Jumbo
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:JumboElephant.jpeg Jumbo (1861 - September 15, 1885) was an African elephant, born in 1861 in the French Sudan from where he was imported to France and kept in the old Zoo Jardin des Plantes close to the railway station Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris. In 1865 he was transferred to the London Zoo, where he became famous for giving rides to visitors. It was the London zoo-keepers that gave Jumbo his name — it is a slightly garbled version of the word jambo, which is Swahili for "hello".
Jumbo was sold in 1882 to P. T. Barnum, owner of "The Greatest Show on Earth", the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Estimated to be 3.25 metres high in the London Zoo, it was claimed that Jumbo was approximately 4 metres tall by the time of his death. Jumbo died at a train station in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, where he was crushed by a locomotive. A statue at the site commemorates the tragedy. Image:Jumbo2St.jpg Jumbo's skeleton was donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Jumbo's hide was stuffed and traveled with Barnum's circus for a number of years. In 1889, Barnum donated the stuffed Jumbo to Tufts University, where it was displayed until destroyed by a fire in 1975. In honor of Barnum's donation, Jumbo became the Tufts mascot.
As a result of Barnum's publicity the word "jumbo" is now synonymous with "large" or "huge": a large hot dog sausage may be called a "jumbo hot dog"; the Boeing 747 is known as the "Jumbo Jet".
See also
- List of historical elephants
- The Greatest Show on Earth: A movie based on that circus's story.
- Jumbo mortgages