Thomas Edison is known for his impatience, tirelessness, and intellectual rigor. But was he also an animal abuser? Popular culture has long attached Edison to the strange incident of an electrocuted elephant (above)—but though it’s an image that might be a handy way to describe the driven scientist, it’s also a widespread myth.

Topsy the elephant has a history as strange and compelling as Edison’s own success story. Implicated in the deaths of several trainers and attached to a strange incident in which her trainer rode her down the streets of Coney Island while roaringly drunk, she gained a reputation as a bad elephant by 1914. Topsy was put to work helping move large objects at a construction site, but when she threatened a group of workers, Coney Island’s Luna Park decided to put her to death.

What followed was described in the New York Times as “a rather inglorious affair.” Topsy was led to a makeshift scaffold with ropes and fitted with electrodes, fed carrots containing cyanide tablets and shocked with 6,000 volts of A/C current. For good measure, her executioners used a steam-powered winch to strangle her with nooses of rope. She was then dissected.

So why was Topsy’s death associated with Thomas Edison? Contemporary accounts don’t mention Edison’s presence at the execution. The myth seems to have arisen for two reasons: the electricity at Topsy’s execution was hooked up by workers from the Edison Company, a New York power company that Edison was not associated with at the time. And the elephant’s death was filmed by the Edison Motion Picture Company—another Edison-associated business that did not directly involve the inventor.

Over the years, the Topsy execution has become linked with Edison’s name despite little evidence he had anything to do with it. Perhaps the link between electricity and a doomed elephant is just too tempting to people who recall Edison’s bitter rivalry with Tesla over electrical currents—a decade before Topsy’s demise.