by Michael Daly
Everyone save for Edison himself and a few rivals still considered Edison the foremost authority on things electric. He had presided over the electrocution of animals as large as a horse. He had sought the chance to electrocute Chief at the height of the War of Currents and perhaps Tip as well after the war was lost. His laboratory was stocked not only with a whale baleen and a hippo tooth, but also with elephant skin and a Wheatstone bridge with which to measure electrical resistance. He could have easily determined that the failure to electrocute Jumbo II was not the result of any unusual resistance pachyderm hide possessed.
A week after the incident at the police station, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a story headlined “Tops and the Press Agent” with the subhead, “It Is Now Given Out that Coney Island’s ‘Bad Elephant’ Is to Be Killed by Electricity.” The article described “poor Tops,” as “the big elephant, which has caused the police of Coney Island so much trouble of late, probably because of the alleged cruel treatment by Whitey, a blond-haired young man who has been acting as attendant to the beast.” The article went on to suggest that the talk of execution was just humbug designed to drum up more publicity or, as the writer put it, “advertising,” and that “it is safe to say that Tops will continue at the same old stand, where she will continue to be harmless, provided the attendant loses the fork.”
The press agent was Charles Murray, lured away from Steeplechase to Luna Park with a start-up promise of a percentage of the profits rather than a salary. He certainly was as capable of humbug as any Barnum or Forepaugh press agent, particularly when he had a financial stake in the outcome. But this was not just advertising. Thompson and Dundy were deadly serious.
“Famous Baby Elephant Condemned to Death,” read a subsequent headline.
The accompanying article recalled how Tospy had been “the pet of thousands of children when, as a famous ‘baby elephant,’ she first toured this country with Adam Forepaugh’s circus twenty years ago,” but made no mention of her being foisted on the public as American born. The execution was to be public and was scheduled for the following Sunday, or Monday in the event of rain.
The preparations were overseen by the press agent, Murray. He diverted some of the carpenters and laborers who were busy sawing and hammering piles of lumber into the towers and minarets of a fantasyland. A platform accessed by a bridge was built in the center of the lagoon at the foot of Shoot the Chutes. Big cloth banners were stretched across all four sides, so that a message in foot-high letters about the opening of Luna Park in May would be sure to appear in any film as well as news photos.
That Edison was sending his film crew indicates that he was almost certainly aware of this new attempt to electrocute an elephant. And the decision regarding where to place the electrodes—along with the fact that the attempt was being made at all after the disaster in Buffalo—suggests that the Wizard was considerably more involved than he had been the last time his crew visited the park, when it filmed Shooting the Chutes.
An elephant obviously has no hands, but there are feet with fleshy pads as removed from major bones and as “close to the blood” as human palms. The problem was that Topsy was too strong to be restrained so firmly as to keep two of her feet in jars of conducting liquid. The answer was a deadly variation on the copper-heeled lightbulb dancers at the Philadelphia exhibition where Edison’s name was spelled out in lights. A twelve-inch copper electrode was affixed to each of two slabs of wood that would then be strapped to Topsy’s feet as elephant-size death sandals. Her great weight would ensure the necessary contact.
The electrodes were to be connected to two wires that would be stretched the nine blocks from a plant owned by the speculator-controlled company that continued to use the Edison name but had no other connection with him except perhaps in this upcoming event. The distance from the plant was one that direct current could have managed, but this was alternating current and it was being relayed from the big new facility five miles away in Bay Ridge. That was the one whose bigger-than-jumbo generating units were manufactured by Westinghouse, a distinction that would receive no mention in the coverage of the upcoming execution but surely held some significance for Edison.
Even with the Wizard involved, the organizers did not want to risk having Topsy rise up from the apparently dead as Tom had done. They also dangled an elephant-size noose from a block and tackle atop the platform, securing the other end of the rope to a donkey engine such as was used to kill Mandarin. Topsy was to be strangled as well as poisoned at the same time the electricity was applied.
“We would have shot her with an elephant gun, too, but we weren’t able to get the right kind of gun in this country and we understand they are only available in England,” Murray said, echoing almost exactly what another press agent had said in Buffalo shortly before the attempted electrocution of Jumbo II.
TWENTY-SIX
“Here I am! Here I Am!
Where Are You?”
On the morning of January 4, 1903, the company that was Edison in name only agreed to maximize the power available to electrocute Topsy by suspending all service in Coney Island save for the trolley cars needed to bring the expected crowds of spectators.
Thompson and Dundy were planning to collect twenty-five cents a head, but the event had received enough press attention that a whole squad of special agents from the ASPCA arrived. They announced they would not allow the elephant’s death to be made into a public spectacle. They also had concerns as to the mode of execution.
“We won’t allow you to hang him,” the agents declared.
Thompson and Dundy explained that the motor-driven noose was only a backup in the unlikely event that the electrocution and the poison failed to speedily do the job.
“The society’s agents agreed there was nothing inhumane about the plan,” the Sun reported. “Death seemed to be pretty well arranged for.”
The prohibition against a public execution remained and admission to the grounds was restricted to eight hundred nonpaying guests, these including the press and what were termed Coney Island celebrities, among them a former judge as well as a former councilman who brought his whole family as if to a midwinter picnic. The ASPCA agents were not so strict as to intervene when the owner of a saloon next to the grounds allowed spectators a perch on his roof for twenty-five cents, as had been done at America’s last public official execution of a human.
More than one hundred photographers set up at the edge of the lagoon. So did the lone motion picture crew through which the Wizard’s magic would make this the most public of executions. Edison had lost out on a chance to beat Westinghouse when a celebrity seeker had deterred Tesla from approaching him that day right here in Coney Island. All the subsequent experiments with animals and even the killing of his own species in the electric chair had failed to frighten people away from alternating current. In his effort to “turn back history with a frown,” he had lost control of the company he founded, which shed even his name as it fell into the clutching hands of speculators. His effort to forget that defeat by topping himself with the iron ore scheme had ended in failure. And there was no hope of changing any of that now, no matter how deadly the jolt, no matter what size the subject.
Later, some historians would suggest that Edison electrocuted Topsy as part of the War of Currents. But that war had long since been lost and the execution itself and perhaps even the method were arranged by Thompson and Dundy. The participation by Edison appears to have been more akin to the rage that caused Forepaugh to leave Topsy with a crooked tail years before.
If Tate was right in believing that Edison not only harbored but also nursed his grievances “in the solitude of his own mind,” then maybe this execution that his crew was filming for all the world to see was for him the culmination of an intensively personal and private drama. How apt that the wires stretched from what everybody called the Edison plant, which was operated by the Edison
company but had nothing to do with Edison himself and was in fact owned by speculators. How perfect that the current would be alternating current from Westinghouse generators, but applied as Edison would recommend, with the slight modification of attaching one electrode to a forefoot, the other to a rear foot, so the deadly force would extend through the whole body, as should have been done with the horse. The film would document that Edison had not been again denied an opportunity to demonstrate the deadliness of the damnable current on the largest of land mammals, a creature so much bigger than any mere man, big enough to vent a great man’s fury and frustration at being bested, to show who is truly boss.
And the Edison movie crew would be filming not just a reenactment like the execution of McKinley’s assassin. This would be the real thing, the first actual death captured on film.
The execution was scheduled for noon, and as the appointed hour neared an electrician on the scene called the power plant over a telephone line that had been strung along with the wires. The plant sent out 6,600 volts for a test and Hugh Thomas, chief electrician at Luna Park, threw the switch. Smoke wafted from where the electrodes met the wood sandals.
“Working fine,” a reporter noted.
The police cleared the roadway leading to the lagoon. A voice called out.
“Here it comes!”
The crowd gazed across the site to see a pair of Luna employees leading “Cupid” Langtry, a waiter known as Coney Island’s fattest man outside of a sideshow. He was escorted in two big chains up to the bridge to uproarious laughter and applause.
All the while, Topsy was in her quarters, eating hay.
“Looking like any other self-regarding elephant,” a reporter noted. “She didn’t appear to be the least bit bad.”
At a few minutes after noon, Topsy was escorted out by Skip Dundy and Carl Goliath, an elephant man who had been retained for the day. Goliath was on Topsy’s left. He had a rake in his left hand, which he repeatedly employed to poke her behind the left ear even though she was ambling willingly along without so much as a tug on the harness buckled around her head and upper trunk. She continued through the construction site that would soon become the Electric Eden and passed a long row of spectators standing on a riser.
Twenty feet from the bridge leading across the lagoon, Topsy suddenly stopped. Some self-proclaimed experts would later say that elephants are leery of bridges, but in her circus travels Topsy had crossed hundreds if not thousands of them, many no doubt frailer than this one.
Whatever it was, no amount of tugging and pulling and poking could make her budge. Murray finally stepped up and tried a variation on press agentry. He held out a carrot and Topsy took a step forward to get it, seemingly as easily manipulated as public opinion.
But when Murray tried a second carrot, Topsy declined to take a second step. The press agent finally was the one to step forward. He ended up giving her a total of twenty-seven carrots but never got her to take more than that first step.
Goliath could only think to return Topsy to where they started and try it again. Topsy came back up the road as obligingly as before, and stopped at the same spot, no less resolute not to take a step farther despite a trail of grain that had been strewn before her.
“I’ll bet Whitey told her what was up,” a Luna employee was heard to mutter.
The would-be executioners dispatched a messenger in search of Whitey, who had been fired the day before, no doubt to save paying him for the week to come when his charge would be alive for only one more day. Whitey had apparently become upset over the impending execution despite the many times he had abused Topsy, in this way being a little like the brutal Arstingstall after Jumbo’s death or, for that matter, like some abusive husbands.
By more than one account, Whitey was in tears when the messenger found him. He declined an offer of twenty-five dollars if he would come and coax Topsy over the bridge.
“Not for $1,000,” he reportedly declared.
On hearing that Whitey had refused, Thompson decided there was only one thing to do before the reporters and photographers grew weary and dispersed to file stories making chumps out of Topsy’s owners. The whole event was liable to end in laughter just as in Buffalo, or worse.
“We will have to kill her right here,” he said.
Topsy was chained by all four feet to construction pilings so she would be kept in place even if she now decided to move. A noose was looped around her neck and attached to the donkey engine. The wires were dragged over. Topsy immediately complied when she was instructed to raise her right foot for the first death sandal.
“Not so vicious,” a reporter remarked aloud.
Topsy seemed less a wild animal than a mild one. Another reporter later wrote, “She stood still in the application as quietly as could be asked, obeying all commands of the men even when telling her to get down on her knees.”
After the second electrode was fitted on her rear left foot and she was again standing, Topsy did become mildly bothered. She shook off the electrode on her forefoot, but soon it was secured again and there she stood, nearly three decades after being torn from her mother and smuggled into America, where she had traveled tens of thousands of miles in perpetual servitude, endured innumerable beatings, and survived more than a dozen train wrecks. Her big dark eyes with their extravagant elephantine lashes glimmered with what a reporter discerned to be still at her core.
“There was real benevolence in her eyes and kindness in her manner,” the Tribune reported.
Murray stepped up to act out the ultimate metaphor for his profession, feeding Topsy three carrots filled with a total of 460 grams of potassium cyanide. She took and gobbled one after another, playfully curling her trunk.
The motion picture camera had been shifted around so that Topsy was in center frame and one of the cloth banners on the platform was in full view over her left shoulder.
OPENING MAY 2ND 1903
LUNA PARK
$1,000,000 EXPOSITION
THE HEART OF CONEY ISLAND
If the gobbling of the carrots was filmed, it never made public view. The Edison crew was there to film, and the Luna Park people were there to stage, an electrocution, not a poisoning. The big worry was that the cyanide might cause her to collapse before the electricity brought her down. The third carrot was no sooner swallowed than the Edison plant got the awaited signal on the phone.
“All right!”
The camera was running and recorded Topsy again trying to shake off the electrode on her right forefoot. The electrode stayed in place. She set her foot back down and was standing motionless when the 6,600 volts coursed through the wires and the electrician, Thomas, closed the switch at the park. There were flashes and small blue flames and then smoke began to curl up from where copper met foot. Some would describe the smell as that of burning flesh, others that of burning hoof. The pain must have been excruciating and her huge form shook violently.
“Turn the current off!” a Luna employee cried out.
The smoke rose up around her flanks and she pitched forward into it, tipping to the right as her right foreleg buckled. The chain on her left leg grew taut with the fall, restraining her even in her last instant, drawing the limb straight out, displaying the electrode at the bottom of the foot. The electrode had stopped smoking. The current had been turned off after ten seconds.
Once the motion picture camera stopped filming, the donkey engine was set to work, cinching the noose tight around Topsy’s neck and holding it tight for a full ten minutes. Only then, when she had been triply killed and there was not the slightest chance that she was alive, did the three veterinary surgeons approach and pronounce her dead.
From the Edison plant came word of an ironic near tragedy. The plant superintendent, Joseph Johansen, had accidentally electrocuted himself during the execution, receiving quarter-size burns oddly corre
sponding to Topsy’s, to his right arm and left leg electro-stigmata. The doctor pronounced his survival “miraculous.”
Back at Luna Park, Topsy was measured and it was recorded that she was ten feet tall and ten feet, eleven inches long. The autopsy was then performed on the spot. The heart and stomach were removed for the biology department at Princeton University. The taxidermist Hubert Vogelsang began skinning her. Some of the hide would be used to cover Thompson’s office chair and two of the legs would be fashioned into umbrella holders. Thompson would tell people that the hide and leg came from the world-famous Jumbo. The head was buried in a remote, unmarked patch behind the stables.
The many witnesses to the electrocution concurred that Topsy had died without making a sound. There is no way of knowing if, in those final instants, she had made one of those cries below the level of human hearing, which a scientist of the next millennium would term a contact call and explain as a simple message elephants in the wild send to other elephants across great distances of savannah and jungle. Such a cry would have carried past the gawkers and across the grounds and the beach beyond and out over the sea, fading to an unheard whisper over the waves.
“Here I am! Here I am! Where are you?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Big Swim
A trumpeting like Judgment Day itself blared from the predawn darkness off the shores of Staten Island on the fogbound morning of June 5, 1905. Again it came, and then again, closer, even louder through the mist. A disturbance in the glassy water began to rock the small rowboat where two fishermen were perched.
A huge form suddenly appeared off the bow, as big as a whale and preceded by what looked like a serpent spouting water. Frank Krissler and his buddy forgot their fishing lines and grabbed the oars, swinging the boat around. They began rowing back toward Staten Island as quickly as they humanly could.
