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

by Michael Daly

  “Warden, just make that a little tighter,” Kemmler said. “We want everything all right, you know.”

  The cap was made snugger and salt solution from the elephant ear ran down Kemmler’s cheeks. The warden uttered the prearranged signal.

  “Good-bye, William.”

  There was a clicking sound as 1,700 volts passed between an electrode fitting into the skullcap and a second pressed against Kemmler’s spine through the back of the chair. He went so rigid so instantly that witnesses were sure he would have been propelled across the room were it not for the straps. His right index finger curled up into itself with such force that its nail drew blood. A bright red rivulet trickled onto the arm of the chair.

  “He is dead,” a doctor pronounced after seventeen seconds.

  The witnesses included Southwick, the man who had conducted the first experiments on dogs and was behind the new death-by-electricity law. He now stood ready with a pronouncement.

  “We live in a greater civilization from this day,” he said.

  Southwick noted that Kemmler had not even cried out, though that may well have been due to the straps securing his chin and flattening his nose. What could now be heard was Kemmler’s labored breathing. His chest rose and fell visibly. Witnesses called out.

  “Great God, he is alive!”

  “See, he breathes!”

  “For God’s sake, kill him and have it over!”

  A press representative fainted. A prosecutor fled the room. The doctor ordered the current turned back on. Kemmler went rigid again. Blood beaded on his face like sweat. The elephant ear lost its moisture and a horrendous smell filled the room as Kemmler’s scalp began to burn along with the flesh around the second electrode. An autopsy would later determine that the section of his brain underneath the skullcap was cooked medium rare. The muscles along the spine were roasted “like overdone beef.”

  Eight minutes after the first shock was administered, the second was ended. The definition of death at the time was based on an inability to generate warmth; the smoldering corpse remained above normal temperature for three hours before Kemmler would be pronounced dead.

  In the meantime, the would-be gawkers outside heard a bell ring from within the prison and took it as an announcement that the moment had come. It was in fact just the usual signal for the civilians who supervised the prison shops to line up to enter the facility. Kemmler’s death was confirmed only when the witnesses began to emerge, Southwick among them.

  “This is the grandest success of the age,” he said, pronouncing himself “one of the happiest men in the state of New York.”

  The New York Times reporter filed a somewhat different view.

  “A sacrifice to the whims and theories of the coterie of cranks and politicians who induced the Legislature of this state to pass a law supplanting hanging by electrical execution was offered today in the person of William Kemmler, the Buffalo murderer,” a dispatch read. “He died this morning under the most revolting circumstances, and with his death there was placed to the discredit of the State of New York an execution that was a disgrace to civilization.”

  On his part, Westinghouse denounced the execution as unconscionable savagery. He began by saying he did not want to talk about it, but then declared that Americans “are not barbarians” and that this was sure to be the last time the electric chair was employed.

  “They could have done better with an axe,” Westinghouse said.

  Edison responded to news of the execution as if he were just an observer from afar, uninvolved in any way.

  “I have merely glanced over an account of Kemmler’s death and it was not pleasant reading,” Edison said.

  He did suggest the executioners would have done better to place the electrodes on the condemned’s extremities, as he had on the horse’s forelegs, though he had since decided it was better to move away from bone, to places “full of blood,” such as the hands of a man.

  Edison’s recommendation was put to the test with the execution of nineteen-year-old Charles McElvaine for the murder of a Brooklyn grocer during a burglary. A priest took a crucifix from one of McElvaine’s hands as they were secured in twin jars of solution that Edison had specifically recommended. Also in attendance was Edison’s top technical man, Arthur Kennelly.

  At the warden’s command, the current was turned on for nearly a minute as McElvaine’s face contorted and his orifices fulminated and his body bucked against the restraints with much the same violence as had Kemmler’s. The current was turned off, but a check of one of McElvaine’s soaking wrists determined he still had a pulse. The warden hurriedly had standby electrodes fitted to the condemned man’s head and leg. A second jolt sent his body convulsing in the straps again, but he was soon after declared dead.

  Edison had Kennelly report to anybody who would listen that McElvaine had died swiftly and without suffering. The Wizard’s news clippings the next morning nonetheless included a New York Times article saying “Edison’s Idea Failed.” Even worse, the truth of Edison’s connection to Brown was so established by then that only the most accommodating reporters employed the term “Westinghoused.”

  The accepted term came to be the brand-neutral, generic electrocuted, and the popular appeal of easily available electricity remained such that perhaps not even a humbugger as great as Barnum could have scared people away from it. Edison was left with the frustration and fury of a man who had sold his soul and gotten nothing in return. He was on his way to learning a very hard lesson about the limits of celebrity.

  NINETEEN

  Reading Your

  Own Obituary

  In the meanwhile, the patriarchal struggle in the show world was ended for all time by the smallest form of terrestrial life, which arrived in an American port just like the largest, only so tiny as to elude any initial notice at all.

  This influenza virus had been reported initially in Uzbekistan and was spreading into the first global pandemic. It traveled the same American roads and railways that facilitated circus travel and had made an elephant a common sight.

  This unseen visitor soon reached Philadelphia, claiming victims of all classes and stations, just as it was felling everyone from beggars to an archduke in Europe. The great showman who had made his claim to fortune and fame with captive Asian elephants fell deathly ill with what had come to be called the Asiatic flu.

  On January 20, 1890, Adam Forepaugh died. His funeral was one of the biggest in Philadelphia history, the many mourners including Frank Robbins, who had for a time leased Topsy and the other elephants. The Buffalo Courier sent a unique floral tribute, a throne of roses that was set beside the coffin.

  “VACANT,” read the inscription.

  Forepaugh may have been a king, but Barnum was the king, as he was demonstrating with a one-hundred-performance run at the Olympia arena in London that kept him from attending his longtime rival’s send-off. Barnum himself had proven to be the biggest attraction, his name as synonymous with showman as Jumbo’s had been with elephant. And any hard feelings in England over the Jumbo purchase seemed not so much forgotten as incorporated into a Jumbo-size legend.

  “The octogenarian showman was unique,” one British scribe opined. “His name is a proverb already, and a proverb it will continue.”

  Barnum returned to America in what would have been triumph had his own health not failed. He had escaped the Asiatic flu but was suffering from rapidly advancing heart disease. His death seemed imminent when his press agent, Tody Hamilton, hatched a scheme to buoy the boss. Hamilton, lauded by the New York Times as “the greatest press agent that ever lived” and by himself for having “grabbed more space for nothing than anyone you know,” went to the Evening Sun with some front-page news. The following day, Hamilton presented the still living boss with the latest edition. Barnum became that rarest of rare souls who are able to read
their own obituary, in his case four columns, with pictures.

  “It revived him after oxygen failed,” the New York Times later reported. “His physicians agreed that the premature obituary had prolonged his life.”

  Four days later, on April 7, 1891, the newspapers set to preparing a second set of obituaries, having confirmed that Barnum really had died at his home in Bridgeport. The show was at Madison Square Garden and that night’s performance went on as scheduled. Both performances were canceled the day of the funeral. The Bridgeport schools closed for half a day, adding thousands of schoolchildren to the huge crowd.

  “No town was ever more transformed than this city by one earthly event,” a reporter wrote.

  The next day, the show proceeded on schedule as if nothing had changed, now under the sole reign of a different kind of king, one who had proven to harbor no desire for fame. Bailey’s passion was born of that day an orphan boy set off barefoot down a country road, determined to become his own master. He wanted control.

  “He enjoyed best being the great silent power that made the show go and grow,” the animal trainer Conklin wrote.

  Now, with Barnum’s demise, Bailey had total control of the Greatest and Most Moral Show on Earth. Bailey had also assumed control of the rival show, sweeping in with his old partner James Cooper to make the deal for the Forepaugh circus upon old Forepaugh’s demise. Bailey put his brother-in-law, Joseph McCaddon, in charge, but the show continued to go by the Forepaugh name, just as the Barnum show continued to give top billing to its departed founder. The two shows alternated between the east and the west, the Forepaugh show still drawing a rougher crowd, the Barnum show still catering to the more genteel, all of it run by a lone man. The absence of Bailey’s name from one show and his second billing on the other seemed to make him feel all the more the guy really in charge, all the more the patriarch. The barefoot boy had become master of the two biggest shows around.

  The terms of the Forepaugh sale required Bailey to retain young Adam as a trainer just as the father had proposed, though only for two seasons. Bailey declined to extend the agreement and the erstwhile crown prince joined with some backers to launch a show as if his name were still his own. The younger Forepaugh’s show was in Hyde Park, Vermont, when the local sheriff sought to arrest a member for an infraction of some kind. The other circus men moved to intervene and the sheriff summoned backup that quickly grew to a posse of deputized citizens.

  “A general fight ensued, in which the circus men used bludgeons, knives, and pistols, but the officers succeeded in putting fifteen men in jail,” the New York Times reported the next day. “All the property of the circus off the railroad track was attached. It is not certainly known whether or not Forepaugh was personally present, but officers are in pursuit of one man supposed to be him who took an early leave.”

  The original Forepaugh show that Bailey had purchased was far away in Topeka, Kansas, that day, but he could not have been pleased with the headline in the Times reading “Forepaugh’s Men Arrested.” Bailey posted a notice in the theatrical journals of the time:

  To All Interested

  JAMES A. BAILEY is the sole owner of the ADAM FOREPAUGH SHOWS, having bought . . . the entire show property and the exclusive right to the use of the name ADAM FOREPAUGH, for all time, in connection with a circus or tented exhibition. . . .

  Under the terms of the sale ADAM FOREPAUGH, JR., was employed on a salary for two years.

  Since then ADAM FOREPAUGH, JR., has had no connection whatever with the shows which gave all the glory to the name of his father. . . .

  In defiance of the terms of the sale, to which he consented . . . he has lent his name and services to some privilege men, who have dragged his name in the mud until patience ceases to be a virtue and this statement is prompted.

  The ADAM FOREPAUGH SHOWS are and have been under the same management ever since the death of ADAM FOREPAUGH and the purchase of the shows by the undersigned.

  Signed JAMES A. BAILEY, of Barnum & Bailey, Sole Owner

  Young Forepaugh subsequently announced he was retiring due to ill health. He whiled away his remaining days in Philadelphia with a new female companion, having split with Lily Deacon, a British equestrienne he married back in 1882. Deacon remained officially married to Addie but distinguished herself from him when she established an animal refuge on her estate, Peaceable Hill, in Brewster, New York. She donated a water trough for horses and birds to the town, with a plaque reading “From the Society of Kindness to Dumb Creatures.” The area youngsters who performed a good deed for an animal needed only visit her to receive a coin in reward.

  TWENTY

  The Great Name

  Vanishes

  An animal lover would no doubt have considered it only justice when the sponsor of the electrical experiments in New Jersey suffered an emotional shock from which he would never fully recover.

  Unbeknownst to Edison, the company that still bore his name but was no longer under even his titular control had been approached about a merger with Thomson-Houston, headed by the same Charles Coffin whom Westinghouse had found so untrustworthy. The management of the Edison General Electric Company favored the proposal, but the only opinion that mattered was that of the primary investor, J. P. Morgan. And Morgan felt the Edison company was doing fine on its own. He also may have harbored a certain sentimental loyalty to Edison, having twice made history with the Wizard, once when Morgan’s became the first private residence to acquire electric lighting, then with the flip of the switch that inaugurated service from the six Jumbos in the first central power station.

  But any such feelings did not change the numbers on the balance sheets that the ever tenacious Coffin presented when urging Morgan to reconsider. Coffin noted that he was making twice the net return that the Edison company was and promised to bring similarly profitable management to the entire enterprise should there be a merger. Morgan agreed to the merger and offered no objection to having the resulting company named simply General Electric.

  Morgan did not bother to inform Edison, much less to consult with him. Edison learned of it after the deal was sealed and then only because his private sectary, Alfred Tate, happened to hear word of it. The secretary confirmed that it was indeed so and hurried to Edison’s laboratory, where he just blurted out the news, not considering the likely impact until the effect was all too apparent.

  “I have always regretted the abruptness with which I broke the news to Edison but I am not sure that a milder manner and less precipitate delivery would have cushioned the shock,” Tate later wrote. “I never before had seen him change color. His complexion naturally was pale, a clear healthy paleness, but following my announcement it turned as white as his collar.”

  Edison said nothing on the subject until some weeks later, when Tate sought him out in his library seeking technical information regarding a storage battery project. Edison responded with vehemence, such as Tate had never heard in his voice, instructing his secretary to go ask one of the technical people, the same Arthur Kennelly who had witnessed the McElvaine execution.

  “He knows far more about [electricity] than I do,” Edison said by Tate’s recollection. “In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that I never did know anything about it. I’m going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before that people will forget that my name was ever connected with anything electrical.”

  Tate would recall, “They were bitter words spoken by a tongue in the mouth of a wound that never healed. . . . I walked silently out as though I were leaving the presence of the dead. Because I knew that something had died in Edison’s heart and that it had not been replaced by the different and bigger thing to which had referred.”

  Tate would go on, “His pride had been wounded. There was no trace of vanity in his character, but he had a deep-seated enduring pride in his name. And tha
t name had been violated, torn from the title of the great industry created by his genius through years of intensive planning and unremitting toil.”

  The writer Jill Jonnes would later note that the man who had hoped to stigmatize his rival by fostering the term Westinghoused had himself been what was known in the parlance of the time as Morganized. But ultimately Edison had put himself in position to be so badly used by refusing even to consider the merits of AC.

  “The tide would not turn back at his frown,” noted the trade journal Electrical Engineer.

  Edison set his jaw and focused on his new jumbo project. He had decided that America would continue to grow so quickly that it was sure to soon run short of iron ore. He embarked on a massive project to excavate supposedly depleted mines in New Jersey, crush the rock with huge milling machines, and extract the remaining iron ore with magnets. The cost was more than the prevailing price but Edison felt sure that would change as shortages developed. The nation would have to rely on Edisoned ore and forget that he had ever been Morganized.

  “All the hopes and aspirations which he had nurtured on association with [the electric] industry died within his heart, leaving only the bitter ashes of defeated ambitions, and he wanted to build above their grave an edifice of still greater achievement that forever would consign them to oblivion,” Tate later wrote.

  As a secondary concern, Edison became involved in a much smaller and far more genteel War of the Phonographs. Edison’s device was powered by a storage battery, which could be recharged only by those who had access to electricity, which was still a relatively scant percentage of the population. He resisted the urging of Tate and others that he consider a spring mechanism.

  “That a man so highly skilled in the mechanic arts should have maintained this attitude towards such a vital and obviously soluble problem is a mystery which to me will always remain a mystery,” Tate later wrote.