Nickythump vs. Elephants Pt.1

1903, Coney Island, New York. The worlds first snuff film.

A crowd has gathered at the unfinished Luna Amusement Park. The salt air off the beach mixes with the smell of taffy and fresh popcorn. The audience has been promised a sight so wonderful, so absurd, that onlookers would have no choice but to surrender their billfolds and fish their monocles out of their martinis.

They have come to witness the electrocution of ‘Topsy’, the murderous elephant.

It probably stole that bike too

Once touted as the first born in America (probably Thailand, but there’s ‘A sucker is born every minute’), the young female had later killed a spectator who wandered drunkenly into the circus paddock.

When his offer of good whiskey was not appreciated by the pachyderm, the man retaliated by extinguishing his cigar on the sensitive end of Topsy’s trunk. Infuriated, Topsy pinned the drunk to the ground, crushing him with it’s massive head and feet.

The media attention, helped along by greedy circus owners, painted Topsy as a vicious killer, with up to twelve past deaths attributed to her. While this was sensationalist media, there was plenty of fodder for the papers.

At one train stop, an onlooker attempted to tickle the famously violent elephant’s ear with a stick. She picked him up by the waist and nearly killed him in front of a packed crowd before trainers intervened.

Topsy’s trainer, Whitey Alt, a terrible drunk himself, contributed heavily to the perception of the animal as uncontrollable.

Once, whilst particularly inebriated, Alt decided to ride Topsy down the main street of Coney Island. The curious pair gathered onlookers at each block until the crowd became so large the animal wouldn’t move further. Alt dismounted Topsy, and began prodding her with a pitchfork, bringing about the reprimand of a police officer. An enraged Alt threatened to turn Topsy loose, to trample the gathered crowd. The quick thinking officer drew his pistol, and with the entire town in procession, walked Alt and Topsy to the police station at gunpoint.

At the station, Alt refused to tether Topsy outside, and the animal simply followed him into the building. According to reports, Topsy quickly became stuck in the marbled entryway, stamping and trumpeting to such an extent that terrified officers retreated to the safety of locked cells.

‘Topsy the Mad Elephant’ and her drunken trainer soon pulled their last prank. Alt, pointing out a group of resting Italian workmen, instructed Topsy to ‘Sick’em’. The mad scramble up the scaffolding and away from the attacking elephant was the final straw for the park’s weary owners.

Unable to even give away the aging elephant, and with Alt no longer fit to oversee her, Topsy’s owners decided to have her killed by spectacle.

Despite protests by the fledgling ASPCA, on Jan 4th, 1903 Topsy was brought to the center of the park for one last show.

The execution was to come in two parts. One simple, the other quite ghastly.

Men from the newly formed Edison Electric Company had, the previous day, laid heavy gauge power lines from the local substation to a set of -ahem- elephantine shackles. When the switch was thrown, operators at the new Edison power plant would push 6000 volts all the way from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to Coney Island, and into Topsy. A feat of fledgling science for the time, orchestrated solely to electrocute an elephant to death.

In case this elaborate ACME plan backfired, Topsy was to be fed two cyanide laced carrots for good measure. A later plan to blow up the elephant with dynamite was probably deemed too messy.

Crowds filled the area, with neighboring buildings charging admission to hang from nearby balconies. Everyone, young and old, jostling to get a spot for the big moment. For the sake of history, the event was attended by newsmen from around the state, as well as two cameramen from the Edison Film Division (‘Edison: The only game in town!’).

The switch was thrown, and through a cloud of smoke, Topsy tensed, raising her trunk upwards angrily before collapsing onto her side. Topsy the murderous elephant, who traveled around the world from the jungles of Southeast Asia to New York City, was dead.

No longer an attraction, her hide was sent to the museum and her feet made into macabre umbrella holders (as was the style at the time).

Elephant Feet – Reunification Palace – Saigon

Her legend would live on, but not for her rampaging ways, but as the unwitting pawn in a story of industrial warfare.

Thomas Edison, the premier inventor of the time, and a national celebrity in his own right, was, in the 1890’s a proponent of Direct, or DC, current for homes. Westinghouse, the competing electronics firm, with patents from Nikola Tesla, supported Alternating, or AC, current. The jockeying for national support for either technology was known at the time as ‘The Current Wars’.

Edison, eager to maintain royalties on his DC system engaged in a childish campaign of misinformation. Fake deaths were attributed to AC current to show it’s danger. Later, real deaths would follow, as Edison secretly lobbied for the first electric chair to be built using AC current. Trying unsuccessfully to popularize the term ‘Westinghoused‘ for ‘electrocuted’.

By the time Topsy was taking her final bow, the current wars were long over. Edison had lost to the cheaper, and more efficient, Alternating Current. But history loves a good yarn, and a hundred years later the story is retold with a maniacal Edison at the switch, laughing as he Westinghouses Topsy to death before his cameras.

As with most events faded by time, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. For all their work, Edison, and Westinghouse – the subterfuge, the espionage. All it did was ensure that at the end of the day, when man’s time is at an end, and some future civilization sifts through our wreckage, they find this, and truly know what strange, savage race we truly were.

*** Warning *** The following is absurd, and pretty gross, but ‘History’ ***