now made what was ballyhooed as his very first appearance in a circus. He was said to have approached the tank “with all the frisky grace of a young hippopotamus and disported himself in its waters with the joyful levity of a light-hearted sea lion.”

  The newspapers reported that in the space of ten minutes, he somehow managed to paddle about, raise a small sail, shoot a handgun, launch a distress signal, cook and eat a meal, and blow his bugle anew. The accounts mentioned Barnum nearly as prominently as Boyton while Forepaugh received only passing acknowledgment as the other party in the temporary combination.

  After the six-week joint appearance at Madison Square Garden, Barnum paraded over the Brooklyn Bridge with Boyton for a show on the far side. Forepaugh returned to Philadelphia and continued on with an itinerary whose fourth stop was Mount Vernon, Ohio, where he serendipitously acquired a new attraction of his own. A one-legged man appeared on the circus grounds and identified himself as Sergeant George Wagner, sole survivor of General Custer’s last stand, Custer and his Seventh Cavalry having returned to Sioux lands with fatal results three years after helping to trigger the Panic of 1873. Wagner said he had lost his right leg below the knee to a poison arrow as he rode to bring a message from the doomed Custer to another detachment. Forepaugh now retained him to reenact his supposed bravery by charging around the big top on a horse to the accompaniment of blaring trumpets.

  The cowboys in the Wild West show became jealous and hired a lawyer to investigate this purported hero. They reported the result to Forepaugh, telling him that Wagner had in fact lost his leg during an accidental explosion at a Fourth of July celebration and had never left Ohio before joining the show.

  “What do I care whether the fellow’s a fakir or not?” Forepaugh replied. “He looks the part better than any of you. He’s got a wooden leg to confirm it. He’s the finest liar under the tent and he’s made a big hit. He stays with the troupe.”

  Forepaugh did make several cuts from that season’s roster, simultaneously reducing his expenses and collecting a nice fee by leasing a half dozen of his uncelebrated elephants to fledgling showman Frank Robbins. They included the crooked-tailed female, Topsy, who could only have reminded Forepaugh of his first elephantine fiasco. He was resolved to have now suffered his last.

  “The war of the elephants is ended,” the New York Times correctly noted.

  FIFTEEN

  Another War Begins

  Even as the torchlight parade down Broadway signaled the end of the war between Forepaugh and Barnum, the electric lights proliferating in the city and far beyond were marking the start of a struggle between two other would-be giants, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.

  “The struggle for the control of the electric light and power business has never been exceeded in bitterness by any of the historical commercial controversies of a former day,” Westinghouse would later say.

  What would come to be called the War of Currents was for supremacy in implementing the modern marvel that now blazed not only along the Great White Way and in the mansions and offices of tycoons, but in theaters and restaurants and department stores and arenas. The ultimate outcome would add a final twist to the story of the crooked-tailed elephant presently traveling with a circus that did not even bill itself as the greatest.

  In this new war, Edison was already established as one of the indisputably greatest and seemed the prohibitive favorite to prevail. He may not have actually been the father of the electric light, but he had created the most commercially viable bulb, as well as the first central power plant and the first extensive lighting system. He seemed on the way to an all-but-certain monopoly.

  But Edison insisted on using only direct current, or DC, rather than alternating current, or AC. The most fundamental difference between the two is that direct current travels in only one direction, whereas alternating current continually reverses direction. The practical difference is that DC cannot easily be transmitted much farther than the square mile eventually serviced by his first plant on Pearl Street. A city using DC would require a generating plant in every neighborhood. Rural folks would be generally out of luck unless they could afford their own private plant.

  Alternating current has no such limitations and can be transmitted over considerable distances economically, but Edison had been using direct current in all his systems. Either he truly believed direct current was superior or he was not about to admit that the great Wizard had been wrong. He could have been the personification of direct current, seemingly incapable by his very nature to change direction. He resisted any suggestion that he even consider switching to alternating current. He dismissed out of hand the early efforts of a would-be competitor who recognized alternating current’s potential.

  “None of his plans worry me in the least,” Edison declared in 1886.

  Edison saw himself in a far grander struggle with the divine, as evidenced when a lightning storm swept past his headquarters, suddenly illuminating his office.

  “That’s the opposition!” he exclaimed to Tate, his private secretary.

  The merely mortal challenger was Westinghouse, who had started out as an inventor, creating the railroad air brake, without which circus train wrecks would have been even more numerous and severe. Westinghouse had gone on to become more of an entrepreneur and had a particular interest in electricity, no doubt stoked when he paid a visit to Edison’s laboratory with an eye toward having a lighting system installed in his mansion. Westinghouse subsequently wrote to Edison saying he had been inspired to develop an engine to go with such a generating system that might be worth marketing. Edison is said to have responded with his usual vehemence to even the suggestion he grant his imprimatur to somebody else’s invention, instructing Tate, “Tell Westinghouse to stick to air brakes. He knows all about them. He doesn’t know anything about engines.”

  Westinghouse reportedly declared, “Well, if Edison won’t use my engine perhaps I can build dynamos.”

  Westinghouse decided to go into the electric business himself and bankrolled a few decidedly modest DC systems before deciding he could not possibly compete with Edison’s growing monopoly. He turned to AC.

  One early skirmish between the predominant DC and the upstart AC came in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the same year that Edison declared himself unworried. Westinghouse’s people began work on a system that would transmit electricity at a relatively high voltage along four thousand feet of copper wire and then employ transformers to step it down to what was needed for incandescent bulbs. The system was all but ready when Edison’s people installed and activated a small plant in the home of one of the local gentry just as they had at J. P. Morgan’s mansion.

  Edison garnered the glory of being the first to light a house in the town but the drawback to DC remained. Westinghouse signed up five times as many customers for his AC system there over the following weeks while claiming the added advantage of being able to set the smoke and noise of his power plant at a remove from homes and businesses.

  With his edge, Westinghouse was able to increase his overall business fourfold between 1886 and the following year. Edison’s far-flung agents reported that they were being bested everywhere by Westinghouse’s marketing force, leaving them in danger of being branded what a great inventor would surely abhor: old-fashioned. Edison grumbled about Westinghouse being not so much an innovator as a marketer, a showman.

  “One thing that disturbs me is the fact that Westinghouse is a great man for flooding the country with agents and travelers,” Edison complained.

  An energetic sales force with a superior product is a formidable business foe, as Edison himself had proven when he introduced electric lighting to replace gas. The desperate gas companies had followed Dan Rice’s lead and resorted to trying t
o frighten the public with the supposed dangers of electricity when in fact gas was generally far more hazardous, killing hundreds every year by fires and asphyxiation. The danger of the established method of lighting was such that hotel rooms in New York had a standard sign reading “Don’t blow out the gas.”

  “The gas was not infrequently blown out with the result that the vital flame of the occupant of the bed also went out a few hours later,” noted Tate.

  That had not stopped the gas companies from seeking to stoke unreasoning fear. Edison now sought to do much the same—and then some—to Westinghouse with a pamphlet that amounted to an eighty-four-page rat bill. The black lettering on the bright red cover read, “A WARNING FROM THE EDISON ELECTRIC LIGHT COMPANY.”

  The pages inside began by describing AC systems as both uneconomical and unreliable. A section headed “Danger” further contended that AC systems established by “advocates of cheapness” were inherently dangerous, and not just because the electricity was transmitted at higher voltages than DC.

  “Any interruption of the flow of the current adds to its destructive property, whilst its complete reversal, as in the Alternating (Westinghouse) system increases this destructiveness enormously,” the pamphlet said with authority but without scientific basis.

  The pamphlet cited Professor Henry Smith Carhart of Northwestern University, who was as confident as he was wrong in stating, “It is absolutely certain that quite a powerful current can be taken through the body, provided it be perfectly steady, while a fluctuating current of much smaller intensity may prove fatal.”

  As an added caution, the pamphlet’s “Danger” section was followed by a “Moral” section asking anyone who might consider investing in an AC system “whether he considers it safe to enter into business dealings and relations with men who give public expression to statements which they ought to know to be untrue. That the so-called competitors of the Edison Company have made such statements and do pursue such methods is abundantly evidenced by their own utterances.”