Charles Cros, poet-inventor-visionary

                                                                 Image: victorugo.blogspot.com

In 1877, Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, self-publicist and notorious elephant assassin (1) invented a sound reproduction audio contraption called the phonograph. 

Or did he? Was it perhaps - as some claim - the poet, inventor, surrealist and visionary Charles Hortensius Emile Cros that gave the world this new invention in sound recreation?

                                             Image: L'Independent (France)

Charles Cros was born 1st October 1844. A precocious boy, at the age of 16 he was teaching Hebrew and Sanscrit, and two years later was a Professor of Chemistry. 

His imagination and genius for invention was unstoppable. At the Universal Exhibition of 1867 he presented his automatic telegraph system. He proposed a solution to the problem of processing photographs in colour. And on 30 April 1877 he delivered to the French Academy of Sciences a sealed envelope containing a document describing a procedure for the ‘registering and reproduction of phenomena perceived by the ear’. He gave his invention the poetic name of Paleophone - Voice of the Past.

                                   Image: jeanpaul.legrand.free.fr

Poetry, indeed, was in his soul. He was friends with Paul Verlaine, and with Arthur Rimbaud, who Verlaine once shot with a revolver in a moment of drunkenness. He rubbed shoulders with Manet, Renoir and Sarah Bernhardt. And in one of his surreal and visionary moments, he became convinced of the existence of large cities on Mars and Venus, and tried to persuade the French government to construct a parabolic mirror in order to communication with our extra-terrestrial brothers and sisters.

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Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud seated on left (1872)

But it was his Paleophone that most preoccupied him. He tried to find financial backers, but without success. On 10 October 1877, an article in a publication La Semaine du clergé renamed the invention 'the Phonograph'. But rumours were circulating that the famous Edison was also developing a system for recording sounds. Did he see the article in La Semaine du clergé? That modern-day Repository of All Human Knowledge, Wikipedia, says not. But Charles was taking no chances.

He rushed to the Academy of Sciences and requested that they open at once the sealed envelope in order to make public his indisputable claim to the invention. The envelope was duly opened on 8 December. But sadly it was two days too late, for the great Thomas had already given the first public demonstration of the recording of a human voice. Then on 17 December Edison registered his patent.

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In the years that followed Charles became more emerged in his poetry. He gave public readings of his poems, and many decades after his death in 1888, one of his verses, Sidonie a plus d’un amant, was recorded by screen icon and tireless campaigner for animal rights (elephants included) Brigitte Bardot.

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What happened when Topsy the Elephant met Thomas the Edison...

On 4 January 1903, Western death culture reached new depths of depravity when it executed an Asian elephant that had killed its keeper after the keeper had fed it, for his idle amusement, a lighted cigarette.

The magnificent and unfortunate animal, that its human slave owners named Topsy, had already rid herself of two of her tormentors of the Forepaugh Circus, in retaliation at being forced to perform humiliating and degrading tricks for the diversion of a decadent public. Her punishment was to be committed to the penal institution known as Lunar Park on Coney Island. 

It was here, at Lunar Park, that Topsy dispatched her third victim, her human jailer that had given her a lighted cigarette to smoke, grabbing him in her trunk and hurling him to the ground, proof that the man, though an imbecile, was still good enough to have his brains dashed out.

Topsy was condemned to death as a common criminal, and Thomas Edison, the celebrated inventor, volunteered to deliver the coup de grâce by grilling her with 6,600 volts of electricity

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Edison already had an impressive track record in toasting live animals with his invention. Cats and dogs had been dispatched. And on 6 August 1890, his first human victim, William Kemmler, was fed 1,000 volts, then 2,000 volts, before being declared dead. 

It was an attempt by Edison to prove the superiority of his system over that of his rival, Westinghouse. Alas, poor Thomas, it didn't work, as the Westinghouse current proved the more commercial.

An estimated audience of 1,500 ghoulish voyeurs gathered to watch the public execution of Topsy. A cord linked to the park's power supply was put around her neck. The executioner pulled the lever and Topsy toppled to the ground. After several seconds she expired and the crowd went away satisfied.

Edison had the event filmed and released the film later that year under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. It played to cinemas throughout the United States.

But 'the whirligig of time brings in his revenges' [Feste the Clown in Twelfth Night], and revenge for Topsy came in 1944, when Lunar Park was swept away by fire.