The Retro Blog

Thomas Edison was kind of a jerk. He came up with DC current, which was sort of impractical and inferior to Tesla and Westinghouse’s AC current, but that wasn’t going to stop him from making everyone use DC. He decided the best way to accomplish this was to portray AC current as exceedingly dangerous. How did he accomplish this? By killing cute puppies and kitties. Seriously. Messed up, I know. The ultimate act of his cruelty was gathering a crowd of 1,500 at Coney Island to witness the electrocution of Topsy, a six ton elephant. Topsy was a circus performer who wasn’t a fan of her cruel owners. She had killed three people in total, including a trainer who had fed her a lit cigarette. While I am of the opinion that if you feed a six ton elephant a lit cigarette you were a Darwin award waiting to happen anyway, her handlers decided it was time for her to go in an Edison fueled blaze of glory.

January 4, 1903 was the date. Naturally Edison used the opportunity to show off another of his inventions, the movie camera. Thus, the morbid can now view Topsy’s untimely end on YouTube:

Edison tried to make the common term for electrocution “being Westinghoused,” but you already know how well that caught on. AC won out in the end, but Edison’s electric chair invention lives on. The elephant’s legacy lives on as a statue at Coney Island, and the fire that burned the theme park down is referred to as “Topsy’s revenge.”