Casket-a-go-go, Part 1

Sure, caskets and coffins are essentially just containers for the dead -- but we stash far more than our corpses inside them. We also pour in a generous helping of human anxiety, hope and magical thinking. In this three-part exploration of Invention, Robert and Joe consider the nature of caskets and look at some of the stranger designs from human history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And what's up. It's October. H If you
are a listener of our other podcast, Stuff to Blow
your Mind, you already know that we have a tradition
on that show of devoting the entire month of October

(00:23):
two subjects of a spooky, ghostly or monstrous variety. That's
kind of our bag, and so we thought we'd give
it a try on this podcast too, because why the
heck not. Yeah, yeah, So, you know, we're thinking of
things to cover, and some of these, some of these
are topics we might may very well cover in the
future without We could do chainsaws, we could do uh
booby traps, you know. But of course the most obvious

(00:45):
one is to consider something about the casket, the coffin, uh,
the you know, something about the containers in which we
entomb the dead, the vessels of our dead. That's right,
And there is more surprising interesting in vation in the
history of this invention genre then you might expect. Yeah,
I mean, because it's a pretty basic concept, right, a

(01:07):
box into which one puts the dead, and then you
put that box any number of places, right, and you know,
usually it's not going to be something that you're gonna
have to, I don't know, revisit, do anything with after
a certain period of time. So it doesn't need to
be a complicated box either, Right, It's just like you're
gonna bury it. So what kind of features does it

(01:29):
need to have? But in that you touched on the
basic human problem here. Like death itself is a pretty simple,
laid out process, it becomes complicated or more complicated through
our human ideas. And therefore even something as simple as
a casket is fine and simple, except people keep thinking
about it, they keep worrying about it and what it represents,

(01:50):
and they pour all of these anxieties into new innovations. Right,
And so I would say this is gonna be one
where the mother of invention is some embination of necessity
and paranoid fantasy. Yes, um, basically the fear of death
overwhelming um necessity and invention, or paradoxically, the fear of

(02:15):
being alive will come back to that. Uh, you know what,
I learned a wonderful phrase while we were preparing for
this episode that I don't think I knew before, and
it's the the disposal of human remains has a sort
of industry term, and that term is final disposition. Be
a great movie franchise, right, I mean, it makes it
sound like this is you reached your final form, like

(02:36):
this is this is the ultimate you. So of course
you want to put a lot of money into how
how you look and what you are poured into. Right.
But also I think of disposition as something kind of
like mood, uh, somewhere between like mood and character trait.
So you could be of like a surly disposition, but
I guess in finality you are of a dead disposition

(02:58):
or you know, just peaceful. You know, it's like I
think they're asleep, right, yeah, now, you know, we always
like to ask the question what came before? So if
we're talking about containers or vessels for the dead, coffins, caskets,
burial vaults, all that kind of thing, asking what came
before is probably gonna be looking at the practice of
human burial before we were using these uh, these containers
or vessels to put people in, and human burial is

(03:21):
actually and archaeologically and anthropologically significant practice in the timeline
of our species because it's I mean, this is one
of those things where it's hard to know for sure,
but it's often taken as a sign of the earliest
archaeologically detectable indications of something like human religion. Yeah, Burial
sites are often a key means of gazing into the
past for starters like this is a way where you

(03:43):
might find a very well, you know, comparatively preserved body
of the deceased, and you can learn things about their anatomy,
how they died, how they lived, what they ate, that
sort of thing. But then also burial customs frequently involved
bearing the individual with artifacts, and those artifacts maybe you know,
more religious in in uh in their scope and may

(04:05):
reveal things about what these people believed. But then they
also might well be artifacts from their daily life tools
they used, weapons they used, etcetera. It's extremely common throughout
human history to bury people with personal effects, as if
they would need these things wherever they were going next.
And that's sort of an indication that, again we don't

(04:26):
know exactly how or when religious beliefs first took shape
and human beings. But when you see, for example, people
putting a bow or or a you know, a grooming
device like a comb or something in a grave with
a person. You can't know for sure what that means,
but it seems to be a sign that the people
of this ancient time and place may have imagined their
loved ones are living on somehow surviving the death of

(04:49):
the physical body, and in some way they might need
this thing again. Right, yeah, and and certainly certainly that
that does become an aspect of many different belief systems,
the idea that there isn't after there is another world
beyond death. I wonder too, how much of it is
just through tool use. You know, when we use a tool,
it becomes a part of our body, you know, it

(05:10):
it updates our body schema, It becomes an extension of
the you know, the barriers between our self and the
rest of the world. And therefore this kind of like
perhaps this is innate idea that the tool that this
individual used every day is not nearly a tool, it
is a part of them. And as they go into
the earth and perhaps into another realm, of course they

(05:30):
have to bring their tools with them exactly, but whatever
is going on there, I mean, when you see humans
from the ancient world from the Stone Age being buried
with tools that they're they're definitely not going to be
physically using anymore. You've got to think that there's there's
something happening in the brains of the people who are
still alive there, whether it's religious or not. Maybe you

(05:53):
could even frame it to some kind of secular sentimentality.
You know, they want to think about the person there,
you know, resting in peace with these items that they used.
Whatever it is, it's it's something that's transcending the mere
utility value of tools, right. It's because like if somebody
dies and they had a favorite comb, and you're just

(06:14):
thinking about pure utilitarian value, you might as well like
keep the comb. You could use it yourself, or you
could trade it for something. Leaving it with a dead
person suggests a sort of second order way of thinking
about life and death. Now, humans and hominance have been
burying they're dead for a long time, of burying with
grave goods for a long time, like tools and clothing
and ornaments, and the Neanderthals buried they're dead with with belongings. Uh.

(06:38):
The date of the earliest known human burials is disputed.
I've seen it estimated that burial of the dead goes
back roughly at least a hundred thousand years or so UM.
But there's so many interesting examples of practices regarding final
disposition in the ancient world that are different than what
we're used to in many of our cultures today, but

(06:58):
are also you can kind of see the through lines
from ancient history until now. One example I want to
think of is the burial practices of the ancient Proto
city of Chattel Hoyak, which was that it was this
early proto city from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Anatolia.
It flourished around seven thousand BC, around nine thousand years ago.

(07:20):
This would be in modern day Turkey. So to to
picture this ancient proto city, you picture all these homes
grouped together, which are each like a boxy pit where
you would the roof would be covered and you'd enter
and leave through a hole in the roof via a ladder.
And then when you're walking around the city, you just
be walking around this flat area on top of the

(07:41):
houses which are all crammed right up in against each other,
instead of having streets between the houses. Yeah, I believe
that this uh, this location has come up on the
show before Yeah, it's a fascinating site. We could do
whole sections. Probably, probably we could do a whole series
on stuff to blow your mind just about Chattel Hoyak,
because there's so much interesting stuff to learn and about
their culture. It's one of the oldest, you know, settlements

(08:03):
of this size that we know about. But the really
interesting thing about the city is that the city itself
and these houses that people dwelled in, it doubles as
a graveyard because it appears that people in the city
of Chadlehoyak would bury their loved ones under the floor
in the houses where they lived, but they would also

(08:24):
sometimes keep parts of the bodies of their loved ones
in the homes with them as like decorative items for
a period of time. For example, some of the remains
from Chaddlehoya show that people would cut the head off
of a dead person's body, presumably again a family member member,
or somebody that you knew or loved, and then they
would cover the head in plaster and use ochre to

(08:45):
paint a face or some other design on the plaster
mask over the real dead person's head and keep that
with them in the house as a decorative ritual item. Meanwhile,
the body would be buried in the floor, under the
hearth or under the bed, and sometimes bodies here would
be placed in some kind of container, maybe like a basket,
a woven basket, or wrapping of reed mats. And of

(09:08):
course this uh, this civilization, they didn't leave behind any
texts or anything. We don't have a holy book from them.
We don't know what they believed, what they believed about
life and death and what happened after death. But it's
so interesting to try to just try to understand from
the physical remains that they left behind. Yeah, because you
can go in various directions there, right, I mean, on

(09:29):
one hand, you can you can face a vision in
which the dead are presumed to still be alive in
some fashion, that the remains still have some sort of
life to them. Perhaps they're still speaking to the people
in some way, shape or form, or it's believed that
they speak to the people, or is it something more
removed where they they know that this is the head

(09:51):
of someone who is no longer alive, but you are
able to to make a testament to that person out
of it. Yeah, it's a truly fascinatingness story. And and
the tidbits that are there are so interesting, so we
should absolutely come back to Chadlahoyac. But this is just
one example of tons of different burial traditions from around
the world that established early on a precedent that respectable

(10:14):
burial was not one in which a body was just
like thrown naked in the soil or left out for
scavenging animals. So there are some cultures in which a
respectable burial is to be left out for scavenging animals.
An example of that would be the sky burial practices. Yeah,
particularly I'm in Tibet, Yeah, where the the ideas of
the body is. Uh, there are a few different modes

(10:36):
of burial in in Tibet, but but this particular mode
would be the ritual um dissection of the body and
then those pieces of the body were then made available
to scavenging vultures buzzards that within consume it. And it's
it's like and it ties into also like the older

(10:56):
animist religion of Tibet. You know, it's the idea that
that your flesh is returning to to these divine creatures,
these creatures of the sky, which I have long found
rather beautiful, right though even though it doesn't line up
with a whole lot of traditions throughout the world that
would say that what what you should do for respect
with the dead body is to sort of hide it,

(11:18):
to inter it, to cover it up, and specifically to
place it inside some kind of container, whether that be
a wrapping of some kind or a special box, right,
which isn't always a possibility in some parts of the world,
particularly if you're in a high rocky region such as Tibet,
where there may not be a lot of soil in
which to bury things. Where there may not be a
lot of uh, you know, a freely available would to

(11:41):
burn uh in order to reduce a body to ash. Uh.
So there are also some environmental concerns taken to account to. Yeah,
that's an interesting point to consider to how like the
bioecology of the region contributes to these cultural practices. But
I mean, I wonder why it's so calm men to
believe that a dead body, again this is not universal,

(12:03):
but why it's so common to believe a dead body
should be placed in some kind of container. Uh. We
don't know exactly what the reason for that is. Uh,
it's pure speculation on my part, but I kind of
wonder if it has to do with a learned cultural
association from daily life in technological societies where items of

(12:24):
value are generally not left out in the open, but
they are stored inside containers. And initially this would probably
be for practical reasons, like to protect valuable objects and
substances from the elements from thieves, from scavenging animals in
the case of foods, like in a grain bin. And
thus you learn over time that, uh, when something is

(12:45):
of value, you protect it inside a container. And this
when you go to buryer deceased relative, you follow that
practical precedent and show that they're a valuable thing by
placing them inside a container. Yeah, I mean a container
is control. It is it is exercise eis in control
um over and against the rest of the world. Be
that container something you put your bread in or your grain,

(13:08):
or be at the container that you put your family
in that you you call your house. Uh. And then
when when death enters into our lives, like that is
a situation where people often feel completely without control. So yeah,
it makes sense that you would turn to this technology
of the container to help, you know, put firm boundaries
on what is occurring. Yeah, and you know, I can't

(13:29):
help but notice how often objects of religious value are
placed inside containers as well, or even over time, the
sacred objects are the containers and on the ark of
the covenant, yeah, exactly, or mythic items like Pandora's box.
Oh yeah. I don't know how much you've seen of
like the preparations for the process of Catholic mass, but

(13:50):
there's a heck of a lot of opening and closing
of containers. There's things in boxes, containers they get taken out,
you know. Uh. Yeah, it's like it's like it's it's
a special old place. Yeah. I mean, all our rituals
really need a good box. You know, because you have
a ritual, you probably have paraphernalia. And that paraphernalia just
can't be left laying around on the coffee table. It

(14:10):
needs a box. Uh and uh. And so it makes
sense that you would you would have a box for
for also the dead as well. Yeah. So of course,
not all cultures put their dead in containers of some kind,
but many did, and over time, some cultures developed extremely
elaborate types of containers for human burial, such as like
the ornate sarcoph a guy for the mummified remains of

(14:31):
pharaohs and other wealthy figures in ancient Egypt. This is
probably the most famous of all the vessels of the dead. Yeah. Now,
Egyptian bombing processes, they span roughly three thousand years of
human history, so it changed a lot during that time.
In fact, you can look at the history of just
burial in Egypt and see it's just kind of like
the evolution of burial in general, because it essentially begins

(14:53):
as pit burials in the hot sand, in which they
you know, just the body is placed in the in
the ground, and then it transforms, and the cosmology that
informs the practices also transform, uh, and it becomes a
matter of continuation of the soul. The tomb is not
just a you know, a receptacle for the body, but
is kind of a kind of like a spaceship kind

(15:15):
of a vessel for for for this journey, uh, into
the afterlife, into the other world. That is. That's you know,
it is rather different than I think, sort of the
modern pop culture idea of a heaven or even a
hell like it was. The the Egyptian afterlife was like
another realm of adventure and intrigue full of trials, and

(15:37):
so you had to be prepared and thus all the preparations,
all these uh uh, these different funeral practices, um, you know.
But but the evolution of ancient Egyptian funeral practices, you know,
puts an increasing demand on the preservation of the biological
body after death, something that's very much a part of
modern funeral practices as well. Um, which which is actually

(15:59):
fairly recent. Yeah, like the modern reintroduction of embalming. Yeah,
it would be interesting to perhaps come back to that
in the future. Now. As far as mummification itself, which
of course, you know, just the drying out of the body,
which can occur either through natural or artificial means. Like
there are examples of of bodies that have been mummifized

(16:22):
just purely because of the environment in which they were left,
or perhaps buried bog bodies and that sort of thing. Yeah.
But as as far as the earliest artificially created mummies, uh,
they seem to date back to around six thousand BC
in the Atacama Desert region of South America, sandwich between
Chile and Peru. And I know you said that it's

(16:43):
artificial mummification. There but that that, of course is like
an ideal type of environment for preservation, like mummification, because
it's what dry and right. Yeah, all right, let's take
a quick break. When we come back, we're going to
talk about confidence. Alright, we're back, all right. Now, we
don't know exactly when humans started using coffins. Some of

(17:07):
the earliest evidence appears to be of like solid wooden
coffins appears to come from different sites in ancient China.
That seems to be something that happened. They're a good bit.
But of course there were sarcopher guy in boxes in
ancient Egypt. Two. Yeah, the Egyptians seemed to have turned
to wrappings, but then baskets and then ultimately wooden caskets
during the pre Dynastic period, and that would have been

(17:28):
u Now a question I have long wondered about, but
I've never asked until now. What's the difference between a
coffin and a casket? I don't know, Joe, what's the
difference between a cock and a casket? With that punch line, Oh,
you expect there to be a good punch line, it's
not a good punch line. The difference is shape, basically, Yeah,

(17:50):
it's shape and design. So as used today, these terms
mean that a casket is basically a rectangular box. Now
that just means roughly rectangular. It can have round to
edges or you know, like angled off edges or whatever,
but it's basically a big rectangle, whereas coffins are more
like that classic Dracula box that you see. It's angled
to be widest at the shoulders and then to taper

(18:12):
off at the head and the feet, so it's got
six sides rather than four. And by doing this you
can actually use less wood to create your coffin, meaning
that the coffin is often cheaper than a casket. Yeah,
and it certainly has become iconic. I remember my my
dad made me one out of probably like balsa wood
or something when I was a kid. Life size, No,

(18:33):
not life size. It's large enough for a Gi Joe
figure the small kind excited but but it was pretty cool,
painted it and everything. Wait, I'm sorry, which one a
coffin or a casket? Uh? It was a coffin Okay,
so wider at the shoulders and wider at the shoulders
to fit a g I Joe. Yea, even though the
g I Joe would mean one size fits all with

(18:54):
a g I joe, they would have have probably been
better off going into a casket. Now, caskets and coffins
are often made of wood, which of course will collapse
over time due to decomposition and break through under the ground.
So another thing that you'll often see and actually you
can see this going way back to ancient Egypt and stuff,
but it's a modern practice as well. Uh. And this
is the idea of burial vaults or grave liners that

(19:17):
are basically the coffin or the casket goes inside these
and they will go under the ground and they hold
the ground up better so you don't get the sunken
grave effect in the cemetery. Yeah. I do love a
good sunken grave effect though, because growing up in really
rural uh Tennessee, we would encounter these. Uh. The region

(19:38):
we were in it was near Kentucky Lake, so a
lot of the people that lived there had had to
leave so that they could flood the area. And so
you found the remnants of old homesteads in the woods
and sometimes they're there there, their graves were there, and
they were almost always sunken. You would find these sunken
graves and these uh and also these uh, these these

(19:59):
twin rows of buttercups that still came up, uh lining
what used to be like a walkway to a front porch.
Oh wow, yeah, that's spooky man. Yeah, hey, it's Halloween.
But certainly, yeah, if you have some sort of more
reinforced container around your wooden your wooden coffin or casket,
you don't have to worry about about the the weight

(20:21):
of the soil pressing down into the rotten casketer or
coffin and creating that sunken effect. Now here's a question, Robert,
while wandering among the buttercups in the sunken areas, did
you ever hear a tiny voice somewhere saying help, No, no, no,
all those voices that had ceased. You gotta admit that

(20:42):
that'd be even spookier, I get, I mean I would, Yeah,
that would be spooky because I mean they would raise
a lot of questions about the whole burial process for sure. Well, right,
but this actually is not a completely unfounded scenario. This
has happened at various times in human history, and however
often it actually happens. People have been obsessed with things

(21:03):
like this happening since you know, for a long time,
especially at certain periods in history, were for some reason
burial alive literature just skyrocketed in popularity, and people got
their mind that like, they couldn't stop thinking about it. Right.
One of the main areas we're gonna look at is
the Victorian era and uh and and there's plenty to
point to there. But we can also go back to

(21:25):
um to really like the first century. See to see
some other examples um consider the first century. See Greek
novel uh Calo by a Cheriton of Aphrodisseus, which Bernard
Laying describes as sort of a Romeo and Juliet tale,
except the two starcross lovers end up marrying each other

(21:47):
at the beginning of the novel, and then he apparently
kills her in a jealous rah. Okay, this is more
of a Greek thing. Yeah, but here's the things that
she's not dead when when pirates bust into her tomb
to rob her grave, they find her alive, and so
they take her back to the ship. They sell her
into slavery. But at the end of the book the
two lovers are reunited, and I guess they forgive that

(22:09):
whole attempted murder thing. But but still it is essentially
a story of premature burial um. And of course there
were there were other um, you know, treatments of similar
things going on at the time. You know, uh, you
know touching, you know, the touching on this idea of
a of a living individual emerging from a tomb um.

(22:30):
I think you can you can look to accounts like this,
and even biblical accounts, so say a Lazarus resurrection, the
primary focus of Bernard Lang's paper, the Baptismal Raising of Lazarus.
You can you can kind of look at these stories
and myths and tales, I think in four different ways.
So on one hand, it could be an account of
someone that was thought dead and buried prematurely. The other

(22:54):
is that it's a ritual of death and resurrection, a
symbolic death and rebirth. One these examples of this in
various cultures, including some traditions of First Nations tribes in
the Pacific Northwest. I think we've talked about that a
little bit on stuff to blow your mind in the past,
and Lane describes traditions from the time of Taraton being

(23:15):
about a symbolic death that one emerges from immune to
or fearless of death, and even baptism itself, the Christian
right of baptism is essentially a symbolic death. I believe
George R. Martin was probably playing with this idea when
he wrote about the devotion to the drowned God Um

(23:36):
in his Song of Ice and Fire books, where they're
essentially doing a baptism, but there's kind of a drowning,
an actual drowning element to it, and you arise, uh,
you know, stronger than before. It's popular story for a reason, right, Yeah,
And so in that we get into also probably the
purely uh mythical folkloreic supernatural resurrections, where the idea is, oh, yeah,

(24:00):
this person died or this god died and then they
came back. And then another way of looking at it
is well, a misinterpretation was made of post mortem movements.
And we'll get more into that later. Okay, So that
would not be a mistaken death that where somebody was
actually still alive, but a real death where they were
mistaken for actually still being alive, yes, or or getting

(24:20):
into that weird case where like, oh we thought they
were alive and then we saw signs that they were
still alive, but then they were dead. Oh and then
of course they were the necromongers and chronicles where there's
this whole right where they essentially or at least the
Grand the Grand Marshal, the Lord Marshall will will venture
into the realms of death and return with supernatural powers.

(24:41):
You'll have no idea the kind of chronicles of Riddeck
Lord that Robert commands. I wouldn't say, let's say that
he is a powerful Riddick universe lor Master. I've probably
seen that that movie more than I should have, uh
put it that way. But but anyway, back to these
just different category worries. I think they do kind of
present all together this idea of the grave as being

(25:05):
this place of ultimately of mystery. You know, it's of ambiguity. Yeah,
it's it's basically uh you know it's it's Strodinger's cat,
right Strodinger's casket, Well you should. Yeah. It's funny because
we often think of the grave is like the ultimate finality.
It's like the you know, the thing above all other things.
It is the state in which all questions are closed. Right. Well,

(25:27):
nowadays we we tend to have more certainty in this
sort of thing. But yeah, you go back, even just
a few centuries to a time where not everything was
understood about about how the human body is, you know,
reacting to different illnesses and injuries. Um, maybe they weren't
very good at checking for a pulse, right, And then
you have a bunch of essentially supernatural ideas of what

(25:48):
death means and how one might come back to it
you have to contend with and what might one might
come back as right now. We mentioned earlier that there
were some periods in places in history where fear being
buried alive seemed to be especially supercharged. And one clear
case here is Europe in the United States during the

(26:08):
Victorian period is like especially I get the feeling in
the English speaking world during the Victorian period, so roughly
the nineteenth century, people were obsessed with the idea of
being buried alive. I think a good case in point
is the works of Edgar Allan Poe uh live burial
or immurement, of course, which means like being sealed up

(26:28):
inside a wall. A similar concept appears in not just one.
I mean you're you're probably thinking of the one work
by Poe, right, the Cask of a monte ado where
the guy the two guys are hanging out and one
leads another guy down into his basement to try some
of the fame demonte ado and then he ends up
walling him inside a room. I think the story never

(26:50):
even even explains what the guy did to deserve it.
There's just some vague reference to some kind of insult
or slight and it really I think it kind of
works better that way. He just leads it to your
imagination and and you know it could be something very
small or something very large, and both both are you know,
our good choices? Uh? For the the horror storyteller, Yeah,

(27:12):
he just he cries out for God's sake montresor and
then nothing else. Um. But so there's not just that
he references immurement or being buried alive or or grave
robbing in multiple stories, just a lot of concerns about
what can happen once you're dead and buried. Uh. And
so I wanted to refer to a story that I

(27:32):
actually hadn't read before we were preparing for this episode.
It's an Edgar Allan post story called The Premature Burial.
Have you read this one? Robert? I don't think I have.
Uh so, I feel like it's kind of anticlimactic, but
the beginning is actually pretty funny. Poe begins the story
by talking about how Quote, there are certain themes of
which the interest is all absorbing, but which are too

(27:54):
entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. So you
leg goes on to point out how it's only because
these horrible events are true that they're worthy of exploring
and writing. Um, so, what's this horrible true thing the
narrator is going to tell us about? Quote? To be
buried while alive is beyond question, the most terrific of

(28:19):
these extremes, which has ever fallen to the lot of
mere mortality, that it is frequently, very frequently so fallen,
will scarcely be denied by those who think the boundaries
which divide life from death or at best shadowy and vague.
Who shall say where the one ends and where the
other begins? We know that there are diseases in which

(28:40):
occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality,
and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly
so called, they are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism,
a certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again
sets in motion the magic unions and the wizard wheels.

(29:02):
The silver cord was not forever loosed, nor the Golden
Bowl irreparably broken, But where meantime was the soul. Wow,
that's really good, because it's really I feel like he's
he's summing up a lot of the ideas and the
the discoveries and the mysteries that were, uh like, we're
at the center of the zeitgeist in that time. Absolutely, Yeah,

(29:24):
these questions of vitality, what is the difference between life
and death? Later on he so he starts from here
to get into a bunch of different stories of basically
of people being buried alive and in coming to horrible
ends or being you know, saved at the last minute.
He also gets into some Frankenstein's territory. He tells a
totally true story of a guy who is dead and

(29:44):
then has resurrected from the dead by a galvanic battery.
So one of the stories he tells, just to give
you a kind of flavor of these stories he recounts
throughout here, is a supposedly true case from the city
of Baltimore about a woman who was the wife of
one the most respectable citizens, a lawyer of imminence and
a member of Congress. So this lady here, she gets

(30:06):
a sudden illness. To all observers, she appears to die, right,
so everybody's like, all right, she's dead. And he tries
to hammer at home by saying, yeah, her face looked dead,
her lips looked dead, they had marble pallor, her eyes
were lusterless. There was no warmth in her body, pulsation
had ceased. And they leave her out for three days, unburied,
and she's just dead, right, nothing. But then he says, quote,

(30:30):
the lady was deposited in her family vault, which for
three subsequent years was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term,
it was open for the reception of a sarcophagus. But
alas how fearful, a shock awaited the husband, who personally
threw open the door. As its portal swung outwardly back,
some white apparelled object fell, rattling within his arms. It

(30:52):
was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmolded shroud.
A careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived
within two days after her entombment, that her struggles within
the coffin had caused it to fall from a ledge
or shelf to the floor, where it was so broken
as to permit her escape. A lamp, which had been
accidentally left full of oil within the tomb, was found empty.

(31:15):
It might have been exhausted, however, by evaporation on the
Uttermost of the steps which led down into the dread
chamber was the large fragment of the coffin, with which
it seemed that she had endeavored to arrest attention by
striking the iron door. While thus occupied, she probably swooned
or possibly died through sheer terror, and in falling her

(31:36):
shroud became entangled in some iron work which projected interiorly.
Thus she remained, and thus she rotted erect Man, He
really paints a horrifying scene there. But you can also,
I don't know if throughout this whole story you can
just tell Poe is getting a thrill about this idea,
like he maybe kind of really wants to be buried alive. Well,

(31:58):
there's also kind of like some a lot of the
burials that are you know, dealt with They're not like
the commoners grave, right, They're the grave of of of
of higher uh levels of society. And I guess there
is kind of a thrill in uh in in that
in that sort of demise, you know, where it's like

(32:20):
you can afford the more stately version of death, but
even your stately version of death becomes this uh, you know,
this this tragic and ridiculous uh situation. Yeah. Well, I
would say there's probably also just a practical reason they're
for for including the rich people's tombs, because they would
be rich enough to have a crypt which you would

(32:40):
have reason to return to later, unlike a normal just burial. Right.
But I also agree that, yeah, you're you're onto something
about like the class dimensions of imagining this kind of thing,
because it also, like you know it, death kind of
levels everything, right, um. And he tells a bunch of
other stories within this short story. Eventually the narrator reveals

(33:02):
that he is obsessed with the topic and that he's
terrified of himself being buried alive and has gone to
all these great links to prevent being buried alive. And
then there's this kind of anticlimactic ending where the narrator
wakes up in a dark, confined place and he thinks
he's been buried alive. Then he discovers he hasn't, and
this helps him get over his fear. And I'm like,

(33:23):
come on, Poe, you can do That's not a great ending.
You can do better like that. The ending needs to
be that that helped me. I've been buried alive. I
feel like that'd be better. I don't know the ending
where he's just like, oh no, I wasn't buried alive
and I'm better now. Yeah, I guess how do you landed? Though,
especially if you're it's written in the age where there's

(33:43):
got to be this uh this you know, presumed means
by which the manuscript makes its way into your hand.
So it's like you would have to write like I
have been buried alive. I am. I am writing this
by candle light in my casket. I do not know
how long the light will last. I will um, I like,
And then how does he get it up to the surface.
I don't know. Burning a candle in your casket is

(34:05):
a terrible idea. You're using up your oxygen. How's he writing?
There is so many quests, see this is exactly why
post said, Okay, I was just I just woke up
in a dark round. It's fine. It was the plausibility, yeah, okay.
So one thing Poe is really dead set on is
that this kind of thing happens all the time. I
think he might be overstating the frequency with which live

(34:26):
burial actually happened at the time, but it does appear
to be at least a real and we'll explore that
in a minute later, maybe reasons why people thought it
happened more often than it did, but it does absolutely
appear to be a real, terrifying obsession for lots of
people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, I
came across the story of the Polish pianist and composer

(34:47):
Frederic Chapan. He was apparently so terrified of being buried
alive that he took precautions that ended up making his
body an object of later science. So I was reading
about this in a news fe teacher from the journal
Nature from seventeen about research that revealed that Chapin's death
in eighteen forty nine was caused by complications due to tuberculosis,

(35:10):
and this was detected from kind of like a swelling
around the heart. How did we figure that out? Well,
we figured it out because Polish researchers had access to
Japan's heart pickled in a jar. I mean, he's going
old school here. This is like the ancient Egyptians with
the you know, putting their uh, their organs into jars.
Oh totally yeah, um and well, so apparently what happened

(35:33):
is that Japan's last words on his deathbed, delivered to
his sister, were swear to make them cut me open
so that I won't be buried alive. And his sister
did as she was requested. She ordered an autopsy in
which Japan's heart was removed and pickled in a jar
of brandy. Well, that's one way to be sure, right,
I mean, he's he's saying like, I'd rather I'd rather

(35:54):
you cut my heart out than me be buried alive.
And in fact, this reminds me of the thing that
I've read about before that's been declared the world's funniest joke,
as determined by the psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University
of Hertford. Yeah, he's got this website laugh Lab where
he was using like an online rating system to try

(36:15):
to discover the joke that had the widest appeal across
different cultures, and according to him, this was the funniest
joke across different cultures. Two hunters are out in the
woods and one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to
be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy
whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps,

(36:35):
my friend is dead. What can I do? The operator says,
calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.
There's a silence, then a shot has heard back on
the phone. The guy says, Okay, now what which obviously?
I mean, we've both heard it before, so we're not laughing.
But I don't know. I do think that's pretty funny.
It's it is. It is a good joke. It is
a solid joke. And to make a joke better by

(36:56):
explaining why it's funny, I mean, it's the same in
going on with Japan, there is like make sure he's dead,
so he would prefer to have his heart cut out
or be shot, I guess, as opposed to being mistaken
for dead. Yeah. I read of some other similar efforts
that were made to ensure that the body was dead

(37:17):
prior to uh to aternament hands. Christian Anderson and Alfred
Nobel both apparently requested that their veins be opened prior
to burial. Uh be better to bleed to death than
to be buried alive, I guess. And you know, it's
interesting how modern embalming procedures tend to remove the fear
of this occurring, because essentially, if you're gonna undergo modern embalming,

(37:38):
a lot of terrible things are going to be done
to your body that if you're still alive. Um, you know,
they're probably going to kill you. I mean they are
going to kill you. You prefer they not happen, right,
So it is interesting that Stephen King wrote a short
story about this occurring, not a premature burial, but a
premature um uh in palming, premature autopsy, titled Autopsy Room four. Uh.

(38:05):
And it's uh. I read it several years back. It's
it's pretty good. It really gives you, it really makes
your skin crawl. Uh. Though I also feel like King,
I think this was a this is maybe this is
written in the late nineties. Uh, younger King would have
probably gone much grizzlier on this. But but this in
this one, he kind of pulls back a little bit

(38:25):
in the same way that Poe does, where it's not
quite as grizzly and dark as it could have been.
There's a story with a somewhat similar premise, though it
goes in another weird direction by Stephen Graham Jones. I
think it's called Welcome to the Reptile House. But it's
one of these things where I guess all horror writers
are going to eventually write that story. And that's what
Stephen King says. He's quoted as saying, at some point,

(38:47):
I think every writer of scary stories has to tackle
the subject of premature burial, if only because it seems
to be such a pervasive fear. Yeah, it certainly is
a pervasive fear. You know what. I was reading another thing.
I was reading a history dot com article I writer
named Becky Little and just as another addition about a
person who in history feared premature burial, George Washington. Apparently

(39:08):
he was terrified of being buried alive and requested that
his body be laid out for three days after his
death just to be sure. Even though that wasn't good
enough for the lady in the post story, right, they
laid her out for a few days, and still she
wrotted erect um. So oh, hey, fun bit of vocabulary.
Do you know what the fear of being buried alive

(39:30):
is called? No? What is it called? I didn't know
this either. It is the word tafo phobia. This is
from the Greek tafos, which means like tomb or grave
uh and related. The science of taffonomy is quote the
study of processes such as burial, decay, and preservation that
affect animal and plant remains as they become fossilized, so

(39:51):
basically fossilization and decomposition in the ground. Now, I think
we mentioned earlier that we think maybe people of the
Victory rein period, posed time and all that who were
obsessed with premature burial but probably believed that it happened
more often than it actually did. And a very likely

(40:11):
reason for this is that back then a lot of
times when bodies were exhumed, some natural features of decomposition
would be mistaken for signs that a person had been
alive after burial. Yeah. Common examples of this include the
appearance of nails or even teeth having continued to grow um,

(40:32):
the release of gas from inside the body, which can
even produce sounds and uh quite recently, a researcher at
an Australian corpse farm. Corpse farms are, of course, so
places where bodies are left in various uh uh you know,
natural states, so that they're uh, their decomposition can be
observed and studied and chronicled, uh generally to better aid

(40:54):
you know, forensics. You know, if you know, like the
timeline of human decomposition, that gives you an enormous advantage
in figuring out like, uh, when a body would have died,
if you find a body out in the woods, etcetera,
or in the water or whatever the case may be.
Exactly so anyway, this particular researcher used time laps to

(41:15):
reveal that a human corpse continues to move significantly for
more than a year after death. What. Yeah, some of
the post imortem movements were expected, but the longer term
movements were a surprise. So what just like a spontaneous
I don't know, like firing or accumulation of salts or
something in the muscles caused twitching or yeah, I mean

(41:37):
they described as especially like the limbs, limbs kind of
moving around you know. And again this is revealed in
time laps, so it's not like a constant, year long
flapping of the corpse. I don't know that it could
produce a scenario like pole uh laid out, where like
the casket is knocked off of the ledge and it

(41:58):
breaks open, and then the the the old woman is
running around and gets her her clo grave clothes, you know,
tangled up around something. I don't think that would necessarily happen,
but uh, it's another example. How Yeah, if you were
going into a grave or a tomb and you were
at all looking for signs that the body had moved,

(42:19):
you might well find them. Yeah, exactly, and often on
theme for this month. Often some of these same signs
that some uh, some people took as uh evidence that
people had been buried alive or also sometimes taken as
evidence of vampirism and other types of undead beliefs, like
the body is larger now it is bloated. How did
it become bloated now? Of course, the real answer has

(42:42):
to do with the decomposition and bacteria breaking down things
inside the body and gas and so forth, but one
explanation could be put forward well clearly, this body has
been leaving the tomb at night and it's been drinking blood. Yeah.
Uh So while clearly we think that this probably people

(43:02):
of the time probably thought it happened more than it
actually did, it did sometimes happen. There are plenty of
documented cases of premature burial where people were alive, they
got buried, and then later sometimes somehow people found out.
A few cases are mentioned by that in that article
I mentioned earlier by Becky Little One is that uh
and and this stuck out at me a case of

(43:24):
an American woman named see Dunbar. Dunbar lived in South
Carolina and in nineteen fifteen she experienced an epileptic seizure
and lost consciousness, after which she was declared dead. They
put her in a coffin. They lowered her into the grave.
Apparently her sister arrived late to the to the funeral
and asked to see her sister one last time. So

(43:45):
they brought her back up out of the grave, opened
the coffin, unscrewed the lid, and then sc Dunbar sat
up and smiled at her sister, and of course funeral
attendees freaked out and they fled, but she was not undead.
She was just gillar Old alive, and she lived. This
was in nineteen fifteen. She lived until nineteen fifty five.

(44:05):
She lived forty more years after this, and it apparently
even still happens occasionally today that people wake up in
morgues or in funeral homes having having been like mistakenly
declared dead. Inteen, there was a case of a seventy
eight year old man in Mississippi named Walter Williams who
was found dead at his home. He had no detectible pulse.

(44:27):
He was taken to a funeral home, and then while
he was awaiting embalming, he started kicking inside his body bag,
and so they took him to a hospital and he
was okay. He survived the incident. Uh The coroner in
the case believed, or at least told the ap that
what had probably happened is that Williams pacemaker had stopped
working and then it started working again. There's even one

(44:49):
really crazy story I came across, though the accuracy of
this account is disputed, but with that caveat, it is
a story of a seventeenth century English woman named Alice
Blunden who was buried alive twice Basically, the story goes
that one night in sixteen seventy four, she drank a
bunch of poppy tea and then fell into a deep sleep,

(45:09):
and everybody believed that she had died. She was buried
quickly and and she stayed buried until a couple of
days later. Children playing near the graveyard heard voices from underground,
and they dug her up, and they found signs that
she had been struggling inside the coffin, but once she
was exhumed, there were no further signs of life. So
they thought, well, we accidentally buried her alive. She struggled

(45:31):
inside the coffin, but then she died, so they lowered
her back down into the grave. Then the next day,
I think the coroner returned or somebody returned to examine
the body, and they found signs that she had continued
to struggle and escape, tried to escape a second time,
but had died again and was actually dead this time.
But the details of the story are in dispute either way. Wow. Yeah,

(45:54):
I mean it's like they say, bury me alive once,
shame on you, bury me alive twice, shame on me.
I would say, if you think you may have accidentally
buried somebody alive once, don't put him back in. I mean,
give it, give it a while. I also like how
this story kind of implies that the children dug up
the body, Like I'm just imagined just wild children and

(46:17):
they're out playing and they're like, hey, I think I
heard a heard a voice from the grave. Dig it up.
I think I think the stories they went to get adults.
But that would be great too, I mean, that makes
a great game, right, But I think it's time to
get to it's okay. So clearly we're faced with this
big problem of people being terrified of being buried alive.
So we've got to get to the invention that solves

(46:39):
this problem. Right, If you are a some Victorian dandy
with a paralyzing fear of being buried alive, what are
you to do apart from just insist that they make
sure you're dead by maybe like stabbing you a bunch
of times before they bury you. Or because we've established
the necessity here, now, to what extent is a true
necessity or just any necessity? Um, you know, we'll leave

(47:02):
that for everyone to decide. But ultimately it doesn't matter.
I mean, there's so there there are plenty of of
inventions that are made. There are plenty of of devices
and uh, and products that are rolled out that aren't
really speaking to a true necessity but a perceived necessity,
and that's enough to to move some product. Of course.
Uh So, I guess we should talk about inventions that

(47:24):
I would say amount to an escape pod from the grave,
kind of like a rocket from the crypt. Right. All right, Well,
before we get into that, we're gonna take a quick
break up, but we'll be right back. Alright, we're back.
So we're going to look at some of the inventions

(47:44):
that were rolled out to deal with this maddening fear
of premature burial, right, and there were quite a number
of these things. For example, if you want to see
some really great illustrations, there's a Vox article from by
Phil Edwards you can look up that collects examples with
illustrations of patents for these are generally called safety coffins,

(48:07):
their coffins that were designed to prevent premature burial. And
so if you look at that article that they even
enhanced a lot of these old patent diagrams with color.
Yeah they're really cool because yeah, they basically took what
was probably just a little sketch, like a black and
white sketch, and they've they've they brought it more to life. Yeah,
so let's look at a few examples from history. Uh,
this one is mentioned in that box article, so if

(48:28):
you want to look it up, you can see the illustration. Uh,
this is one that is patented August sixty eight. The
patent awarded one Franz Vestor and it is basically a
coffin with an escape tunnel an escape hatch. So the
details are that you'd be partially buried with a tunnel
connecting the coffin to the surface, complete with air holes.

(48:50):
And I guess the idea is that earth would be
filled in around the coffin, but not covering the breathing holes.
And if you wake up inside, you've got a few options.
You can pull a lever to ring a bell on
the surface, alerting people to your presence, or you pull
a lever to open a hatch at the top of
this little tunnel, and then you can simply climb out yourself.

(49:10):
The tunnel actually had a ladder inside, and this is
not the only model in which you could ring a
bell to save your life. Actually quite a few safety
coffin patents were equipped with strings or levers that would
operate some kind of sonic alarm, usually a bell that
would ring on the surface above. And I guess presumably

(49:31):
with this one, if you know, you were there for
a few days and nothing happened, then finally they could
like fill it in, cover up the air holes, or
maybe take the hatch off and use it on some
other coffin. Yeah, I mean the degree to which this
was actually a threat, you know, this is actually a
possibility aside, you know, this is a pretty clear cut solution.
All right. If the problem is I might be very

(49:52):
long still alive, well, let's just make sure there's a
way of communicating that knowledge to the surface world should
that occur. Sure. Uh So. Another safety coffin I was
reading about is Le Carnie. This is from eight seven.
It was a safety coffin created by Count Michel de
Carnis Carnikie, who was in the court of the Russians.

(50:14):
Are Nicholas the second and this again, this debut in
eighteen seven. There's a great twenty sixteen article about this
in Mental Flaws by the writer Claire Voon. If you
want to look that up and read more about this thing.
But Robert, I've got an image of it attached for
you here. Uh So, basically, you've got a standard coffin below,
but it's augmented with some devices that go up from

(50:36):
the coffin. Uh So, your coffin is connected via a
pipe to the surface and then up on the surface
the pipe attaches to a spring loaded iron container. Now
inside the coffin below, there is a glass ball dangling
by a string or a chain just over the chest
of the body inside. So if the body moves, the

(50:58):
ball gets nutt and any nudge of the ball triggers
the springloaded contraption above, which opens the container to the
outside air, and this allows fresh air to get in
and get down into the coffin via the pipe. But
it's better than that. So the springloaded device, if set off,
not only lets air in, but it also automatically raises

(51:19):
a flag over the grave and commences the clanging of
an alarm bell. Uh And at the very least, the
opening of the container and the presence of the tube
would allow the person in the coffin to scream for help. Wow,
So this one really has all the bells and whistles. Um.
If anyone out if you've had the experience of shopping
for a casket, uh and uh and I have, Uh,

(51:41):
you know, it is kind of like shopping for a car,
where that we're generally the salesperson will be there to
up sail you on other features and models. Um, which
can be a little you know, needs to say, be
a little uncomfortable. But I can well imagine a scenario
where you're in a room not just normal caskets and coffins,
but safety coffins and caskets, so that you're being up

(52:03):
sold on these features, like, well, you could go with
this model that is our standard model has a bell inside,
but to be really sure, wouldn't you prefer to have
a flag that emerges? And uh? And also this uh,
this powered ventilation system. Well, yeah, this has more practical
plausibility I think than the standard casket up selling, which

(52:26):
is like it is a kind of weird thing, the
idea of them than trying to sell you better coffins
or caskets. I think with the implication right that, oh,
you know, if you really want to be respectful to
your loved one, you'll buy this more expensive thing, which
is sis kind of gross or what what would they
have wanted? You know, it's generally the way of of

(52:46):
of getting into that. And you know, I don't know.
This is one of the problems about or one of
the challenges about any kind of funeral practice, right, is
that one does it for the dead, But it's not
about the dead, right, The dead, except in these rare
scenarios where they're prematurely buried, they're really not affected by
the process anymore. It's all about the living exactly. That's

(53:08):
my point. With the safety casket, then it really is
about the dead. It's like or it's about the the
person in the casket. I guessed it to be clear.
But other than that, yeah, it's generally just the domain
of the the individuals above ground. Yeah. Uh. Now. Another
thing I wonder about though, with Lick Carnice is like,
why did the top container have to be sealed at
all to begin with? I don't know for sure, but

(53:30):
I assume the reason is it's to prevent foul smelling
gases that result from decomposition from wafting up uncontrollably into
the cemetery. So it's like sealed to begin with, But
then if you trigger the ball, then it opens up
and the stuff goes on. Now, of course, this contraption
it instantly attracted attention and positive press. When it was
debuted in eighteen seven, it became known as Lake Carnice.

(53:53):
Carnice Carniki marketed the device in Europe and the United
States to an initially pretty warm reception, and it was
considered affordable even though it's got all this stuff. Supposedly,
the price tag was not crazy. Uh, it was considered practical,
especially since the above ground parts of the event invention
could be reused after a period of course to make

(54:14):
sure that the person was like really definitely dead. And
Carney's Carnegie's representatives and assistance would go around doing live
demonstrations with him, where like they'd be placed inside the
device and then trigger it to signal, you know, to
signal escape. His representative Emil Cami, speaking to the Medical
Legal Society of New York, UH was hyping this thing

(54:38):
up and and said in this speech quote, according to
the declarations made by grave diggers the great cities of
all countries, when at the end of five years the
dead or removed from the common grave, they find in
the coffins convulsed skeletons with fists clinched, twisted and raised
the jaws. In every part of the world, there is
not a community of any importance, town or village where

(54:59):
some memory is now preserved if people buried alive, and
this memory remains like a permanent terror through all time.
So basically just pushing this idea that that we're we're
mostly prematurely burying people. Yeah, it's like it's just happening
all the time. It's just that every graveyard, every cemetery
is just like the muffled screams and whimperings of all

(55:22):
of the people who have been recently buried. Yeah. Yeah,
I think that is definitely overselling it. Uh and Lake Kearnice,
even though it got initially good press did experience some setbacks.
One setback was that apparently during one demonstration and assistant
got stuck inside was like buried in the device to
demonstrate it working, but then it didn't work. I think

(55:42):
the spring loaded mechanism malfunctioned, and I think the assistant
was okay, they got dug out, but obviously this was
not good for press, and so they were actually burying
the individual in the in the in the device, I
think so, at least partially, yeah, because they were I mean,
they wanted to show off how good it was. But
they were also concern earns about false positives because of

(56:02):
the sensitivity of the device. It was pointed out that
it's normal for corpses to swell during decomposition, and such
swelling could nudge the glass ball and trigger unnecessary exhumations, right,
which would be even more traumatic, right right, Well, I mean,
I'm not sure more traumatic than a false negative. I
think a false negative would be worse than a false positive,

(56:25):
but they're both bad. Yeah. Well, I mean if if
if you if you learn O, I've prematurely buried somebody,
and then you dig them up, you definitely want them
to still be alive, right, I mean, it would be terrible,
but hey, at least at least we get we can
we can move forward. But if you just dig them
up thinking they're alive and oh no, they're just they're
not only are they dead, but they're even grosser looking

(56:46):
now right, Uh yeah, And that's a funny thing. I mean,
there were dual fears about death at the time, right.
If people had these fears of being buried alive, but
people also feared sort of feared being seen in a
state of natural decomposition, you know, like that that's a
sort of like acquired cultural fear that like that it's
bad to decompose, and you don't want people seeing you decompose,

(57:10):
the sort of a mummification mentality. Yeah, And that's a
complicated issue under itself, right, I mean, and it is
the natural process. Uh. And it is the sort of
thing that is going to happen to the body. It's
something the body does. Um. But on the other hand,
you know, even even those of us, you know, who
have probably a pretty liberal idea of how they want

(57:32):
their body maintained, we probably don't, you know, probably not
thinking like public decomposition. We've we're probably imagining something a
little more private and something that is even you know,
even if it's a very green burial or decomposition, we
we want it to be you know, private. Um. You know,
the worms may be invited to play pinnuckle on our scalp,
but only the worms. You know. This is just making

(57:55):
me think back to that statement by Emile Cammi is
talking about all the the premature burials as this special
knowledge that's in the realm of grave diggers. So it's
like the grave diggers are like the people, this community
of people who know about all of the premature burials
and like they've got all of the grave and decomposition secrets. Yeah. Well, yeah,

(58:17):
I think there's there's something to that. You know, as
a as a culture removes itself from the physical realities
of death and generally you know, relegates those duties to
a certain class or certain professions. Um, I mean, it
really creates more room for superstitious ideas and and and
just general supernaturalism in general. Like i've i've I think

(58:40):
there is there is a finality to seeing the dead.
And my view is that when we prevent ourselves from
seeing the dead, from having that that physical experience of death,
like we often don't have a certainty that it occurred.
You know, there's always this room for even like not
even like a a sensible doubt, uh or even a

(59:03):
conscious doubt, but there is this idea that the person
did not quite die, as they just suddenly were no
longer in my life, you know. Uh, So I don't
know the asen downs to having a you know, a
robust funerary custom. I imagine ultimately, I guess we should
say finishing up Lake Arnie. It was never really successful.

(59:24):
It never really was employed at wide scale, right, So
it means that the the fear of premature burial never
reached like a real fever pitched where it was actually
resulting in the sale of these devices and on a
large scale. Well, it certainly didn't overcome the negative press
that the device that has had gotten for, you know,
for those drawback reasons. But there were other safety coffin models,

(59:48):
and people did employe actual safety coffins of various kinds.
Um you know, many again had these bells and stuff
that could be operated via a string or via lever's.
Other safety coffin models were operated with levers that were
triggered by the head or the mouth. I think it
was often assumed there that maybe you wouldn't be you know,
you might be in some state where you couldn't use
your hands or something. One really great model invented around

(01:00:13):
your nineteen hundred is in a patent awarded to one W. J.
McKnight for quote electric device for indicating the awakening of
persons buried alive. Uh So, what goes on in this
pattern here is the person wakes up, they close an
electrical circuit which electrically opens an oxygen tank for breathing
and sends an s O S signal through a connection

(01:00:34):
to a wire service. It's just what instantly emolates them
in their their casket, emolates them. What do you mean?
I mean like we have what like oxygen and then
a spark, hopefully those sparks. I don't know. I don't
think it's like a you know, like diving bell kind
of oxygen rich environment. Okay, but still it seems like
I've been through a lot. I've been prematurely buried, and

(01:00:56):
now you're gonna you're gonna, you're gonna blast me with
air and shock me. So well, it's good. It's sending
out the message to you know, whoever is listening. I'm
not sure exactly what where the wire went though, I
do think about Simpson's episode where they they use the
Morse code to send for s O S and then
it connects to a Morse code exhibit in the museum.

(01:01:18):
But you know, you mentioned like a diving bell, like
the bathmosphere, and this does sound a lot like a bathosphere, right.
It's sure, it's tiny container and you're you're lowered down, uh,
somewhere beneath the surface, and then there's there's air, and
then there's an electrical wire for communication. Right, all right, well,
I think we need to call part one there, but
we are not done talking about vessels for the dead.

(01:01:40):
That's right. We will return next week and with the
next episode of Invention, and we will roll out some
more caskets in the meantime. If you want to support
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And hey, if if you're if you are listening to Invention,

(01:02:00):
you are not listening to Stuff to Blow your Mind,
go check out Stuff to Blow your Mind. Because all
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(01:02:21):
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
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