Did Thomas Edison really kill an elephant to spite Nikola Tesla?
As most people fêted as a genius by American history, Thomas Edison was a bastard coated bastard. One who seemingly knew nothing about science and everything about using patents to fuck over his competition.
Infamously, one of the figures said to have been most thoroughly sidelined by the man credited with inventing the lightbulb was Nikola Tesla. Over time, a familiar narrative has taken hold: Tesla, history’s devoted pigeon enthusiast, cast as the misunderstood genius who might have changed the world if not for the influence of Thomas Edison. According to this version of events, Edison resented Tesla’s indifference to profit and moved to curb his more idealistic ambitions, particularly his interest in free and universal energy.
One of the most enduring stories about the hate-boner that Edison had for Tesla supposedly comes from the war of the currents in the 1890s. At the time, Edison was in a pitched battle with fellow tech baron George Westinghouse over whose electric power transmission method would be adopted by the United States at large. This was a war on two fronts for Edison, as Westinghouse was using Tesla’s induction motor patent as the basis of his power distribution network, so if Edison could win this war, he’d be destroying two competitors at the same time.
Edison’s method of discrediting Westinghouse and Tesla was to go on a media blitz about how unsafe their Alternating Current system was. The story goes that Edison commissioned a film showing an Alternating Current system killing an elephant, namely a famously bad-tempered circus elephant called Topsy, who’d killed a few punters who’d mistreated her. Honestly? Good for her. Thus, Edison gets pilloried further by history for literally using the death of an animal to smear a competitor’s name.
That’s the story anyway, but is any of it actually true?
Did Thomas Edison really kill an elephant to spite Tesla?
Well, sort of.
The truth is that The Edison Company did film the murder of Topsy the elephant and distributed the 75-second clip around the country. After that, the story gets a little bit murky.
For a start, it wasn’t just the electricity that killed the poor pachyderm; it was also the carrots they laced with cyanide to help get the job done. Most importantly, though, despite this story getting caught up in the war of the currents and thus, Edison’s lifelong conflict with Tesla, the company’s namesake probably had nothing to do with it.
After all, the war of the currents was in the late 1880s and early 1890s. While part of Edison’s campaign against his rivals was how supposedly dangerous their equipment was, this was not part of that particular campaign. Principally because this film was shot in 1903, ten years after he fairly comfortably lost the war of the currents due to Tesla’s Alternating Current technology and Westinghouse’s existing infrastructure, meaning that they could transmit electricity over long distances more effectively than any other service.
If you think that means he “lost” somehow, don’t worry. Edison managed to finagle his way into securing a bunch of contracts in the aftermath of the war of the ecurrents. The kind that, for some reason, meant that the Edison Company also picked up truckloads of cash from Westinghouse’s hard work. Thus, the reason that his company put a poor elephant to death was quite simply because of the attention it would get them. Topsy had become a national sensation for defending itself, and the company wanted to put it to death for a quick buck.
Never forget, you do not have to lie about billionaire dickheads. All the stuff they really did is bad enough.