Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

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 ring 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 6,600 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, to the birth of Coney Island.

Daly¿s book starts with the 1796 arrival of the first elephant to set foot in America. She was called simply the Elephant, and while her performance didn¿t 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 wasn¿t until the years after the Civil War that the circus in America boomed, thanks especially to magnates P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh, who 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, Forepaugh understood that it was the first American-born child of an immigrant family that often offered a real anchor. So he 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 wouldn¿t sell her for $20,000. Barnum, who had been offered the same elephant from a dealer in Hamburg, called his bluff, saying he¿d 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 he¿d 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.

Rich in fantastic detail, Topsy 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 crowd 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 lighting¿s 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, the elephants met violence with violence, killing trainers or breaking free, a