Ancestry Magazine

An Elephant Never Forgives
On 4 January 1903, Thomas Edison killed Topsy, an elephant at Coney Island whose penchant for peanuts had been replaced by a vengeance for her trainers, and who, people would argue, might have had it coming.

Edison had no personal vendetta against Topsy. Edison was involved in a standards war with George Westinghouse over which was better—Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC) or Edison’s direct current (DC).

Edison’s DC power had a problem—his Pearl Street Station in New York City could light a square mile of New York, but it would take hundreds of such stations to light the whole city. Westinghouse had adopted an AC motor invented by Croatian immigrant and former Edison employee Nikola Tesla, and the plan was to put giant power plants outside cities and transmit power to the cities over wires.

Edison’s strategy was to discredit AC by building it up as the more dangerous option. To do so, he electrocuted cats and dogs using AC. He suggested that New York State use AC for capital punishment, even recommending they rename the electric chair the “Westinghouse Chair,” and refer to the act as “being Westinghoused.”

When Topsy’s owners decided that she had to be put down, they planned to hang her, but the ASPCA objected. Edison saw an opportunity for a PR stunt, got permission to electrocute Topsy using AC, and gave her 6600 volts.

But despite the behavioral study in the electrical resistance of elephants, there were some clear technical advantages for AC, and Edison’s generator lost the standards war. People said it was impossible, but Westinghouse and Tesla made power at Niagara Falls, and used it to light Buffalo (the town, not the animal) 25 miles away. By 1910, Edison had sold Edison Electric to General Electric, who cross-licensed AC equipment from Westinghouse.

Bet They Were Something Before Electricity
The availability of relatively cheap and unlimited power changed the world. At first, electrical power was used for large-scale industrial purposes like mills and city lights. Then it was used for mid-level purposes such as the electric elevator, which made tall steel buildings practical. The electrical storage battery allowed people of any physical condition to operate a gasoline-powered engine, instead of requiring the strength to manually crank the engine, helping us quickly move from place to place. And the electric furnace led to the creation of alloys such as aluminum, and its plethora of uses.

But Topsy’s fate didn’t start with Edison—its origins go back centuries to around 600 B.C., when Thales of Miletus rubbed a fur blanket with a fossilized resin called “elektron” (Greek for “amber”) causing a spark and enabling the amber to pick up lightweight objects. For the next 2,000 years, no one understood why amber reacted this way—it was simply written off as a magic property of amber. But in 1752, Benjamin Franklin used his kite to prove that the spark from amber and lightning were actually the same thing (and Franklin went a step further, inventing the lightning rod and reducing the fire losses from lightning after that).

In the 1770s, Scottish inventor James Watt patented improvements to the steam engine. This power would later be used to run mills more efficiently than water power. Around 1790, an Italian doctor named Galvani noticed that a severed frog’s leg twitched when touched with a knife. Most boys would have fun ani mating dead frog’s legs—you could scare girls awfully easily if you knew how to do that. What Galvani’s motivation was for twitching dead frogs, I couldn’t say. But another Italian, Alessandro Volta, reasoned that it was a connection between two metals that made the frog move. Volta went on to prove that electricity could do more than just make a spark—it could flow like a stream and through a wire.

Return of Edison
But long before electricity ran through wires, an Italian named Peregrinus, circa 1269, discovered that round magnetized stones would make metal needles align with Earth’s poles. Voila, a compass. (Also an easy way to impress children with your powers—“See this? I can make the needle move by ordering it around! Needle? Show me…North!”) For a while, people used compasses, but they didn’t understand how they worked. Finally, in 1600, William Gilbert wrote De Magnete (Latin for On the Magnet), detailing everything known about electricity to that point in time, including an observation that the earth was a giant magnet, like Peregrinus’s stones.

More than 200 years later, in 1820, experiments showed that running a current through a wire would cause a compass to orient to the wire, instead of to the magnetic north pole. Being able to rig a compass and make its needle move was a cool trick and was modified for use in convincing séances.

In 1831, English scientist Michael Faraday thought that if electricity could produce magnetism, then maybe magnetism could produce electricity. At the same time, American schoolmaster Joseph Henry was making magnets more powerful than ever before, in Albany, New York. Henry’s work was a foundation for much electrical invention that came after, but Henry believed that this knowledge belonged to all men, and he never made any effort to patent an invention or idea. Today, Faraday is credited with the first working electrical motor, and Henry is forgotten. Well, he’s forgotten in terms of electrical invention. He’s remembered as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, where he served as the chief executive from 1846 until he died in 1878. He used telegraph reports to create the first weather map, he worked to improve the lights in lighthouses, and he assisted Morse in the renewal of his patent for the telegraph. He told Alexander Graham Bell that his idea for using an electrical current to send voices over wires was a good one and encouraged him to pursue it.

Topsy Today
Topsy’s death might not have had the impact that Edison hoped for—AC, not DC, is the primary means of power delivery today. But, because of the work of Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and Topsy, among others, electricity began to serve even the most decentralized purposes including powering labor-saving devices for our homes. Washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, electric drills, dishwashers, electric ovens, and electric mixers soon entered the home, and radios and televisions weren’t far behind.

So next time the lights go off while you’re researching your family history via your computer, light a few candles and try to think about how your ancestors lived in the old days. Dig through a box of old family photos and look for electrical devices to see if you can tell when they were introduced. Poke around in the attic and see what you can find with a cord on it. Think about the timelines of your family’s past, and how power changed their lives. And keep thinking about all of this when the lights come back on.

Beau Sharbrough is a noted speaker and writer on genealogy and technology. He can be reached at www.rootsworks.com.