Introducing James Bailey, the Circus Showman and His Dazzling Electrical Lights
In the history of lighting, names such as Edison, Franklin and Tesla, as well as Faraday and Volta, are often and rightly cited. But do you know that a circus showman—perhaps the Greatest Showman—deserves some credit, too? James Bailey of the Barnum & Bailey Circus fame afforded many Americans their first experience of interior electrical lights.
Table of Contents:
- Bailey’s career in the circus
- Bailey and a circus with generators and lights
- James Bailey, American circus legend and lighting pioneer
- Bailey in the final analysis
- James A. Bailey timeline
It’s important to contextualize the circus, which fell out of favor when the humane treatment of its menagerie of animals became contentious. Not that long ago, America’s mass traveling entertainment came to town on a train. With it came many Americans’ very first sight of electrical lights.
“Picture this,” one author writes in a recent historical paper, “in a small town in 19th century America, a train stops at the station, whistling smoke with a rumbling steam engine. Out disembark a troupe of acrobats, knife throwers, lions, and elephants, all clad in colorful costumes. The circus has arrived. This scene was well-known throughout the 19th century, especially in the United States.”
“From their origins in ancient Rome to our modern times, circuses have thrived…The 19th century was a time of social upheaval, not only in performances but also in technology. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was the last ingredient needed to create the traveling circus in its most popular form. The invention of the steam engine, which powered modern trains, changed everything. Technological advancements facilitated communication and transportation. The Industrial Revolution allowed the circus to hop from one city to another…People, from owners to performers, may have created those spectacles. But without the technological advancements of the nineteenth century, the 19th century circus as we know it would have never been as popular as it was during its heyday. The most famous circus in all of 19th century America was the Barnum and Bailey show. While one of its founders, Phineas Taylor Barnum, born in 1810, is the more well-known of the two, the circus could never have seen the light of day without his business partner, James Anthony Bailey, born in 1847.”
Mr. Bailey was not a born showman. He wasn’t even born a Bailey. According to a 2018 televised PBS series on the circus, Bailey, the youngest of four brothers, was born James McGinnis in Detroit. His parents died when he was eight years old. Jimmy, as he was known, was sent to live with a much older sister named Catherine, who brutalized the boy.
Though Jimmy’s father had left an estate of $20,000, the sister was designated as his guardian. “Instead of being treated as a ward for whom comfortable provision had been made,” he later told the New York Times, “I was made to work like a dog. On the slightest provocation, I was whipped. My guardian had boys of my age. For their misdeeds I was punished. I was kept working so hard that I was always late at school, so I was continually being whipped by the teacher and kept after school. Then, for being late in getting home, I was whipped again.”
Jimmy fled the house when he was 12, though not without first formulating a means of permanent emancipation and escape. PBS reports that the next time Jimmy went swimming with friends, he left a pile of his clothes on shore, slid into the water and disappeared. Everyone assumed that he had drowned. As one biographer wrote, Jimmy emerged elsewhere, “slipped away and trudged down the road, barefoot, broke and alone. Jimmy wasn’t sure where he would go or what he would do. But he knew one thing: he was not going back home.”
On the contrary, he made his own way, finding work in fields and horse stables, getting hired at a farm where he made $3.25 a month plus room and board. Jimmy’s job—this was before the Industrial Revolution—was to follow a scythe wielder to bind the cut wheat into sheaves. “It was very hard work for a small boy,” Bailey later recalled and he objected for a simple reason: “Another boy, doing the same work as I was, was getting $6 a month, which was not fair,” he said, because Jimmy was the better worker.
Eventually, he ended up in Pontiac, Michigan, where he was hired as a hotel bellboy. At the hotel, he met guest Colonel Fred Bailey, an advertising salesman for a traveling circus who had arrived in Pontiac on June 17, 1861. Jimmy begged Col. Bailey to hire him. That’s what Col. Fred Bailey did.
“Riding around in a buggy,” PBS notes, the boy “plastered towns with posters, announcing upcoming shows. He soon developed a keen sense for the local conditions that guaranteed circus success. As another circus man once said: ‘any fool can start a circus. It’s the smart showman that knows where to put it.’ Like so many, Jimmy found a family under the big top. He even changed his name to honor the man who’d brought him in.”
The escape plan had worked. Though Barnum would get most of the credit for popularizing the circus, James Bailey continued to run the Greatest Show on Earth successfully for 15 years after Barnum’s death. Bright, self-educated, intelligent Bailey, like his namesake, did so by relentlessly searching for each new opportunity and the newest innovation.
When the electric lightbulb emerged as an invention, Bailey was the first in the world to use lights inside a circus tent.
Bailey’s career in the circus
Bailey’s industrialized business practices formed long before he’d teamed with Barnum in 1881, however. As biographer Gloria Adams writes in James A. Bailey: The Genius Behind the Barnum and Bailey Circus:
“…By 1876 [Bailey’s pre-Barnum circus] had three acres of canvas, employed 4,000, spent $200,000 a week to feed man and beast, and put down three tons of sawdust at each venue. [The] ‘Palace of Wonders’ sideshows included three tents: a theater with 50 ballerinas, ‘living curiosities,’ and a black tent with lighting and mirrors that included such marvels as a disembodied head smoking a cigarette.”
Bailey and a circus with generators and lights
Lighting uniquely captivated Bailey’s interest in that particular circus, according to Norris Schneider, an American historian in Zanesville, Ohio, where Bailey applied and mastered his techniques: “Bailey became part owner of the Hemmings, Cooper and Whitley Circus,” Schneider wrote. “A few years later the ownership rested solely in the hands of Cooper and Bailey [and] it was Bailey, who, while running this particular show, introduced electric lights in circus tents.”
This is a small, mostly unreported, detail in U.S. industrial and lighting history. Given the ubiquity, influence and popularity of the circus, which was welcomed in the 19th century, it is nevertheless significant. As the American Experience series on the circus noted in 2018:
“Bailey continued pushing his show into uncharted territory. Before American cities had electric street lighting, Bailey’s circus was illuminated by the new technology. Never one to miss an opportunity, the showman sold tickets for a tour of the generator to crowds who’d never seen electricity before.…”
Adams’s biography of Bailey offers evidence of his enthusiasm for electric lights; she notes that, in an advertisement teasing the historic circus merger in 1880, promotional copy heralds: “Barnum and Bailey join circuses! Three rings! Electric lights! The Greatest Show on Earth!”
On an industrial-themed website, Hannah Jennings affirms Bailey’s early role in developing lighting technology:
“In 1881, the merged circuses had many acts under contract so it had to expand to three rings. The new circus had a 40-piece band. The daily nut, the amount to break even, was a fortune: $4,500. They did three shows a day when in cities. There were 21 fabulous electric chandeliers: people were invited to see the generators. The sideshow boasted that there were no wax or stuffed figures or ‘cheap panoramic effects.’”
James Bailey, American circus legend and lighting pioneer
Equestrian Josie Demott Robinson wrote in her autobiography that “Mr. Barnum was the advertiser who loved the limelight, who rode around in the ring, and announced who he was. But Mr. Bailey was the businessman, content to be invisible…And interested only in the success of the show.” Bailey was known for possessing a logistical genius in transporting people, animals and equipment. He hired detectives to travel with the show and protect the circus audience “from grifters and thieves.” Bailey, born on the Fourth of July, secured the first elephant born in the U.S. and, in 1880, was crucial to obtaining Jumbo the elephant in London, which launched Barnum and Bailey in earnest the following spring in Madison Square Garden.
Barnum famously asserted, “The public likes to be humbugged.” James Bailey’s entrepreneurialism was more refined; he once said that the circus ought to “give the people the best…and they’ll reward you.” When P.T. Barnum died in 1891, Bailey ran the three-ring show until his death in 1906.
Bailey in the final analysis
The Circus on PBS notes that Bailey died of erysipelas—a strep infection of the skin for which there was no treatment—at the age of 58 in his Mount Vernon, New York home. Buried in the Bronx, in New York City, he’s considered one of the titans of the circus, which, pre-dating mass electronic entertainment, indelibly marks one of America’s first major displays and applications of lighting.
James A. Bailey timeline
1847: James Anthony McGinnis born, July 4, Detroit, Michigan
1849: Father, Edward McGinnis, dies, October, of cholera
1855: Mother, Hannora McGinnis, dies, August 1. James goes to live with his sister, Catherine Gordon
1859 or 1860: Runs away from home
*1861: Joins the Robinson & Lake Circus/changes last name to Bailey
1863: Becomes a sutler’s clerk for the Union Army during the Civil War
1866: After the Civil War ends, returns to circus life as an agent for William Lake’s circus
1868: Marries Ruth Louisa McCaddon
1870: Becomes part of the Hemmings & Cooper circus
1873: Buys out Hemmings
1875: Goes into partnership with Cooper
1876-1878: Takes Cooper and Bailey show to Australia, New Zealand and South America
1878: Buys Great London Circus and Sanger’s Royal British Menagerie
1880: Baby elephant “Columbia” born in captivity with Cooper & Bailey Circus
1881: Forms partnership with P. T. Barnum and James L. Hutchinson
1882: Buys Jumbo from England
1886-1888: Retires and builds his mansion, The Knolls
1888: Returns to work as an equal partner with Barnum
1890: Buys Adam Forepaugh Circus
1891: Barnum dies, April 7
1894: Bailey becomes sole owner of Barnum & Bailey Circus and forms management agreement with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show
1896: Buys one-third of the Sells Brothers Circus and takes B & B show to London
1898-1902: Takes show on European Tour
1904: Signs agreement with Ringling Brothers Circus to divide sections of America for touring
1905: Sells one-half ownership in Forepaugh Circus to the Ringling Brothers
1906: Bailey dies at The Knolls, April 11
1907: Ruth Bailey sells the Barnum and Bailey circus to the Ringling Brothers
1960: James A. Bailey inducted into the International Circus Hall of Fame
1991: James A. Bailey Inducted into the Circus Ring of Fame, Sarasota, FL
*Though many sources cite 1860 as the year Bailey left Pontiac, Michigan, with the circus, the Robinson & Lake Route Sheets record that the circus didn’t play in Pontiac until 1861.”
—biographer Gloria Adams, James A. Bailey: The Genius Behind the Barnum and Bailey Circus
Sources: Circus Music Historical Society; James A. Bailey: The Genius Behind the Barnum and Bailey Circus by Gloria Adams; Les Standiford for Literary Hub; “History of Circus: From Ancient Roots to Controversial Sensation,” by Marianne Plasse, The Collector; Hannah Jennings; Zanesville Times Recorder; Historical Marker Database; The Circus (American Experience on PBS).
Editor’s note: this article is part of the Legends series on great minds in lighting, industrial design and architecture. Can you think of a person who merits scrutiny in the history of lighting? Tell us why—include the individual’s name and your reasons—he or she ought to be considered a legend in the Language of Lighting.
