Topsy the Elephant is Electrocuted (1903)
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s January 16th. This day in 1903, film of the electrocution of an elephant, Topsy, is being viewed in kinetoscopes across the country. Topsy was executed on Coney Island a few weeks earlier.
Jody, Niki, and Kellie discuss how the story of Topsy’s death lands at a moment when there are lots of changes in the way Americans thought about electricity, corporal punishment, animal rights — and how the death evokes the spectacle and bloodlust of the lynching era.
Sign up for our newsletter! We’ll be sending out links to all the stuff we recommended later this week.
Find out more at thisdaypod.com
This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.
Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories.
If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com
Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Our website is thisdaypod.com Follow us on social @thisdaypod
Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia. |
| 0:07.0 | My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:10.0 | This day, January 1903, Topsy the Elephant was electrocuted to death on Coney Island. |
| 0:18.0 | Listeners, I should say, you know how sometimes in the intro to this show, I give the intro and then I say something like we've gotten a number of requests to do this episode and we're finally getting around to it and you probably hear that and you're like oh yeah you know it makes sense that they finally gotten around to like the compromise of 1850 or the time someone threw a shoe at George H. W. Bush or whatever. |
| 0:39.0 | But folks, this is one of those episodes and we actually have gotten a number of requests to do the |
| 0:45.1 | time that Topsy the elephant was electrified to death on Coney Island, maybe by Thomas Edison, |
| 0:52.2 | but I guess thank you listeners for multiple numbers of you |
| 0:56.2 | thinking this is a good fit for our show. I don't know what that says about us or you or all of us together |
| 0:59.9 | But here we are like this is on you. |
| 1:02.0 | This is not us. |
| 1:03.0 | Some of them are like yeah you know that makes sense we're going to do this and then it's like well okay |
| 1:08.0 | the people have spoken but actually as it happens the people in their |
| 1:12.3 | infinite wisdom have suggested we do an episode |
| 1:15.0 | that is about a really interesting moment because it does unlock all sorts of cultural and political |
| 1:20.3 | themes about the era because video of Topsies execution was distributed widely to be viewed in |
| 1:26.7 | coin-operated kinetoscopes. |
| 1:28.8 | So this is an early example of mass media and of course we can pin this to a moment in history where corporal punishment is in |
| 1:36.0 | wide use in this country not to mention that this story was lost for many years |
| 1:40.3 | and then rediscovered and then was framed kind of as being about something that it isn't really about so there's a sort of historiography angle to it as well. |
| 1:48.0 | So lots of themes here to discuss and here to do that as always are Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter |
| 1:55.2 | Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. I did mention |
| 2:01.1 | that this was taped and distributed at the time the video is still floating around to either of you |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -801 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.