By Morris Dean
I suppose you regard inventor Thomas Edison more or less as I used to: you sort of revere him, or have a pretty favorable feeling toward him.
But maybe you don't know, any more than I did before watching the 40-minute 2013 HBO documentary An Apology to Elephants (directed by Amy Schatz), that he used an unwanted circus elephant to demonstrate the danger of alternating-current electricity. He hooked the elephant up and promptly transformed the stately beast into a tower of toppling electrocutional light and smoke. It's a horrific segment of archival black-and-white footage shown in the documentary. Nice, Thomas E., how instructive....
