the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE 21
male Indian elephant, was going to be euthanized because she had killed
one of her handlers. (This was not Topsy’s first homicide, though from all
accounts it may have been her most justifi able. She attacked the handler,
according to many reports, after he fed her a burning cigarette.) Special
scaffolding had already been built to hang the pachyderm, but animalrights
advocates stepped in to prevent that spectacle.
Edison’s reasons are far from clear, but the inventor decided to offer
his services as both executioner and documentarian. Edison, never a
slouch at publicizing himself and his inventions, may have been trying to
promote electrocution nationwide as a means of execution, or perhaps he
was simply hoping to use the public fascinations with electricity, elephants,
and death to introduce the public to his latest creation—the motion picture.
Whatever his reasons, Edison knew from experience that a certain
type of spectacle would guarantee public attention.
And so, on a gray January morning, Edison set up his crude movie
camera in the then-unfinished Luna Park section of Coney Island, right in
front of the gallows. Word spread and a crowd began to gather, eventually
swelling to about 1,500 people. Around 1:30 p.m., park employees led the
six-ton Topsy, wearing copper-lined sandals, onto the platform. An Edison
company employee attached electrodes, and final adjustments were
made. Around 2:45, Edison started his camera and somebody threw the
switch. Six thousand volts of alternating current shot through the elephant.
Smoke wafted from where the electrodes met her leathery skin,
and her knees buckled. Within ten seconds, Topsy was history. “The big
beast died without a trumpet or a groan,” reported one newspaper, the
Commercial Advertiser. The New York Times later called the event “a
rather inglorious affair.” Looking back in a 2003 newspaper article, Dick
Zigun, the proprietor of the Coney Island Museum, described Topsy’s
death as “a seminal moment” for electricity, film, and public entertainment
that kept Coney Island “at the forefront of popu lar culture at the
turn of the century.”
Edison is said to have taken his film on the road as part of his con-