Synopses & Reviews
In 1903, on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted, and over the past century, this bizarre, ghoulish execution has reverberated through popular culture with the whiff of urban legend. But it really happened, and many historical forces conspired to bring Topsy, Thomas Edison, and those 6600 volts of alternating current together that day. Tracing them all in
Topsy The Startling Story of the Crooked Tailed Elephant, P.T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison, journalist Michael Daly weaves together a fascinating popular history, the first book on this astonishing tale.
At the turn of the century, the circus in America was at its apex with the circuses of P.T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh (or 4-Paw) competing in a War of the Elephants, with declarations of whose pachyderms were younger, bigger, or more sacred”. This brought Topsy to America, fraudulently billed as the first native-born, and caught between the circus disputes and the War of the Currents, in which Edison and George Westinghouse (and Nikola Tesla) battled over alternating versus direct current.
Rich in period Americana, and full of circus tidbits and larger than life charactersboth human and elephantTopsy is a touching tale and an entertaining read.
Review
"Step right up, folks, and read all about it! The amazing tale of elephants, electricity, Edison and Barnum, stunts, fights and ghastly events. Topsy is a 19th century reality show that boggles the mind as the pages fly by with events that have you laughing out loud one moment and gasping in disbelief the next."Tom Brokaw
Review
Michael Daly vividly revives a rollicking pachydermal tale that riveted New Yorkers a century ago and still survives in a gruesome YouTube video. Daly . . . provides perceptive insights into circus and sideshow elephants and their huckster handlers . . . [and] leads readers on mesmerizing detours that reveal everything from the origins of pink lemonade to a brazen pickpockets trick. . . . Even [the] dark episode does not dampen the books exuberance. . . . A summery escape.”
New York Times[A] poignant, grim account of dueling impresarios and the American appetite for curiosities centered on one elephants life and death. . . . Topsy is a fascinating but disturbing story, a skillfully told and admirably researched reminder of a time not as long ago as wed like to think.”Wall Street Journal
A gripping popular history . . . Vivid . . . simultaneously fascinating and horrifying."St. Louis Post-Dispatch
[Daly] invoke[s] these creatures . . . with grace and compassion.”New York Times Book Review
Heartbreaking.”Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
A lively chronicle.”Dallas Morning News
"A fascinating and moving piece of American history and a meditation on the cost of entertainment and human progress."Kirkus Reviews
Bizarre and remarkable . . . Dalys fascinating, nuanced portraits of the seedy sides of the circuss heyday and the dawn of the electric age makes for incredibly entertaining reading.”Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This book should be read by anyone whos ever been to the circus. I read it and could not bring myself to put it down. Nor could I bring myself to look at the momentpreserved by Edisons footage and now on YouTubethat this book illuminates so clearly. The story left me a little breathless, and I will never see an elephant in captivity again and not think about Topsy and the cruelty of which we humans are capable. Ive always respected Michael Daly as a great New York writer. But here, he reaches out to the world beyond New York and goes deep. The results are extraordinary. He humanizes and speaks for those animals who cannot speak. He touches the hearts of those of us who are not animal activists. Im not so proud to be a member of the human race today, but I am proud to know someone who should be.”James McBride, author of The Color of Water
"Step right up, folks, and read all about it! The amazing tale of elephants, electricity, Edison and Barnum, stunts, fights and ghastly events. Topsy is a 19th-century reality show that boggles the mind as the pages fly by with events that have you laughing out loud one moment and gasping in disbelief the next."Tom Brokaw
Topsy offers a compelling history of late-nineteenth-century scientific genius, American hucksterism, and the chase for the almighty buck; its a tale of giants; Edison, Barnum, and an elephant, in which the four legged creature comes across as more humane than her fellow players”Richard Price
[A] tale of American enterprising spirit gone amok. . . the authors quiet outrage . . . endows an off-the-radar circus story with the fatalistic gravitas of Aeschylus."Boston Globe
After seeing Thomas Edisons 1903 film 'Electrocuting an Elephant,' author Michael Daly had to know more. The result is Topsy, a sad and fascinating story of a circus elephant at the turn of the last century, when America was flexing the new power of electricity. . . . While the tragic conclusion is known from the outset, the journey in Topsy offers continuous surprise.”Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Dalys anecdotes will have readers laughing at the bad luck of the sometimes honest circus goers. . . . [and he] skillfully recreates several examples of animal brutality, the importance of the circus as one of the few affordable forms of entertainment, and the immoral actions of the leading characters.”ForeWord
"Daly deftly weaves the story of one pachyderm's untimely end."Barnes and Noble Review.com
However tragic, Topsy is also a tale of determination, invention, and hope. Readers will come away with an understanding of aspects of American history that include un-sugarcoated descriptions of animal abuse, glories of the circus, and the emergence of electricity.”Baltimore City Paper
Daly expertly leads his readers through this peculiar series of events, as well as the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalowhere McKinley was assassinatedand the development of Coney Island. Complete with letters, photographs and newspaper accounts from the period, Daly enlivens a captivating popular history of this exceptional time. A poignant read.”Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Fascinating . . . a heartbreaking, complex story of brutality.”—Workforce
Synopsis
In 1903, at the soon to open Luna Park on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted, likely with advice from Thomas Edison, whose film crew recorded the horrible event. Over the past century, this bizarre, ghoulish execution has reverberated through popular culture with the whiff of an urban legend. But it really happened, and today, Edison's footage can be found on YouTube, where it has been viewed nearly two million times.
Many historical forces conspired to bring Topsy, Edison, and those 6600 volts of alternating current together at Coney Island that day. Journalist Michael Daly's Topsy is a fascinating popular history that traces them, from the rise of the circus in America and the lives of circus elephants, through Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the War of the Currents, and the birth of Coney Island.
Dalys book starts with the 1796 arrival of the first elephant to set foot in America, called simply The Elephant. While her performance didnt go far beyond uncapping bottles of beer with her trunk and drinking, she drew large paying crowds up and down the eastern seaboard. So large, in fact, that her owners walked her from town to town in the dark to avoid anyone getting a free look.
Other elephants followed, but essentially as solo curiosities. It wasnt until the years after the Civil War that the circus in America boomed, thanks especially to magnates P.T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh (or 4-Paw as he sometimes styled it). Barnum and Forepaugh are major characters in Topsy. Their constant competition and efforts to outdo each other led Forepaugh to hatch an outlandish scheme in 1877. At an incredibly dynamic time in American history, with the country growing and immigration on the rise, he understood that it was the first American born child of an immigrant family that often offered a real anchor. So Forepaugh smuggled in a baby elephant, captured in the wild in Asia (most likely Ceylon, now Sri Lanka), and passed it off as a true-American, the first elephant born in captivity. He said he wouldnt sell her for $20,000. Barnum, who had been offered the same elephant from a dealer in Hamburg, called his bluff, and said hed pay $100,000 for an American-born baby.
This was just one of the battles in the War of the Elephants. Forepaugh went big, billing one of his herd as the largest, so Barnum went bigger, importing an elephant from England named Jumbo. Barnum claimed hed been hunting for an elusive "holy" white elephant for years, so Forepaugh simply painted one of his and concocted an exotic backstory that involved Thai royalty.
Topsy, rich in fantastic detail, brings to life the world of the circus, the caravans and sideshows, the astonishing athletic spectacles and the crooks. Daly highlights the differences between Forepaugh and Barnum. The latter was the gold standard, a master showman and spinner of humbug” whose circus was nevertheless known as the Sunday School Show.” Forepaugh played to a rougher crowed, and even traveled with his own team of pickpockets, who paid a sort of daily licensing fee to work the crowd. They even stole clothes from laundry lines while the people in small towns watched the circus parade. And all circuses resorted to rat bills,” slanderous advertisements pasted along the routes. When one circus made use of electric lights to brightly illuminate the previously dim tents, another warned” the public of the lightings supposedly dire health risks.
Similar to the contrasting morals of the shows, elephant trainers had a striking dichotomy. Most resorted to horrible violence and cruelty to bend elephants to their will, to tame” them. Occasionally, as happens later with Topsy, they met violence with violence, killed trainers or broke free, and were subsequently branded bad” elephants.
In contrast were two trainers, Stewart Craven and Eph Thompson, who are the heroes of this book. Craven was one of the most famous trainers in the country, and was well paid for his work. Thompson, his protégé, being black, was slighted. Forepaugh maintained a fiction that his spoiled son trained the elephants, but it was really Thompson who showed that kindness and care could achieve remarkable things. His elephants danced, stood on their heads, raced, balanced on a fake tight rope, and formed into a living pyramid.” One could even somersault. Topsy was among these elephants, but she also dealt with cruelty; Forepaugh himself beat her so badly that her tail was broken and left permanently crooked.
The War of the Elephants was winding down just as the War of the Currents took off. Thomas Edison, synonymous in the public eye with electricity, stubbornly held firm to a misguided belief in the superiority of direct current, which could only be transmitted short distances. Alternating current, favored by brilliant oddball Nikola Tesla and his backer George Westinghouse could travel very far, but Edison argued that it was dangerous. To help win favor for DC, he maneuvered for New York State to switch from hanging to electrocution for executions, hoping that Westinghoused” would become a common term, like guillotined.” And to prove” how dangerous AC was, he backed dozens of inhumane experiments” where dogs were electrocuted.
Despite his best efforts, the Wizard lost the war, and control of his company. He remained embittered, even as his fame grew, thanks to the increasing importance of electricity. Daly segues from Edison to what should have been his triumph, the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the illuminated White City.” Popular entertainment had exploded in America thanks to the circus, and the final main thread of Topsy is a discussion of this landmark event, followed by the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo (at which President McKinley was assassinated), and the development of Coney Island.
Its on Coney Island in January of 1903 that these strands all come together. Luna Park, which would go on to become iconic, was set to open that year, and the developers figured that an execution of the bad” elephant Topsy would draw useful publicity. Edison, the War of the Currents lost, was still involved, at the very least with his film crew, though likely more closely. Throughout the book, Daly traces Topsys picaresque life up to this point, from her capture, the roar of the crowd, life on the endless road, and the tormenting of her trainers, weaving her tale through the other big stories. It's a touching tale, and it is impossible to read Topsy and look at the circus, elephants, or Thomas Edison the same way again.
Above all, Topsy is an entertaining read that brings to life this remarkable world and its characters.
About the Author
Michael Daly has been a newspaper journalist and columnist for many years, currently with the New York Daily News. He is the author of The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge about his friend, an NYFD chaplain who died on 9/11. In 2002, Daly was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He lives in Brooklyn.