The history of the battle between elephant ghosts and machines

© wikimedia

Leviathan Press:

I personally have always had a fascination with giant creatures, whether they are whales in the ocean or elephants on land. Perhaps due to the length of time they have evolved, I always feel that they are rare and mysterious creatures on this planet.

Rare: An elephant used to haul heavy weapons during World War I. Judging from its size, it must be an underage Asian elephant. © Alamy

In ancient times, there have always been historical records of using elephants in warfare. The Persian Achaemenid Empire used war elephants obtained from India in several battles. The Battle of Gaugamela between the Persian Empire and Alexander the Great was probably the first time Europeans faced war elephants: the 15 war elephants arranged in the center of the Persian army array brought great shock to the Macedonian army. So much so that Alexander felt it necessary to sacrifice to the god of fear on the eve of the battle. However, later generations believed that war elephants were actually unreliable weapons that could only scare and deter the enemy. Because war elephants are generally very sensitive, they are easily affected by strange sounds or other reasons and lose their minds, fall into madness and flee in all directions.

In any case, we humans seem to have always had overly complex emotions towards elephants: admiration for their size, worship of their strength, and sympathy and pity for their miserable situation when they strayed into human society. However, rather than sympathizing with elephants, aren’t many people just projecting their own situations?

On September 15, 1885, Jumbo the elephant was killed in a collision with a freight train, 25 years after he was captured in Sudan. In this article, Ross Bullen takes us on a haunted journey to explore the stories of other elephants' "collisions" with machines. Whether they happened in adventure novels, abandoned roadside inns or in the science of the mind, these stories reveal the hidden anxieties in the hearts of people at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

"Lucy the Elephant," a sculpture by James V. Lafferty, in Margate, New Jersey. Photo taken circa 1933 or later. © www.loc.gov

In his 1886 book The Ivory King, the American naturalist Charles Fredrick Holder wrote of the elephant’s current state with a conservative slant, acknowledging that the elephant was “the true king of all beasts, the largest and most powerful land animal in existence, an inexhaustible source of wonder and astonishment to all men” but also that they were “at the end of their ways”.

Holder believes that prehistoric hunting and the modern ivory trade are the main factors in the gradual extinction of elephants. He also mentioned that "the British are advancing rapidly into the East. They are building railways in India and introducing various progressive facilities that symbolize advanced civilization. People once relied on elephants to complete various large-scale projects, but now they have become insignificant. The extinction of elephants is only a matter of time."

Despite his sympathy for elephants, Holder applauded the technology that replaced them, arguing that it was “a progress” and a sign of “the advance of civilization.” Elephants may indeed be “king of the beasts,” but they would be defeated by steam locomotives and other Western technologies.

The analogy between elephants and machines is common in our 21st century consumer society, with words like “mammoth” (and, of course, “Crimson”) being used to market motors and countless other products. But the analogy really gained popularity in the 19th century.

This was the time when the automobile and motorcycle were introduced, and when European colonists were expanding into Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, where elephants were native. From a Western perspective, elephants were strong and impressive, and they performed the work that was performed by machines in Europe and North America. At the same time, however, the colonists had no doubt that modern technology was superior to the animal labor of elephants.

Among other things, they believed that machines would eventually replace elephants, and that the species might eventually become extinct. In his 1854 novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens famously compared the “monotonous up and down motion of the piston of a steam engine” to the “sad and frantic motion of the elephant’s head,” a comparison he repeated four more times in this relatively short novel.

For Westerners, elephants are like "technology" owned by the colonies as "Others", and therefore easily become the fantasy objects of Western power and domination. At the same time, the words "sadness" and "madness" are often used to describe elephants captured by humans, which also reflects the anxiety of Victorians about powerful, uncontrollable and destructive industrial machines.

This illustration from an unidentified newspaper shows Gimpel, "the glory and pride of England," being sold to the circus run by P.T. Barnum in 1882. © collections.ctdigitalarchive.org

In addition to the symbolic "collision" described by Holder, there are often real collisions between elephants and railways. The most famous example is the death of the elephant Jimbo in 1885.

When he was 4 years old, Jimbo was taken from the African savannah by a group of hunters. They killed his mother and then trafficked him to Europe. © Cult of Weird

Holder devotes an entire chapter to describing Jimbo, including how he was captured in Africa and sold to Europe, how he spent many years in the London Zoo, how he was sold to Barnum's circus, how the deal caused outrage among the British public, and how he eventually died in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada.

At that time, Jimbo completed his last performance in Barnum Circus. When he was led to the train car carrying him, a freight train suddenly rushed towards him unexpectedly. Although the conductor tried his best to brake, the train still hit Jimbo. His 6-ton body derailed the locomotive and two carriages, and he died 15 minutes later.

In a new edition of his autobiography published in 1889, Barnum called Jimbo's death a "tragedy known and shared by all," and said he had received "hundreds of telegrams and letters expressing condolences."

People pose with the dead elephant, Gimble, after he was struck by a train in St. Thomas, Ontario, on September 15, 1885. © collections.ctdigitalarchive.org

Jimbo's death sets off a series of strange physical (and possibly intangible) remnants.

In 1985, to commemorate the centenary of Campbell's death, the city of St. Thomas erected a life-size sculpture of the elephant. The sculpture is made of steel as the skeleton and cement as the main material. The sculptor is Winston Bronnum, a self-taught Canadian artist who is famous for creating giant animal sculptures for passers-by to admire.

Winston Brennom's statue of Campbell was unveiled in 1985. © Laurence Grant

In addition, after Jimbo's death, his elephant skin was stuffed into a specimen and continued to travel with Barnum's circus. Finally, the specimen ended its years of wandering and was collected in the Natural History Museum opened by F. T. Barnum at Tufts University, and became the mascot of the university.

A small bottle of remnants left by Campbell. © dl.tufts.edu

The specimen was consumed by fire in 1975, and all that was left of the huge body was a tail (which was accidentally broken and is now stored in the university's collection) and a small pile of ashes, which is stored in a "Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter" bottle and is still stored in the office of the athletic director of Tufts University.

Jinbao's material "legacy" exists in two opposite extreme forms: a heavy statue at one end and a handful of ashes at the other. This tension between the flesh and the non-flesh is also very obvious when Jinbao died.

At the time, Barnum's circus exhibited Jimbo's skeleton, hoping to profit from his corpse. More than one writer has expressed the idea that death might in some sense free Jimbo from his bulky body. In the pages of Chicago's The Current newspaper on September 26, 1885, there was a joke: " It may be said that his soul has less trouble walking in this world than Jimbo himself. "

Indeed, in the decades since his death, his ghost has haunted the media. In the following pages of this article, I will take you on a surprising journey with the ghost of Jumble, in children's adventure novels, abandoned roadside inns, weird electrical experiments and spiritual science...tracing the "collision" between elephants and technology in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A specimen made from Campbell's elephant hide, transferred to the Barnum Museum of Natural History at Tufts University in 1889. © wikimedia

A colorful circus poster attracts people to see "Jimbo's huge skeleton". It was created between 1885 and 1890. The poster has the following yellow text: "This huge and majestic skeleton comes from the largest and most noble animal in the world. This is the first public exhibition of elephant skeletons in the world." © wikimedia

We first come to India in 1867, just ten years after the famous Indian National Rebellion. At that time, a group of European explorers in Calcutta attempted to cross northern India. Among the team was an engineer named Banks, who invented a new travel tool: a steam-powered elephant. This elephant, called a "steam house" or "behemoth", could pull two carriages (one for the explorers and one for their servants) to travel over various terrains and carry enough fresh water.

Jules Verne’s 1880 novel The Steam House is a relatively unknown work, but it actually adds a very interesting example of the elephant-machine analogy. In the India of The Steam House, the steam engine has replaced the elephant, and even the elephant itself: the steel “behemoth” is bigger and taller than the real elephant, and outshines the latter. Maucler, the novel’s narrator, recounts the shock of the local natives when they first see the “behemoth”:

"First, a gigantic elephant appeared, evidently pulling the carriage behind him. This monstrous creature was twenty feet high and thirty feet long. Its progress was steady, conscious, and mysterious, and filled those who gazed at it with awe. Its huge feet rose and fell with mechanical regularity, and as it changed its pace from a slow walk to a fast one could see no sound or gesture from the rider.

The natives were so shocked by the giant elephant at first that they didn't even dare to approach it, but kept a safe distance. But when they finally dared to get closer, their surprise turned into admiration.

They heard a roar similar to that made by this creature in the jungles of India, and from time to time, a puff of steam emanated from the elephant's trunk.

It's a steam-breathing elephant!"

Illustration from the 1881 English translation of Jules Verne's The Steam House. © archive.org

To the natives of Calcutta, the Steam House looked like a real elephant, except for its massive body (twice the size of an average Indian elephant), its "mechanical" movements, and the suspicious steam that emanated from its stationary trunk (which seemed a little unusual).

Although Mauclair declared that “they are all very good at moving,” he also admitted that the Steam House was clearly a machine, “a marvelous piece of fraud… encased in steel,” a fact that would soon become apparent to anyone who dared to look closely. A hybrid of Western technology and Eastern biology, the Steam House seemed to have an uncanny effect on the Indians who saw it, who were unable to determine whether it was a familiar, useful elephant. The scene was part of a well-worn formula in which Western technology fills the gullible natives with shock and awe.

Indeed, Verne’s novel is almost entirely driven by this colonial fantasy: Europeans and their mechanical giants gallop across Indian soil and eventually conquer it, whether it is its wild animals (including real elephants) or the local kings or even Nana Sahib (also known as Nana Saheb Peshwa II), the leader of the rebels at the Siege of Cawnpore, who, in Verne’s imagination, has been living in anonymity for 10 years.

More than 20 years later, in 1903, Frances Trego Montgomery wrote a children’s novel, The Wonderful Electric Elephant, and published a sequel, On a Lark to the Planets, the following year. He imagined an elephant machine similar to the Steam House, but in keeping with the latest technology, it was powered by electricity.

Cover of The Magic Electric Elephant. © archive.org

Moreover, in Montgomery’s story, the “upgrade” is reflected in the expansion of the elephant’s reach: the children first travel around the world and then travel through the solar system on this magical electric beast. Although Montgomery’s story is more fanciful than Verne’s, both are based on the same basic formula, that is, to deceive and surpass the stunned non-Westerners through technology.

At the end of The Amazing Electric Elephant, Montgomery has his two child protagonists (Harold and Iona) paint the electric elephant to trick the people of Siam (now Thailand) into believing it is a colorful auspicious elephant (or "chang pheuak" in Siamese).

“Each of them took up a watercolor brush, and began to work, and in a few hours the work was done. Now before them stood a beautiful elephant, and in place of the plain, ordinary, mouse-colored elephant there was a beautiful, rose-pink elephant,” Montgomery wrote. Next, the children had the “chief hunter of the Prince of Siam” “capture” the elephant and bring it to the Prince’s palace, where “two rows of boys, black as ebony, with silver trays on their heads” bathed, fed, and adorned it with gifts and luxurious jewelry. Montgomery set up this scene for two purposes: first, the lavish treatment given to the so-called “auspicious elephant” by the Siamese monarch would make readers laugh; second, it was also a spectacle that readers had already seen many times: the worship of Western technology by indigenous peoples from a colonial perspective.

Book cover for On a Lark to the Planets by Francis Trego Montgomery, the sequel to The Wonderful Electric Elephant. © archive.org

Electricity and elephants weren’t just in Montgomery’s novels in 1903. In January of that year, Edison Studios released the infamous film Electrocuting an Elephant , a 74-second film that chronicled the electrocution of an elephant named Topsy at Coney Island.

The name "Topsy" comes from a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Topsy was captured in Southeast Asia and sold to Adam Forepaugh's circus, and then to Sea Lion Park. The new owner thought she was no longer useful and could not be resold, so he planned to hang her for public entertainment. Under the protest of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), this horrific plan was cancelled and replaced by feeding her carrots laced with cyanide, strangulation, wearing shoes woven with copper wire and passing 6,600 volts of high voltage electricity.

News photo of the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant, taken on January 4, 1903. Behind Topsy, an "electric tower" is under construction, built by some architect for Luna Park. © wikimedia

The film opens with a scene of an elephant trainer leading Topsy to the "execution ground". After that, the camera switches and Topsy appears in the center of the screen. She struggles once and tries to get rid of the copper wire shoes on her feet. After that, she stands quietly until she becomes stiff for a moment, and sparks explode from the bottom of her feet. A few seconds later, Topsy is stiff all over, surrounded by smoke, and then falls down.

At this point, about 45 seconds have passed since the film began. For the rest of the film—almost 40% of the film’s total running time—the camera remains fixed on Topsy’s strangely stiff body, and the smoke around her slowly dissipates. At the end of the film, there is another seemingly unobtrusive transition, and a person appears in the frame. He stands beside Topsy and observes her, as if to add a bit of spectacle to the death scene. Then the person walks out of the frame, and the film ends.

In The Fantastic Electric Elephant, Montgomery used electricity to bring a mechanical elephant to life; in The Electric Elephant, a real elephant was killed with electricity. Moreover, the "collision" between Topsy and 6,600 volts did leave something mechanical: a 70-foot-long roll of film placed in a coin-operated Kinetoscope, an early short film player that customers could watch for a fee. The perforated film would slide through the projector's mechanical setup like a train on rails to play The Electric Elephant for anyone who was willing to pay a few coins.

Each time, Topsy would "come back to life" and "die" at the end of the film.

The place where Topsy was electrocuted became the Luna Amusement Park from 1903 to 1944, but it was already an elephant cemetery. There used to be a building called "Elephantine Colossus" here, which was 7 stories high and had a total of 31 rooms. The "Elephantine Colossus" was built to attract tourists and had a hotel, a concert hall and a controversial brothel.

Old photo of the "Elephant" building. © urbanarchive.org

The Elephant was designed by James V. Rafferty and built in 1885. It is an enlarged version of Rafferty's Lucy the Elephant. Lucy the Elephant was built in 1881 near Atlanta and still exists today. The end of the Elephant was a fire, which seemed to predict the fate of the elephant skin specimen at Tufts University nearly 80 years later in some incredible way.

Did someone store the ashes of the burning Elephant in a peanut butter jar? We don’t know, as there are no records. But like the ghost of Jimbo, the elephant-shaped hotel seems to have its own spirit, and has made contact with more than one witness.

Illustration of "The Colossal Elephant of Coney Island" from an 1885 issue of Science American. © digitalcollections.nypl.org

In April 1897, the Metaphysical Magazine published a story called "Strange Visions" in the "Department of Psychic Experiences". It recounted the extraordinary experience of a "Mr. M". He came to Long Island for vacation in September 1896. One evening, after discussing some "psychic and supernatural things" with several neighbors, he and his wife were walking home along the beach. At this time, they suddenly "saw with surprise that the western sky became very bright, which undoubtedly indicated a large fire". After returning home, Mr. M decided to look at the fire from his balcony again, and then he had the following strange vision:

"I happened to be gazing upwards at the sky, and at an elevation of about sixty to seventy degrees, a small white cloud caught my eye. It had a somewhat peculiar shape, and its white and pink colours were unusual. Suddenly, the cloud transformed into a perfect elephant. Because it was so peculiar, I called others to see it, and although I had not shared my thoughts with them beforehand, they all agreed that the shape of the cloud did resemble an elephant. The fire soon disappeared, and with it (or before the fire) the elephant-shaped cloud also disappeared. After that, I did not think about it any more."

Unexpectedly, the next morning, Mr. M read a report titled "The Coney Island Elephant Burns" in The New York Herald. Obviously, this news report gave another possible explanation for the elephant vision last night, so Mr. M contacted the editor of Metaphysical Magazine. Under the story "Strange Visions", the editor-in-chief of the magazine proposed the following hypothesis:

"Many people near the fire were in a state of great excitement. Whether they expressed it in words or not, they only thought one sentence in their minds: 'The elephant! The elephant is on fire!' After seeing the red sky, Mr. M's mind communicated with these people and received their thoughts. After all, the shapes of clouds are vague and only the viewer's mind can give them unique shapes. There is no doubt that the reason why the clouds took on the shape of an elephant was due to the idea transmitted to Mr. M's mind."

Side view of the "Elephant" building on Coney Island, photographer unknown. © wikimedia

Like the ghost of Jimbo, the immovable building, the Giant Elephant, acquires a new kind of mobility due to its "death", becoming something like a telegram, sent from the minds of those who witnessed its destruction, and finally received by the mind of Mr. M. A few years later, in the same place, the elephant Topsy will face a similar fate as the previous two, except that her death is transferred to the celluloid film by the staff of Edison Studio.

Charles Frederick Holder, author of The Ivory King, would not have been surprised by the fact that the world’s elephant population has declined dramatically from the 19th to the early 21st centuries. Perhaps that’s understandable: as these remarkable animals have vanished, people have invented new ways to commemorate them: statues, buildings, motorcycles, photographs, movies, and more.

The irony of this commemoration, however, is that while they mourn the death of elephants, they also cheer on the technology that forces elephants to migrate or brings them extinction. On June 22, 2022, about 200 kilometers northeast of St. Thomas, the first public art exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario was unveiled, featuring a sculpture of an elephant standing on a circus stage, completed by contemporary Canadian artist Brian Jungen.

Brian Jungen's elephant sculpture. © The Globe and Mail

Jungen said he was inspired in part by the story of Kimbo for the sculpture, which is made from a discarded leather sofa and copper. Titled Couch Monster: Torn Heart, Couch Monster invites viewers to consider the tensions and contradictions between its subject and form: a living elephant, perched on a circus stage, looks as if it will move at any second, while the elephant, made from a discarded sofa and solid copper, evokes a state of stillness.

The significance of Jungen’s Sofa Monster lies in its use of unique materials and the Danza subtitle, “Torn Heart,” which openly denounces the way elephants are treated as discarded commodities. The sculpture, or rather the ghost of Kimbo, seems to be saying to us, “My heart is torn apart.”

By Ross Bullen

Translated by Jiang Yi

Proofreading/Sesame filling teeth gap

Original text/publicdomainreview.org/essay/jumbos-ghost

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Jiang Yi on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan

Editor's Note:

In fact, it was not only the indigenous Indians who were shocked by Western steam/machinery at the end of the 19th century, but also the "collision" between the Qing government and Western culture at that time. According to the records of Guo Songtao (1818-1891), the first Qing ambassador to Britain, and Zhang Deyi (1847-1918), the translator, they saw the phonograph and records for the first time in their lives when they attended a tea party in London on May 20, 1878. They not only checked the structure of the phonograph, but also witnessed the recording process of the phonograph performed by Edison himself... Isn't it a bit incredible to think that the Qing people with pigtails were in the same room with Edison, who was about to electrocute the elephant "Topsy"?

Oh, by the way, speaking of elephants, I think the coolest one is the mechanical giant elephant in Nantes, France:

This steampunk-style elephant is 12 meters high, 21 meters long and weighs 50 tons. The elephant can carry up to 49 tourists along the banks of the Loire River. It is also a tribute to Jules Verne, a science fiction writer born in Nantes.