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

by Michael Daly

  Edison finally relented—as he never had in the current wars—when the rival Emile Berliner of the Gramophone Company produced a model powered by a hand-cranked system that had been developed by a bicycle shop repairman. Edison followed Berliner’s lead and set to developing a similar mechanism.

  But Berliner’s gramophone further distinguished itself by dispensing with any recording capability. His was a device intended solely for playback, music in particular.

  “He recognized the vast potentialities of the entertainment field and set out to conquer it,” Tate wrote.

  Berliner was seeking to tap into a commercial potential that had, in fact, first been suggested at Edison’s lab when a child prodigy pianist named Josef Hofmann visited there and became the first well-known musician to make a recording. Edison now left a penciled note on Tate’s desk making clear his feelings regarding this use of his invention.

  “Tate—I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes. It is not a toy. I want it sold for business purposes only.”

  Tate later reasoned in his memoir, “It was the old story. I knew it perfectly. He was unable to visualize the potentialities of the amusement field. Either that, or he had made up his mind to combat it.”

  Edison decided the phonograph should be used primarily for dictation and had the first one to be so employed installed on Tate’s desk.

  “I was the ‘dog’ on which this novel method was tried out,” Tate would recall, apparently making reference to Brown’s experiments. “And I cannot claim the distinction of having been a docile animal.”

  Tate was then tasked with marketing it. This was complicated by 1892 being a time when, in Tate’s words, “young women had started to invade and subsequently to conquer the stenographic field, but as yet had displaced the male stenographer only to a degree which made him acutely and resentfully conscious of the menace.”

  The male stenographers viewed the phonograph as an added threat.

  “Their interests were represented at the time by a stenographic journal which maintained a campaign of bitter opposition to the use of the phonograph and the whole profession combined solidly against its adoption. . . . The few instruments that we succeeded in installing in offices were quickly discovered to be inoperative,” Tate would report.

  Tate saw only one possible solution.

  “I decided therefore to join the feminist movement.”

  Tate hired a middle-aged woman he identified only as Miss McCrae to train a dozen female phonograph/dictaphone operators at a time. Even this met with little success, though women generally continued to replace men as stenographers. Edison again gave in to financial necessity, as he had when finally forsaking the battery for the spring drive.

  “Under the same influence, he reversed his decision concerning the entertainment field and began intensively the work of developing the phonograph for the reproduction of high-class musical records,” Tate would recall. “He effected many improvements and refinements and raised the phonograph to a plane of perfection with respect to its fidelity in the reproduction of recorded vocal and instrumental music.”

  But Edison was ultimately indifferent to even the best of it.

  “His heart was never in the work,” Tate noted. “It required constant urging to induce him to make the various changes and adaptations demanded by the evolution of the art.”

  Edison continued to view the entertainment business as something for the likes of showmen, the purview of a humbugging Barnum or a loot-skimming Forepaugh, but not an Edison.

  On visiting the San Francisco distributor of the phonograph, Tate saw that one of the doors was marked “C. Nestor Edison, Manager.” He learned that an executive named Con Nestor was engaging in a little humbug, passing himself off as Edison’s nephew.

  “Edison was never aware of it,” Tate would write. “I thought prudent not to tell him.”

  While strolling down Market Street, Tate glanced in a music shop window and also chanced to see a recording of a “Solo by Mrs. Edison” singing “Ave Maria.”

  “May I hear that record by Mrs. Edison?” Tate asked the clerk.

  “Certainly,” the clerk said. “And we have some others if you would like to hear them. They are very popular. We sell a lot of them.”

  The record proved to be what Tate described as “a beautiful, highly trained soprano.” He inquired about it when he returned to the distributor. The reply from the supervisor for the whole West Coast could have come from Barnum.

  “We found a young girl, a student who has a remarkable voice,” Tate was told. “Of course her name was unknown and I thought her voice was too good to send it out without attaching some prestige to it. We had got Con fixed up all right, and as I had appropriated Edison’s name I thought I might as well include Mrs. Edison. If it hadn’t been such a fine voice of course I wouldn’t have done it.”

  Tate could well imagine how Edison would react if he learned that his wife’s name had been appropriated to promote the use of the phonograph, which he still felt to border on sacrilege.

  “I at the time deemed it prudent to maintain silence,” Tate later wrote, adding that if the real Mrs. Edison ever read his memoir, “she will be astonished to learn that in the Gay Nineties she achieved a reputation on the Pacific Coast as a vocal artist second only to that of the Swedish Nightingale.”

  Edison brought the same aversion regarding entertainment to an invention he described as the visual equivalent of the phonograph. He had begun work on it shortly after opening his lab in West Orange, New Jersey, and called it the kinetoscope, joining the ancient Greek kineto for movement and scopos for watch. The prototype was a four-foot-tall wooden box containing a small lone incandescent bulb before which moved a film loop thirty-five millimeters wide. The film was perforated along both edges and propelled by sprockets between the light and a pair of magnifying lenses that were viewed through a kind of peephole. The images to be viewed in the kinetoscope were captured by what Edison called a kinetograph, a motion picture camera with a sprocketed drive that engaged the same perforations in the film. He foresaw the subject matter to be primarily educational.

  “I had some glowing dreams about what the camera could be made to do and ought to do in teaching the world things it needed to know, teaching it in a more vivid, direct way,” Edison said.

  Edison hoped to have his kinetoscope viewer ready for the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which had been conceived as an American equivalent of the exposition in Paris, but marking the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. The exposition was put off a year because of the presidential election, but Edison was still not able to get the kinetoscope ready in time. That was due partly to an assistant who was overly fond of imbibing and partly to the iron ore separation project, which had problems on a scale with its ambitions and threatened to consume all of Edison’s silver dollars before it began to produce a useable product.

  The exposition would proceed without a new sensation from the great Edison to soften the pain of having his name removed from the company that had been his grandest conception.

  On its part, General Electric had cause to rue dropping Edison’s name as it sought the contract to provide lighting for the exposition. The job promised to involve some one hundred thousand lights, the most ever. And out of its sense of its own bigness, the new General Electric conglomerate bid as if it were the only company that could possibly handle it, demanding $1.7 million, a sum that one exhibition official termed “extortionate.” The bid might have been accepted as a premium for greatness if the firm had retained the name of the man still popularly recognized as the father of the electric light. Had the firm also retained some of Edison’s ability to see beyond immediate profit—as he had when he sold his first lightbulbs below cost—it would have recognized the brand-building value of such a contra
ct even at the risk of a short-term financial loss. It might not have demanded such a prohibitive sum in the first place.

  Demand it did and the bid was seen for what it was, naked corporate greed. The Chicago newspapers cried robbery and cheered when a small local firm, Southside Machine and Metal Works, entered a bid for a third of what the conglomerate wanted. General Electric just scoffed, saying this so-called rival could not make good on a task of that magnitude. The local firm then sought out Westinghouse, who had just reestablished his financial stability after some corporate struggles of his own and had up to this point refrained from joining the bidding on such an ambitious project. He took up the challenge and the press hailed him as a hero.

  The General Electric Company was not without influential friends and a second round of bids was held. The conglomerate bid slightly lower than the local firm’s first price, but Westinghouse bid still lower. Westinghouse won the contract to illuminate the 1893 celebration of what the exhibition’s official guidebook termed “the forces which move humanity and make history, the ever-shifting powers that fit new thoughts to new conditions, and shape the destinies of mankind.”

  Nearly one in four Americans, in excess of twenty-five million, visited the fair and thrilled at an electric blaze that offered not a tingle of danger. Westinghouse’s dynamos provided the power even for the eighteen thousand miniature red, white, and blue lights on the eighty-two-foot column popularly known as the Edison Electric Tower or simply the Edison Tower. The official name was the Tower of Light, and the column was not topped by a figure of the Wizard as the similar column in Paris was topped by Napoleon. This monument culminated in an eight-foot incandescent bulb composed of thirty thousand pieces of prismatic glass. The colonnade around the base was emblazoned with the words “The General Electric Company.”

  In an added slight, the company that had shed Edison’s name had on display its new AC system. That did not keep its press agents from seeking to maintain an association with the Wizard in the public’s mind by telling reporters that Edison had approved the tower’s design.

  The identity of the tower’s creator may have caused Edison both satisfaction and indignation. Luther Stieringer had been a top Edison assistant before striking out on his own and becoming one of America’s first lighting designers. His fondness for color was seen not only in the patriotic motif of the Tower of Light but also in the multihued “electric fountains” nearby, where geysers rose up through a whole spectrum of lights, turning magically prismatic amid the fair’s white blaze.

  Westinghouse also had an exhibit in the center aisle. One feature was presented almost as a shrine, with a cupola whose inscription included the surname of the inventor at the heart of Westinghouse’s spectacular success:

  Westinghouse Electric &

  Manufacturing Co.

  Tesla Polyphase System.

  Various manufacturers displayed a vast array of electric prototypes, from household appliances to power tools to medical instruments. A view of the grounds was accorded by another new marvel powered by Westinghouse: the 250-foot, passenger-bearing wheel named after its inventor, George Ferris.

  One electric device that was not wired to any power source for demonstration purposes was the contraption with which Edison had hoped to defeat his rival. The electric chair was on view along with other instruments of capital punishment in the building housing the prison exhibit. The particular form of electric current employed to dispatch the condemned in the electric chair seemed no more important than the brand of rope used for the hangman’s noose. And everywhere the visitors to the fair turned was more shining proof that alternating current was a boon for all mankind, the common animating factor in a host of amazing inventions.

  This teeming, incandescent exhibition was known as the White City, and it must have seemed even more dazzling amid the deepening gloom of a second national economic calamity in as many decades. The Panic of 1873 had been followed by the Panic of 1893, also triggered by hyperextended railroads and reckless speculation, seeming proof that if elephants never forget, humans never remember. Banks were folding by the hundreds. Businesses were closing by the thousands. Unemployment was tripling. Yet here was the fair’s gleaming promise of better days ahead thanks to technology and industry and the power of electricity.

  The White City was said to be the inspiration for the Emerald City of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard Oz. But for the real-life Wizard, the glow rising into the night sky from the sensation on the South Side signaled a compounded defeat both by his rival and, more stingingly, by those who now controlled the company he had founded.

  “He never ceased to regret the loss of properties which abruptly terminated his direct association with the evolution of the great industry which he himself had created,” Tate later wrote. “He was in the position of a parent watching the growth and prosperity of a kidnapped child.”

  He seems to have remained all but mute about this deep, transforming hurt.

  “Beyond what he said to me Edison was silent and nursed his grievance in the solitude of his own mind,” Tate recalled.

  And because he would continue to silently suckle his anger for years to come, the glow that promised a brighter future for humankind portended a bitter fate for the crooked-tailed elephant appearing that very June just a short way up the city’s lakefront.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Topsy Somersaults;

  Gold Dust and

  Duncan Get a Home

  The Forepaugh show still bore the name of the deceased patriarch but was wholly owned by Bailey—and a businessman as astute as he would have been expected to skip Chicago when the competition was a mammoth fair that had the whole country abuzz. Bailey very well might have dropped Chicago from his itinerary had others not tried to force him to do so. He had previously been compelled to mount a legal fight to use Chicago’s lakefront lot after the Montgomery Ward Company sought to have the show barred as a “great annoyance.” Bailey had prevailed, but with the advent of the fair, local speculators offered the city $10,000 to rent the lot through November. Bailey had to fight again to hold on to it, but he had to put up $5,000 for two weeks, rather than the $2,500 he had paid the prior year for one. That landed him in Chicago for twice the usual time as even he himself fell victim to fair fever. The show’s 1893 route book, a compendium such as every big circus published at the end of each season as a running historic record and memento, reported:

  Chicago, Ill.Monday, June 5th

  We inaugurated our two-week stand in Chicago today. . . . Mr. and Mrs. James A. Bailey are on a visit to the show and will of course “take in” the world’s fair as a side issue.

  The show included reenactments of the American Revolution, conducted at the end so as not to blind the spectators with gun smoke as had Forepaugh of old. Bailey tried to market this feature as an extension of the Columbian extravaganza across town.

  “Columbus discovered the New World for Spain. George Washington won it for America,” read a big newspaper ad. “The Adam Forepaugh Show seeks to glorify the Father of Our Country without distracting from the honor due the discoverer. The most magnificent entertainment of all time. The SCENES and BATTLES of 1776—The American Revolution. . . . WHOSE CHILD SHOULD NOT LEARN THIS GLORIOUS LESSON SO DELIGHTFULLY TOLD?”

  The ad made no mention of anything so foreign as elephants, noting only that there would be “an exhibition of AMERICAN-TRAINED WILD ANIMALS that still further upholds American superiority.” A soap company ad featuring the circus did show an elephant, skipping a rope held by a tiger and a kangaroo in a big top marked 4-PAW CIRCUS.

  “There are strange sights at the circus,” it read. “But nothing so strange as the woman who does not know of the excellence and superiority of KIRK’S AMERICAN FAMILY SOAP.”

  That may or may not have sold much soap. The Forepaugh “father of our country” ad certainly did not draw crowds an
d in an effort to fill the seats the show held special “professional” days, offering free admittance to all thespians and then to the city’s hordes of newsboys. The show also lent use of the tent to the renowned evangelist Dwight “D.L.” Moody. The ad in the newspapers read:

  Ha! Ha! Ha!

  Three Big Shows!

  Moody in the Morning!

  Forepaugh in the Afternoon and Evening!

  Moody drew an overflow crowd that was admitted through the menagerie tent, thousands filing past the elephants, who could be heard trumpeting as Moody delivered his sermon and voices rose in such hymns as “Rock of Ages.” The hope was the faithful would return later for the circus, but more often than not, those who went anywhere chose the fair. The show’s route book noted:

  Chicago, Ill.Sunday, June 18th

  This is the last day in Chicago, and everybody is impatient to be on the move once more. The weather during our stay was absolutely perfect, but business by no means up to expectations. The great counter attraction of the Columbia Exposition virtually killed our afternoon business.

  The show went on to visit 131 towns in 159 days, giving 312 performances in fifteen states and traveling 10,332 miles. It entered the “corn and wheat belt” that a smaller but contentious show run by the Sells brothers considered its home turf.

  Marshalltown, IowaFriday, August 11th

  Afternoon attendance very big, and at night it was up to the usual standard, notwithstanding the facts that Sells Bothers has posted notices over our paper to the effect that our date has been postponed to August 14th.

  Thieves continued to trail the show with the intent of robbing patrons as if it were still the old Forepaugh days. Bailey’s policy was made emphatically clear during a pause en route. Several of the show’s stouter men were reported in the route book as having gone “on a hunting expedition for three disreputable followers of the ‘grafting species.’ They were found and after a powerful and forcible argument and a cold dip in the river as a side issue ‘they never came back.’”