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If you’re still sad about the Coney Island revamps and Astroland’s swan song, here’s something to rub in the melancholy a little. Last week, Wired commemorated January 4th, 1903, the day Thomas Edison decided he needed to electrocute an elephant to prove his point: that DC was superlative, AC atrocious.
Edison had established direct current at the standard for electricity distribution and was living large off the patent royalties, royalties he was in no mood to lose when George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla showed up with alternating current.
Edison’s aggressive campaign to discredit the new current took the macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC (a killing process he referred to snidely as getting “Westinghoused”). Stray dogs and cats were the most easily obtained, but he also zapped a few cattle and horses.
Edison got his big chance, though, when the Luna Park Zoo at Coney Island decided that Topsy, a cranky female elephant who had squashed three handlers in three years (including one idiot who tried feeding her a lighted cigarette), had to go.
Other elephant burial grounds here.
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I read that…! Interesting the things brilliant minds will do sometimes! Don’t people say that sometime smart people lack some common sense?
posted by historyforest on 1-8-2008 at 6:47 am
Didn’t I also read somewhere that Edison made it so that Leon Czolgosz (McKinley’s assassin) would be electrocuted with direct current? I think I read that in one of my Presidential History books, but a quick check of Wikipedia did not back it up.
posted by Witty Nickname on 1-8-2008 at 8:05 am
I think this was on a QI episode not long ago
posted by Ashley on 1-8-2008 at 8:22 am
@Witty-
You are on the right track, but a little mixed up. Edison was the main proponent of DC power. His commerical rival George Westinghouse was the main proponent of AC power transmission (the technology for most of it developed by Nikola Tesla who worked for Westinghouse and hated Edison). Edison wanted his DC power scheme to to ultimately win “The Battle of the Currents”, so he took aims to paint AC power as dangerous. Thus, public displays of electrocuting animals and condemned criminals, Edison wanted to be AC, not DC. It was pretty sneaky and effective, but ultimately the benefit of AC technology was too great and Westinghouse/Tesla’s technology one.
posted by Sid Morrison on 1-8-2008 at 9:19 am