Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  One year later, a headline in the New York Herald: EDISON’S EUREKA—THE ELECTRIC LIGHT AT LAST.

  1880

  The second elephant born in America (and the first to survive infancy) came into the world under the Bailey and Company big top in Philadelphia. Her mother was a dancing elephant named Babe. P. T. Barnum was so covetous of Babe’s baby—since it seemed no customer could resist her—that he offered to merge Bailey’s circus with his own.

  She grew, of course, and soon became just another one of Barnum and Bailey’s three dozen adult elephants. The nation turned their attention away from the “baby” until twenty years later, when she threw a lion across Coney Island’s Luna Park and into a crowd. Five years after that, she was branded unredeemable. The circus used a block and tackle to choke her to death before a “jury” of twenty-one elephants. Babe was one of them.

  Babe died seven years after her daughter, during the circus’s traveling tour of the Antipodes—a burial at sea.

  1881

  One night under the arc lights in Buffalo, New York, a dentist named Alfred P. Southwick watched a drunken dockworker reach down and touch a live wire. When he saw the man fall, Southwick noticed the quickness of the death, its calm and quiet close. The dentist quickly made a deal with the local dogcatcher to perform electrical experiments on the strays of Buffalo.

  1882

  Two months after Charles Guiteau was tried for the murder of President Garfield, the most famous elephant in history landed at New York City’s Castle Garden pier. A team of sixteen horses, five hundred men, and two of P. T. Barnum’s pachyderms (Gyp and Chief) pushed the “mastadonic” African elephant’s box up Broadway. The beast sold out matinees and evening shows at Madison Square Garden all spring. Over a quarter of the US population saw him—at the Garden or on tour—over three years.

  The elephant arrived from England already named and with a reputation as the largest, gentlest living thing on the planet. Though no one can be certain where his name originated, by the time the Coward Charles Guiteau was hanged that fall, any large entity in New York was renamed after the animal: Jumbo frankfurters, Jumbo cigars, Jumbo steam whistles, Jumbo lawmakers mucking up the progress in Congress.

  Even Edison got into the game. He was a mile away from Madison Square, digging under Pearl Street to wire the first American neighborhood with direct current. Six two-hundred-horsepower generators, each with its own steam engine, buzzed noisily beside the eighty-five buildings they powered. Edison had christened the cacophonous generators “Jumbo dynamos.”

  1883

  From an editorial in Scientific American titled “Killing Cattle by Electricity”:

  Death by “judicial lightning” after such a fashion may be adopted in place of the hideous violence of the long drop. Certainly as a project for killing worn-out quadrupeds it appears as effective as it is kindly.

  And again, in the same journal, two years later—the editorial “Electricity for Executing Criminals”:

  How simple a process it would be to connect the place of execution in the Tombs with the system of electrical street illumination, so that electricity could be made the executioner of murderers! Death would be instantaneous and perfectly painless while at the same time the awfulness of the penalty thus inflicted would be profoundly impressive.

  1884

  For the 1884 season of the Great Forepaugh Show, Adam Forepaugh took his elephant Tiny (once named Othello), and painted him with whitewash. He billed him first as Tiger Killer the White Elephant and then changed it, once more, to Light of Asia. The papers suggested fraud, as did P. T. Barnum, though Barnum was shilling an elephant with vitiligo as “white as God makes ’em.” Forepaugh released a heavy-hearted statement that Light of Asia caught a cold and died. He’d really just rinsed the elephant, renamed him John L. Sullivan, and taught him to box. The elephant didn’t actually die until forty-eight years later, of heart failure. By then he was called Old John.

  1885

  When an elephant went rogue and could not be contained, American circus folk said the beast had “gone ugly.” After killing his keeper in Nashua, New Hampshire, Ugly Albert was led to a ravine on the outskirts of Keene. There, a local Light Guard fired upon him at fifteen paces. A dead elephant was more mass than any local team could drag away, so, as was the fashion, they cut Ugly Albert into manageable chunks. Twenty yards of entrails. Bones that outweighed an American quarter horse. A forty-pound heart. An acre of blood. A hide for the Smithsonian.

  On September 15 of that same year, in a Canadian town about one hundred miles from Niagara Falls, the Great Jumbo’s faithful handler, Scotty, walked him down a railway yard to his luxury boxcar. An incoming train trapped Jumbo on the tracks and couldn’t brake fast enough. The impact smashed Jumbo’s tusks into his brain and bucked the locomotive over the elephant’s body. He died with the engine still on top of him.

  The nation mourned. Barnum sued the railroad and arranged two separate tours: one of the elephant’s reassembled bones and one of his stuffed hide—a DOUBLE JUMBO!

  1886

  On the first day of spring, George Westinghouse’s chief scientist threw the switch on a street of commercial and municipal buildings in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—the first downtown powered by alternating current. The energy that lit Great Barrington came not from a cacophonous power station a block away, but from a generator parked in an abandoned lumber mill a mile from town. In order for the current to travel that far, “The Great Barrington Electrification” needed a strength of 500 volts, nearly five times that of Edison’s direct current at Pearl Street.

  An ocean away, in the war with Abyssinia, teams of forty elephants pulled British cannons across the North African desert. When the war ended, many were sent back to England or America to work in the circus trade.

  1887

  Though direct current powered towns from Chicago to Boston to New Orleans, Thomas Edison still felt the pressure of Westinghouse’s progress with alternating current. So the Wizard of Menlo Park—light-bringer to America—printed an alarmist, all-red pamphlet titled “A WARNING FROM THE EDISON ELECTRIC LIGHT COMPANY.” It was perhaps the first published work to feature the term “death-current.”

  Alfred P. Southwick, the Buffalo dentist, never forgot that scene of the dead drunkard and the live wire. That fall, he wrote Edison for the inventor’s opinion on electricity as a capital punishment. Edison sent a reply to Southwick that December, which the dentist then excerpted for a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

  The most suitable apparatus for the purpose is that class of dynamo-electric machinery which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of these are known as “alternating machines” manufactured principally in this country by George Westinghouse. The passage of the current from these machines through the human body, even by the slightest contacts, produces instantaneous death.

  That same month, a fire in Barnum and Bailey’s winter quarters killed dozens of animals, including Alice, the supposed widow of Jumbo. The thirty elephants strong enough to pull loose from their chains and escape the building caught fire along the way. Parts of their burned hides fell into the straw as they ran.

  1888

  Notes from H. P. Brown’s animal experiments at the Edison laboratory, July 10:

  Dog No. 1. Old black and tan bitch; low vitality; weight not taken. Resistance from right front leg to left hind leg, 7,500 ohms. Connection made through wet roll of cotton waste, held in place by wrappings of bare copper wire; continuous current used. Electromotive force at time of closing circuit 800 volts; time of contact through dog 2 seconds.

  Dog No. 2. Large half-bred St. Bernard puppy; strong and in good condition. Resistance 8,500 ohms. Connections made as above. Continuous current. Electromotive force 200 volts. Time of contact through dog 2 seconds.

  Dog No. 3. Fox terrier bitch, young and of good vitality. Resistance 6,000 ohms. Connections kept thoroughly wet. Electromotive force 400 volts.


  600 volts.

  800 volts.

  1,000 volts.

  Dog No. 4. Half-bred shepherd dog; strong and in good condition. Connections same as above. Resistance 6,000 ohms; continuous current, Electromotive force 1,000 volts.

  1,100 volts. Respiration fell to 72 and dog unhurt. Dog yelped when circuit was closed, but wagged his tail as Dr. Peterson counted respiration.

  1,200 volts. Dog yelped as circuit was closed, but still unhurt.

  1,300 volts. Dog yelped.

  1,400 volts. Dog yelped slightly. Respiration 72 (irregular).

  1,420 volts. The utmost capacity of dynamo at present speed.

  That fall, after the passage of the New York State Electrical Execution Act—which replaced hanging with death by “judicial lightning”—the state’s Medico-Legal Society was tasked to submit a report of best practices. They ordered more tests, this time on animals closer to the weight of a condemned human. The Edison laboratory obliged by electrocuting two calves at 124 and 154 pounds, respectively. Then they tried 2,000 volts on a horse. Then they wondered about larger specimens.

  1889

  Dynamort. Ampermort. Virmort. Electromort. Electrostrike. Electrocide. Electricide. Electrothanasia. Electrosiesta. Electrolethe. Electrophon. Electropoena. Electro-cremation. Super-electrification. Galvanation. Gerrycide. Joltacuss. Voltacuss. Blitzentod. Razzle-dazzle. Thanelectricized. Browned. Westinghoused.

  July 11, in the New York Times: We pray to be saved from such a monstrosity as “electrocution,” which pretentious ignoramuses seem to be trying to put into use.

  A twenty-five-year-old circus elephant, one of (at least) two in America named Chief at the time, was reported to have killed so many handlers that no employee of the John Robinson Circus dared go near him. The British Veterinary Journal said the circus was in talks to donate the elephant to Edison laboratory, but in the end had a change of heart. They gave “Old Chief” to the Cincinnati Zoo, which shot him by the end of the decade. Two days after, Cincinnati’s Palace Restaurant added “elephant loin” to its dinner menu.

  Chief II also had a brief flirtation with Edison. In Scientific American:

  Many who saw or heard of the experiments made with alternating electrical light currents at the Edison laboratory, to find a substitute for hanging, will regret that the big elephant Chief, of Forepaugh’s circus, sentenced to death for his viciousness, could not have been experimented with, as was promised.

  Would the 3,000 volts current, which we are told, will surely kill a man—they have been killed with far less than this—be enough to dull the consciousness of an elephant and then kill? It seems the circus people could not wait for the elaborate preparations necessary. They tied a noose around Chief’s neck, and giving an end each to two other elephants, started them tugging in opposite directions till the big elephant was dead.

  1890

  On the second morning of the year, a fire torched Edison’s Pearl Street power station. By the time the Metropolitan Fire Department managed to subdue it, only one jumbo remained.

  Two hundred sixteen days later, William Kemmler, “The Buffalo Murderer,” was led into a mess room at the Auburn Prison. There, electricians had installed a heavy oak chair bolted to the floor, powered by a Westinghouse dynamo. Sixteen months prior, Kemmler had throttled the married woman with whom he’d been living under an assumed name, then walked out of his tenement house, muttering, I’ll take the rope for it.

  The warden cut away Kemmler’s new shirt and sack coat at the spine. He placed a rubber skullcap on Kemmler’s shaved head. The cap was stuffed with a wet sponge called an “elephant ear.”

  WARDEN: I have warned him that he has got to die and if he has anything to say he will say it.

  KEMMLER: I am bad enough. It is cruel to make me out worse.

  PRISON DOCTOR: May God bless you, Kemmler.

  [cue 1,300 volts of electric current, released for seventeen seconds.]

  PRISON DOCTOR: He is dead.

  DENTIST ALFRED P. SOUTHWICK: We live in a higher civilization from this day.

  A WITNESS: See—he still breathes!

  ANOTHER WITNESS: Great God, he is alive!

  An elephant in the Wallace Brothers’ Circus threw his trainer across the ring and then chased away the small-town police force that tried to restrain him. He was last seen running into the California desert, never to be heard from again.

  1891

  Three New York murderers, all electrocuted July 7:

  James Slocum (murder of wife)

  Harris Smiler (of mistress)

  Shubuya Jugiro (of shipmate)

  Joseph Wood (of drinking buddy)

  And in December, Martin Loppy (of wife, with scissors). He required four jolts.

  1892

  February 8, Charles McElvaine (of grocery store clerk). Killed in a new style of chair, borne from Edison’s suggestion after the Kemmler disaster, in which the condemned man’s hands are submerged in shallow bowls filled with saline. Results were less than ideal.

  1893

  January 6, Zip the elephant (a four-foot chain of iron was found in her stomach, which the elephant must have swallowed when no one was looking)

  May 7, Carlyle Harris (of wife, with sleeping pills, her death originally misdiagnosed as stroke)

  July 27, William Taylor (of fellow inmate). His twitching leg pulled the electrode from the chair at the first jolt. His third jolt fried the prison generator. He died on a cot as the electricians tried to rewire the chair to the city of Auburn’s DC power supply.

  The Niagara Commission accepted George Westinghouse’s bid to build three double-phase generators for the city of Buffalo that would take their power from Niagara Falls, thirty miles away. Edison’s General Electric was among the companies that lost the bid to Westinghouse, along with the bid to power Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, the first all-electric fair featuring a brilliant “White City” of light.

  NIKOLA TESLA: Niagara Power will make Buffalo the greatest city in the world!

  During the last month of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, an elephant named Dolly went on a rampage, plowing through the Midway at the fair’s busiest hour. Elsewhere on the Midway, a dwarf elephant got into a vat of beer, drank to excess, and died before the famous electric-powered closing ceremonies.

  1894

  Tip the elephant (fed a tray of poisoned oats)

  1895

  July 1, Robert Buchanan (of wife, with poison)

  1896

  February 11, Bartholomew Shea (of election reform activist)

  At midnight on November 16, the mayor of Buffalo threw a switch at the Niagara station and brought AC power to his town. Nikola Tesla, mastermind behind the “polyphase” system which allows supercharged currents to travel great distances, gave a speech at the Falls:

  Niagara has something in accord with our present thoughts and tendencies. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.

  Gyp the elephant killed at least seven men within a quarter-century:

  Harry Cooley (smashed in Forepaugh’s winter quarters)

  George West (crushed on tour with Robinson’s Circus)

  “Jimmy the Bum” (flattened in Louisiana)

  Robert White (thrown across the room with enough force to disembowel him)

  William Devoe (while with O’Brien’s show in Poughkeepsie)

  Patsy Hulligan (died of infection after Gyp tore off his arm)

  Frank Scott (a lion tamer)

  Gyp’s trainer returned from vacation after the beast had dispatched the lion tamer, and Gyp reached out her trunk to embrace her man. The papers clamored to send her to Edison by the end of the year. Three weeks later, the Times reported the trainer had made a convincing appeal to spare her, and that Gyp may be sent to Cuba to trample down the ranks of Spaniards.

  1897

  August 3, in the US Patent Of
fice:

  #587,649. ELECTROCUTION CHAIR.

  To All Whom It May Concern—

  The invention relates particularly to an electrocution-chair, which is so arranged that the contraction or expansion of various muscles will be registered while the current is passing through the body. Such records would possess a certain scientific interest and would give an opportunity of accurate observations and deductions of the action of the electric current at high voltages on the human system. Such information, it will be seen, of course could not be obtained in any other way.

  1897

  The Pan-American Exposition Company originally planned to stage their World’s Fair—a celebration of American progress—on an island in the Niagara River, a few miles upstream from the Falls. They later settled on Buffalo instead, as it was one of the ten largest cities in the union, with its busy harbor, twenty-six railroads, and twelve steamship lines.

  October 19, Syd the elephant (burned alive until the Robinson and Franklin Brothers’ Circus changed their minds, then salved with petroleum jelly and sent back to work)

  1898

  Congress pledged a half million dollars to support the Pan-American Expo, but halted its production until the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. President McKinley offered his personal support, pledging to do anything he could to help Buffalo. In return, the Pan-American Exposition Company promised their fair would showcase the most impressive American accomplishments of the past hundred years and would be remembered as “the electrical marvel of the opening century.”

  That spring, Barnum’s circus set out for a European tour on the SS Minneapolis with eighteen elephants in tow. The circus executed a quarter of them before returning:

  Don Pedro (choked by block and tackle in Liverpool)

  Nick (strangled in Stoke-on-Trent)

  Fritz (tied to a tree and garroted after escaping in Tours)

  Mandarin (hanged over the water as the boat docked in New York. Mandarin’s trainer wept)