Thomas Edison stages a highly publicized electrocution of an elephant to demonstrate the danger of alternating current (although the only true danger it poses is to Edison’s own direct-current patents).
Edison had established direct current as the standard for electricity distribution and was living large off the patent royalties, income he didn’t want to lose just because George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla showed up with alternating current. Edison’s aggressive campaign to discredit the new current took the macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC—a process he referred to snidely as getting Westinghoused. Stray dogs and cats were the most easily obtained subjects, but he also zapped a few cattle and horses.
Edison got his big chance when the Luna Park Zoo at Coney Island decided to terminate Topsy the elephant. The cranky female had squashed three handlers in three years—including one idiot who’d tried to feed her a lit cigarette. Someone suggested having the pachyderm “ride the lightning,” a method American prisons had started using in 1890 to dispatch the condemned. Edison was happy to oblige. Topsy was restrained using a ship’s hawser. Copper electrodes were attached to her feet. To stack the odds against Topsy even more, she was fed cyanide-laced carrots moments before a 6,600-volt AC charge slammed through her body. She was killed instantly, and Edison—in his own mind, anyway—had proved his point. A crowd of fifteen hundred witnessed Topsy’s execution, which was filmed by Edison and released later that year as Electrocuting an Elephant.
But in the end, all Edison had to show for his efforts was a string of dead animals, including the unfortunate Topsy. DC fell out of favor as AC demonstrated its superiority and became the standard.—TL