Odd this day
The day a man who owned a circus decided the best way to publicise it would be to take an elephant on a suspension railway, and Tuffi the elephant responded by charging about in the suspended carriage, breaking through the side and falling 40 feet into the river below.
The Wuppertal Schwebebahn opened in 1901, in that fin-de-siècle era of Big Metal Things (Eiffel Tower, Blackpool Tower…), and carries people around Germany’s 17th largest city to this day. You can see it working in this splendid, odd little film that plays on a loop in New York’s Museum of Modern Art:
Like many suspended monorails, it straddles roads and rivers. In this case, Wuppertal stands on both sides of the banks of the Wupper, and the carriages sway gently over a fair amount of water — which would prove to be fortunate, not least for one four-year-old female pachyderm.
It all started well. She cheerfully queued for a ticket.
Apparently, circus owner Franz Althoff bought himself a second class ticket, and four for the elephant. All five, however, came with restrictions — one of which prohibited the movement of animals except guide dogs and police dogs. Ah, well…
One of the German websites which tells this story says this wasn’t their first stunt, but it does seem to have been a little more adventurous than previous outings:
Althoff regularly did circus marketing with Tuffi. In Oberhausen, the ringmaster and the elephant had taken the tram to the town hall a few days earlier. There were only incidents that ranged from harmless to entertaining — the elephant enjoyed a house plant and a bouquet of flowers for dessert and urinated on the carpet.
Der Spiegel agrees, and adds a few more fine details:
Because she was so trusting, Franz Althoff often used the young female elephant in advertising appearances. In the Ruhr area she drove a tram, she brought beer crates to the scaffolding for construction workers in Solingen, and in Duisburg she sailed across the water on a harbour tour. Marketing talent Franz Althoff always announced these performances in advance, reliably ensuring a crowd, photographers — and attention for his circus.
Even if something went wrong, Tuffi was forgiven. In Altötting she was so thirsty that she drank a holy water fountain empty. In Oberhausen she initially took the tram to the town hall without any problems, but then ate a house plant and a bouquet of flowers and then relieved herself by splashing on the town hall carpet. Althoff smiled, paid the damages and was happy about the advertising effect of the appearances. But Tuffi’s biggest PR coup was yet to come.
Yes, on this day 74 years ago, someone decided to load an elephant onto a suspended railway, and also to pack the gondola with reporters and photographers. Either they, or the swaying of the carriage, freaked out the great grey beast, and she smashed her way through the wall of the car and plunged ten metres into the river.
Der Spiegel says there may have been various contributory factors:
It gets hectic: First the elephant barely fits through the narrow door of the cable car, then significantly more photographers and onlookers crowd into the car than had been agreed … The doors close and the train starts to move, squeaking and rocking.
The crowd may have been
so big that Tuffi wanted to turn around to see what was going on behind her
…or…
Bad memories probably came back to the animal: “As a little elephant, she was stuck in a box during her transport from Asia.”
…and, apparently…
Tuffi climbs onto a bench — and it collapses … Then everything happens very quickly: Tuffi makes two attempts, breaks violently through the window and outer wall on the left side of the train and falls around ten meters deep into the Wupper, just a few hundred meters behind the boarding stop. What remains is a demolished monorail carriage, several injured journalists and a destroyed camera.
There are no real images of the moment, because everyone was rather busy at the time going “oh, shit, there’s a huge hole in the side of the carriage and an elephant has just fallen ten metres into a river”, which is why I used that photomontage at the top, which I believe is available on postcards in the town (I have not been to Wuppertal myself).
I have, however, been to MoMA in New York, and seen the film embedded above — and I’ve been to YouTube and found this version, juxtaposed with a colour film from 2015:
Anyway, Tuffi apparently fell into a muddy bit of river and was unharmed, finally dying at the age of 43 in 1989 (outliving Franz Althoff by two years). She did better than the five people who died when two carriages fell into the Wupper in April 1999, but that is (apparently) the only major accident in the edifice’s history.
In 1950, Althoff was fined for “bodily harm” (presumably to the human passengers), and “the head of the city’s traffic department” was fined “for negligently endangering transport”. Tuffi was back in the circus that night, and continued to appear on trams. Just no more suspended monorails.
