Playback by Elizabeth Massie Page A

couple tentative whacks of the hook, Burke drove Topsy forward as the assistant handlers, two scrawny boys Edison didn’t know, followed along on the other side. The elephant walked clumsily in the copper-lined wooden sandals Burke had buckled over her feet, but she didn’t stumble. The chains that hung from her leather harness swung back and forth, making a disturbingly cheerful
chinging
sound, like Christmas bells a few weeks late in the ringing. The crowd, separated from the elephant and generator by a makeshift wooden fence, gasped and stepped back in unison as if Topsy might grab them up with her rubbery trunk and dash them to the ground. For that was what she had done to one of her handlers. Picked him up and slammed him to his death, head first. She might not have killed the man had the handler not thought it funny to feed her a lit cigarette moments earlier. But no matter. The handler had been her third kill in three years. The other two deaths were men who had been a bit too aggressive with the bull hook. Likewise, they were lifted, dashed, and squashed.
    Furious at the animal for hurting the circus’s reputation and thinking he might have a new way to make some quick cash from the morbidly curious, Forepaugh declared they would hang Topsy to death from a crane. “Let her swing! Let her dance on air!” he wrote in a flyer that was posted around the Island for all to see. But the ASPCA heard of his plans and kicked up a huge fuss, declaring such an execution would be inhumane. “How long would she hang?” they demanded to know. “How long would she suffer? Doesn’t Forepaugh know that animals are sentient creatures just like humans, only mute and unable to share their thoughts and fears?”
    “Damn those animal lovers to hell!” Forepaugh had declared. “How dare they take my rights from me?” But he gave in, not wanting a riot of any kind on his doorstep,and began his search for another dramatic way to get rid of Topsy. She was too big to shoot. She was too massive to stab.
    It was then that Edison stepped up, offering to down the elephant in a most graphic and entertaining manner—frying her with an electric generator that produced powerful alternating current. Edison didn’t make the offer out of the goodness of his heart, though. In fact, he had two solid reasons for hoping his offer would be accepted.
    The first reason was business. Alternating current had been developed by his competitors in the electric market—Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse—and Edison feared competition against his already established direct current technology. And so he started a campaign to prove how dangerous alternating current was and how everyone should stay with direct current.
    To back up his claims, Edison had sent his technicians on tours across the country where they would scoop up stray cats, stray dogs, and old farm animals, and present a side show for the local citizens in which the animals were hooked to generators of alternating current and killed by electrocution. As the switch was thrown and the current coursed through the hapless animals’ bodies, the technician would shout out his prewritten, rehearsed claims: “This is the electric current that Mr. Westinghouse wants to be brought into your stores, your public buildings, your schools, churches, and even your homes! Do you see the danger you would be facing with alternating current? Do you know that even now, in the prison in Auburn, New York, this very current is being used to execute murderers in their electric chair? We must keep Thomas Edison’s direct current. It is the only safe choice!” The audiences would nod in enthusiastic agreement, but then wander away, forgetting everything except the thrill of the kill and the smell of burned fur.
    A film of Topsy being toppled by alternating current would make the point as strong as it could be made. If an elephant, the largest land mammal on Earth, could be put down by alternating current, then