Topsy

I have a fascination with Elephants. One of the goals of the daily writing practice is to contribute towards a biography of famous elephants.⊕ I think it might take a while before I get to that point, so I’ll probably revisit the stories of different elephants a fair bit on the way. This piece is really intended to be a very very brief introduction to Topsy This came about after reading about Topsy.

Topsy became quite well known recently because of the way she died. It’s often reported that Topsy was killed by Thomas Edison, to prove that AC electricity was more dangerous than DC electricity. This is absolutly untrue.

Topsy was killed in 1903. The war of the currents was done and dusted by 1890, by which time all electric companies were using AC systems, Edison himself had completely divested of all electric company shares by 1897.

But this is not about Edison. This is about Topsy. ⊕ Edison posthumously continuing his preternatural ability to take credit for stuff that he had no hand in.

Topsy had gotten a reputation as a bad elephant. But how? A lot of this might be to do with the killing of James Fielding Blount. Blount was a circus nerd. He was hanging out at the forepaugh circus where Topsy worked, possibly trying to get a job. One day he got drunk on whiskey and wandered amongst the elephants throwing sand in their faces and offering the whisky. When he got to Topsy he burnt her trunk with his cigar.

Understandably furious, Topsy reacted ⊕ Elephants use the tips of their trunks very much like humans use fingers. They’re very very sensitive. picking up Blount, hurling him to the ground and crushing him dead under her foot. From this point on Topsy was marked down as a “bad elephant”. Newspapers reported on incidents in her past, killing a trainer in Waco, Texas and another in Paris. Apart from the newspaper reports about Blount there’s not evidence of this happening and it seems quite likely that these stories were invented to sell the myth of Topsy as a savage beast.

A year later this reputation would be her undoing. But that’s writing practice for another day.