October 21, 2019 • 31 mins
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
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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 we're back with part three of our
exploration of coffin tech. It's death Tech month at at
Invention here. In the last couple episodes we talked about
like special types of coffins. Originally, in the first episode,
(00:25):
I think we focus mainly on coffins that we're designed
to keep you from being prematurely buried and uh and
thrashing about inside your your grave sealed for doom forever. Uh.
And in the last episode we focused mainly on well,
we we looked at length of the fist coffin the
f I s K. How can you say fisk coffin.
(00:45):
That's almost impossible. Yeah, I'm surprised that it sold so
well with a name like that, which was a strange
and elegant invention. And it's all right, But a lot
of what we talked about was stuff to prevent people
from having their bodies stolen by resurrection men or resurrectionists
who took bodies from graves in order to sell them
to medical colleges and dissection rooms and anatomists. Yeah so
(01:10):
so yeah, we talked about ways to to safeguard the
the the casket, the burial ground, putting cages over them,
having specially designed caskets to keep people out, weird gadgets
to go around your neck, etcetera. But now we're going
to get into Uh, I guess what we would call
active measures? Right? A casket or a coffin that fights back. Right,
(01:31):
So what if all the last solutions we are, all
the previous solutions we talked about were just too wimpy.
Here is a possible solution. If you want to keep
people from stealing your corpse, turn them into a corpse
and then they'll have their own and they won't need yours. Uh,
you're talking about a casket that kills. Like if it
were like a seventies or eighties horror film, it would
(01:53):
be instead of being death Spa or deathback the beat
it kills, it would be death casket, the casket that killed.
Maybe that's too close, are it is too on the nose?
So you know, one thing I was thinking about is
if you go by Indiana Jones as your main source,
you would think that the booby trapping of tombs with
(02:14):
deadly mechanisms for crushing, impaling, fatally desiccating, plucking out the
eyeballs of grave robbers was sort of a time honored tradition,
right that this goes back into the ancient world. Lots
of tombs are like this. But the sad fact is
that I can find almost no real evidence of booby
trapped tombs from the ancient world, with essentially one possible exception,
(02:38):
and that only exception is rumors about the unexcavated tomb
of the ancient Chinese emperor Chin chi Huang, which we
already did an episode of our other podcast, Stuff to
Blow your mind about, So if you want a whole
episode on that subject, you should look up our Chin
chi Huang episode. But the short version is some ancient
accounts claim that the tomb of Chin chi Huong is
(02:58):
rigged with weapons and poisons to slaughter any potential looters.
And I've got a description of the tomb here from
the first century b c. Chinese historian uh Sima Cuyon,
and it's translated by Burton Watson. Uh So it goes
like this. It says they dug down to the third
layer of underground springs and poured in bronze to make
(03:20):
the outer coffin. Replicas of palaces, scenic towers, and the
Hundred Officials, as well as rare utensils and wondrous objects
were brought in to fill the tomb. Craftsmen were ordered
to set up crossbows and arrows rigged so that they
would immediately shoot down anyone attempting to break in. Mercury
was used to fashion imitations of the Hundred Rivers, the
(03:43):
Yellow River, and the Young Sea, and the seas, constructed
in such a way that they seemed to flow above
or representations of all the heavenly bodies below the features
of the earth. Whale oil was used for lamps, which
were calculated to burn for a long time without going out.
That is nice. They're like, this is really top shelf
(04:04):
when it comes to tombs. Yeah, and tomb technology. I mean,
you got your mercury, you got your automatic crossbows. Uh,
you'd assume maybe the mercury works kind of like a
toxic poison to fill the room with fumes. Very interesting stuff.
But of course the tomb remains unopened, to which on
one level means I mean, granted, it's unopened for a
variety of reasons. But you could say that, hey, just
(04:27):
just the idea that there are crossbows in there there
in there, that they are deadly traps in there, could
have contributed to its protection over the centuries. That's a
very good point that it could could be like a
mimetic protection um. And of course the thing is, we
don't know if there's anything to these stories, and even
if it was true when the tomb was crafted, I
strongly doubt that like crossbow mechanisms from two thousand years
(04:51):
plus ago would still work today right now. It will
be interesting though, because, as we discussed in that episode
of Stuff to Blow your Mind, we may have actually
we find out what what is going on in that tomb.
There's been talk of of actually entering it or sending
in you know, the drones to explore it a little bit, uh,
you know, as much as exploration, but also to to
(05:13):
make sure that the area is protected, that that the
the artifacts inside are not destroyed in due course due
to say seismic events or something like that. Right, but
maybe we'll send that first drone in and it'll get
hit by a crossbow bowls, you never know. That would
be very cool. But like I said, the kind of
strange and disappointing thing is this seems to be the
(05:34):
only case I can find of a booby trapped tomb
from the ancient world. But I would say, on the
other hand, the general lack of Indiana Jones style traps
does not mean that ancient people's weren't very keen on
keeping their graves undisturbed. Of course, one thing is just
standard type security features like you would find on the
tombs we've already talked about in the previous episodes, you know, seals, gates,
(05:59):
things being filled in, or having huge slabs placed on
top of or in front of them, that kind of thing,
just to keep people out. But the other thing I
would say, picking up on the idea of mimetic security
is like the idea of the mythical curse of the Pharaohs. Now.
Of course, that is more or less a twentieth century
mythical invention, but it does take slight inspiration from reality
(06:22):
in that some ancient tombs are marked with like curses
or warnings against people who might disturb them. I was
reading a really interesting thing about tomb curses on the
National Museum Scotland blog and a post by assistant curator
Dr Dan Potter with a translation that I'll get to
in a second. Uh. Now, when I imagine ancient tomb
(06:43):
curses and warnings and stuff, I often imagine really vividly
violent threats, the like may your teeth turn into bees
kind of thing, or may rot erect, you know, the
the poe poe kind of direction. But as an example
of the kind of two mornings, you're more likely to
actually find an ancient Egypt. Potter translates a stone with
(07:05):
an inscription from roughly between twelve to ten sixty nine
b C. And it's from the necropolis of sheik Abbot Alcerna,
which is in where ancient Thebes would have been. And
this is Potter's translation. It is to you that I
speak all people who will find this tomb passage. Watch
out not to take even a pebble from within it outside.
(07:27):
If you find this stone, you shall not transgress against it. Indeed,
the gods since the time of pre who rest in
the midst of the mountains, gained strength every day even
though their pebbles are dragged away. Look for a place
worthy of yourselves and rest in it, And do not
constrict gods in their own houses. As every man is
happy in his place, and every man is glad in
(07:49):
his house. As for he who will be sound, beware
of forcefully removing this stone from its place. As for
he who covers it in its place, great lords of
the West will reproach him very very very very very
very very very much. That is a stern tongue lashing.
(08:10):
I really like that. At the end though, it's kind
of quaint and polite. It's like, don't mess with my tomb.
I'm dead, I'm a god. Now you go find your
own tomb, become a god in your own way, and please, please, please, please,
please please please don't mess with it. I love this. Yeah,
the excessive use of the very here, because that would
not be considered you know, proper in English, modern English
(08:32):
anyway to to use that. But but really it gets
the point across. The more varies, the better it reminds me.
I had a professor once of I believe it was
a uh, you know, Canterbury Tales classes that I was taking.
He was the professor, and he he liked to stress
that while we're not fond of double negatives now, uh,
there was a time when you would just quote Negate
(08:54):
the hell out of something if you wanted to to
make sure it was negated. They're great old instances of
word repetition in in older languages, especially like from the
ancient world. I think about the idea of holy, holy holy.
You know, it's just saying like, you don't say extremely holy,
you say holy, holy holy. You keep repeating the word
(09:15):
to emphasize the superlativeness of work. But yeah, I like
this idea of thinking about the mythology that surrounds two
warnings is a kind of meme based security invention. And
you could think of that in a religious context as
it's invoked here, like you're gonna upset the gods. Things
are going to be very bad for you if you
disturb this tomb, or you could think about it in
(09:35):
a chin chi huang kind of context where you could
seed stories out with the historians, or you know, just
throughout the culture that there's some mega like killer robots
in this tomb you don't want to go inside. Yeah.
One thing I was thinking about is if you just
have the the curse posted, it depends on literacy for
what to really convey its meaning. Uh. Not everyone may
(09:57):
be able to read, but everyone speaks the language crossbow. Um.
But then again, if you're if it's not just about
making sure that you have a sign posted, but to
spread the word of it, to make sure that the
curse is known, that's a different thing altogether. Well, should
we take a quick break and then come back to
discuss some gorrier, more modern versions of active measures protecting
(10:20):
it to him? Let's do it. Alright, we're back, so
let's let's get into the gory details. Right. So we
were discussing previously that even when ancient tombs have curses,
it seems like they're often less gruesome than you would expect.
But leave it to modern Americans and Europeans to take
(10:40):
tomb security to ridiculously nasty, violent places. As exhibit A,
I would like to read a report from the Stark
County Democrat, which was a Canton, Ohio newspaper, the addition
of January one. This is this article is called a
torpedo blows them up. This is wonderful days pleasuated this
(11:03):
in its entirety Mount vernon January nineteen, So you got
your dateline. A report reaches here that on Monday night,
three body snatchers, while attempting to rob a grave of
near Gan this county met with a fatal accident. The
story goes that while excavating the grave, the Picks came
in contact with a torpedo, which exploded, killing one of
(11:25):
the ghouls named Dipper, and mangling the leg of another
whose name could not be learned. The third part, the
third party was occupying a sleigh as a lookout and
after the accident, succeeded in getting his disabled companion in
the sleigh and driving off. This is one of This
is like a page from you know, Coran McCarthy book
that we can only find the Library of Babble. Yeah, Dipper,
(11:49):
they only know one of their names. And again I
love the description as ghouls because I think we mentioned
this in the last episode. But Google's, of course, are
aditionally monsters of a necrophageous persuasion. They lurk in graveyards
and they scavenge the flesh of the dead. But let's
come back to that other detail that I meagined. A
lot of people latched onto, uh the idea that a
(12:11):
torpedo exploded, right, Yeah, a torpedo blows them up. So
I'm thinking like a torpedo on a submarine, Like did
somebody bury an explosive charge among their great uncle's grave goods,
which exploded when the ghoul's broke in. No, this was
not an accidental explosion of something that happened to be
down there. This apparently was a specific technology designed to
(12:34):
protect graves by maiming and murdering resurrection men and grave robbers. Yeah,
that the coffin torpedo. I ran across this as well.
I was not familiar with it previously, and when I
read it, of course, the thing that entered my mind
is the idea that you have a casket that is
fired out of a torpedo tube on a submarine. I thought, well,
that's what it is. How weird that I've run across
(12:55):
such an invention. But no, it's even weirder. Yes, So
I've come across two major records of booby trap coffin inventions.
Uh so. One is that on October eight eight, an
Ohio inventor named Philip K. Clover received a patent for
what he called a coffin torpedo. It was designed to
(13:16):
quote prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies. To presume
the authorized one would be the end times one, right, Yeah,
it would need to be Jesus or you know, an
accepted uh spokesperson for Jesus, or a sufficiently powerful necromancer. Uh.
The torpedo would be loaded with a shotgun style spray
(13:37):
of lead balls, and then we would be buried facing
up inside the lid of the coffin, and if triggered,
the Coffin torpedo would of course blast the thief and
possibly killed them. Okay, so in a way it gets
even grizzlier because what we're talking about he is really
more comparable with a land mine or or a shotgun trap.
The probably a landmine is the more accepted comparison here. Yes,
(13:59):
actually one person I'm going to sit in a minute
makes exactly that comparison. So another coffin torpedo came out
a few years later. This one was patented by a
guy named Thomas In Howell, also of Ohio. So it
seems like maybe Grave like unauthorized resurrection was happening a
lot in Ohio at the time. Howell says in his
patent that other Grave torpedoes already exist, but that he's
(14:22):
improved the Grave torpedo design by including quote exterior nipples
on the shell and quote pivoted swinging hammers combined with
a rotary disc or collar for engaging the hammers and
by its rotary movement, release the hammers, which constitute the
essential and important feature of my invention. So he's all
about nipples and hammers. Yeah, I don't really have a
(14:44):
clear vision of what these hammers are accomplishing. You can
look up a diagram on the I've got a link
here to the to the patent for you. But basically
it ends up working sort of the same. It's like
a landmine thing. In fact, I was reading a blog
post about this invention by an anthropologist named Katie Myers Emery,
who has written a lot on like a Burial of
(15:04):
the Dead, traditions and stuff, in which she says that
Howell's model was really more like a landmine than a gun.
But she also quotes a contemporary advertisement for one of
these grave torpedoes. I think it's for Howell's model, which
reads sleep well, sweet angel, Let no fears of ghouls
disturb thy rest. For above thy shrouded form lies a
(15:26):
torpedo ready to make minced meat. If anyone who attempts
to convey you to the pickling vat I think it's
really also drives home that the use of the word
torpedo has has shifted some in our in our usage.
I think so too, because I think of essentially an
underwater missile, like a run for Red October or something.
(15:46):
But I love this this pitch here, sleep well, sweet angel,
let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest. It's it's
good copy, but it's also not catchy. I mean, I
feel like the Howell's model needs a catch your jingle,
Like they won't use me for science. I'd rather stay
here and rot. You know. The other thing I'm thinking
is that at this point in our history, like an
(16:08):
undisturbed grave is so normal, you know. I feel like
I almost I want to attract the ghoules, like it
would kind of make my death more of a celebration.
But it's just just a thought. Yeah, why not have
another boring burial like everybody else, you know, why not
get things of popping around your grave? Uh So. In fact,
the strangest thing of the story is that this torpedo
(16:31):
was not even the first lethal trap for grave robbers
of the Resurrectionist age. It seems that since the eighteenth century,
there had been what are known as cemetery guns. Uh,
that's not a trick name. That just means guns used
for cemeteries. So I found a link to one in
particular being auctioned at Southeby's in January of sixteen. It
(16:54):
is an eighteenth or early nineteenth century flintlock gun, originally
made out of ash would steel and wrought iron by
the Jurgenson Machine Company of New York. I've got a
picture of it for you here, Robert. I think this
gun being sold at auction is one of the same
ones I've read about elsewhere, being displayed at a museum
called the Museum of Mourning Art at Arlington Cemetery in Pennsylvania.
(17:19):
And so this gun would have been positioned on a
swivel mount and then it would be mounted at the
site of the grave that needed to be protected, and
then it would be fired by trip wires. So you'd
place trip wires that linked to the triggering mechanism, and
if somebody pulls the trip wire, if the tension you know,
goes up on the wire, it triggers the gun and
(17:40):
the shot or the ball I guess, goes out at
in the direction of the grave. This seems excessive yeah,
I'd have to imagine that if these were ever deployed
at any kind of scale, they would kill innocent people. Right.
And if people just happened to be going through the
graveyard and they you know, trip over the trip, are
they you know, kicked the wrong thing? Oh? Yes, her
(18:03):
squirrels would set them off birds, I mean small children.
It's yeah, this is this is this is ridiculous. Well,
now you might wonder if like, okay, this sounds excessive.
So maybe things like this were made but never actually used.
But there are accounts of them being used. I found
a couple in a book by an author named Susie Lennox.
(18:24):
The book is called Body Snatchers, Digging Up the Untold
Stories of Britain's Resurrection Men from Pin and Sword, which
is a history press published in and So Lennox says, uh,
this following account was reported in The Times, I mean
the Times of London in eighteen seventeen. So apparently there
was a really tall guy. There was a British grenadier
(18:46):
who was seven feet tall, and he passed away and
for some reason, his very tall body was highly coveted
by an atomis. Maybe they just I don't know, they
wanted to see what made him so taller, and there
was a standard fee increase were for you know, excessively
tall or excessively short specimens. Maybe, oh, maybe in the
medical college it's easier to see a larger specimen from
(19:08):
the sitting up in the gallery. Or maybe they saw
him in half and sell him as too. I don't know,
but for some reason, yeah, his very tall body was
highly desired by the resurrection men. So his body was
buried in the cemetery of St Martin in the Fields,
which is this Anglican church in Westminster's in London. And
because the seven foot corps was known to be of
(19:30):
great value to the body snatchers, the sexton of the
church quote put together a number of gun barrels so
as to form a magazine that they might all be
discharged together. So he set up a bunch of grave guns,
all aimed at this grave. And apparently the trip wire
that pulled the trigger on the gun battery was attached
to a piece of wood, and then the wood was
(19:52):
buried just under the surface of the grave. So if
you start digging down to access the coffin, you would
hit the wood and you'd have to remove it, so
in removing it you would pull on the wood. This
would pull the triggers of the gun battery and the
person standing over the grave would get hit by a
volley of bullets. And according to this Times report, one
night after the burial, at about four thirty am, the
(20:14):
sexton of the church heard a tremendous report. So he
goes out to the churchyard and the sexton finds a
bunch of picks and shovels lying around on the ground,
and to quote from the Lennox's retelling here quote, he
also found a man's hat with a bullet hole in
one side of it. As there was no exit hole.
The sexton concluded that it must have lodged in the
(20:36):
head of one of the body snatchers, killing him instantly,
with his friends taking his lifeless body away with them.
So immediately I was wondering, wait a second, now, if
you are a group of resurrection men, you're trying to
dig up a body and one of your buddies gets killed,
I mean for the other ones, isn't that just as good?
Like you just run off and you sell this fresh
(20:58):
dead body. Now, yeah, I wonder if new racket was
born that night they're like, hey, we just keep we
just need to keep hiring new guys into our gang,
and we'll just kill them and sell their bodies. Yeah, hey, Jeff,
you move the wood. Yeah, well better yet, we don't
even have to kill them ourselves. We just bring them
to the cemetery. We have this crazy gun that shoots people. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You always get the new guy to move the wood
(21:20):
and pull the string, and you get a fresh body
every night. Now, needless to say, this would be quite
illegal if you were to sit try and set something
like this up today. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean,
I think the risk that these guns posed too obviously
innocent people would be a clear thing that would make
them illegal over time. But even so, I mean, even
(21:40):
if you're aiming them at criminals, I don't know, I
don't know if it seems right to just like shoot
people when they're trying to do something in the kind
of gray area space of digging up dead bodies at
the time. Now, on the other hand, of course, the
guns didn't always work. Lennox also recounts the story from
Camden Town in eighty three, where body snatchers succeeded in
breaching a gun protected grave just by dismantling the trip wire.
(22:03):
So they saw what was going on there and they
just took the system apart. So maybe we should take
a quick break and then when we come back we
can discuss something like the end of the resurrection Men period. Alright,
we're back, So yeah, obviously this threat comes to an
(22:24):
end because I mean, imagine, like most people out there,
if you've ever been to a funeral or helps to
put one together, the resurrectionist men did not come up.
None of these features were offered to you at your
local funeral home. Nobody was telling you about how you
might need to invest in a torpedo for that expensive
new casket. Right, So I think there were multiple things
(22:46):
that brought about the end of this phenomenon, and of
course the phenomenon came in different waves of different places,
different times. Uh, it would be against subject to kind
of economic demands like where and when are there anatomists
that need these bodies? Is where and when can they
not get bodies through other legitimate means? But one blow
to the trade and dead bodies like this came with
(23:09):
changes not in technology but in social norms and laws.
And this this first shift, I think would be in
the UK occurring around eighteen thirty two when Parliament passed
the Anatomy Act, and this acted several things, but one
of them was that it expanded the range of categories
of unclaimed bodies that could be used legally for medical
(23:30):
education and research. So now it's not just like executed criminals,
but lots of different kinds of bodies can be used.
And similar laws were passed in the United States later on,
so that was one change, but it obviously didn't completely
do away with this fear because again, some of the
stories we were just looking at were people in the
eighteen eighties in Ohio who were afraid of getting their
bodies stolen and and and there seemed to be people
(23:53):
out to steal the bodies. Yes, absolutely, uh so, so
that doesn't fully do away with it, but that's that's
one dent I would say in another big thing is
actually a further round of technological changes, and I think
specifically it's the most important thing is when body preservation
technology changed, so you'd get embalming, which became common in
(24:15):
the second half of the nineteenth century. I think it
became common in the United States around like the eighteen eighties.
I've read that it was in a large part kind
of a post civil war thing too, because this is
certainly a situation where he had a lot of of
of dead young people who needed to then be shipped
back home. Right. But another big thing, of course, coming
soon after that in the in the nineteen hundreds would
(24:36):
be chemical refrigeration and body freezers, and back to a
previous invention that we've touched on exactly, yeah, air conditioning
for the dead. So when human bodies could be stored
and protected against decay for a long time or even indefinitely,
I think much of the body supply problem went away,
but you could probably also say that there might be
(24:58):
a I don't know exactly how demand changed over time.
I mean, obviously human dissections still occur, and you know
that that still can be a part of medical research
and education, but it might not be as prevalent a
necessity as it once was. But certainly the supply issue
has been changed by technology, because now you can just
have frozen bodies on hand, right, And again the culture
(25:20):
has changed to like more people, it's it's not this, uh,
this taboo thing for the anatomist to eventually have your
body and make use of it. And yet at the
same time, you know, obviously graves are still robbed from
time to time, grave desecrations do still occur. They just
they don't have the the economic factor behind them. It's
(25:42):
got just it's left going to be left to the
domain of just pure uh pure ghouls uh pure you know,
necromantics and so forth, individuals who are probably doing this
as a passion, as a hobby, but not as you know,
their primary means of earning a living. Now, one thought
that comes to mind is there was an old Clark
(26:03):
Ashton Smith short story I read. It took place in
kind of like a you know, a dark, darkly fantastic kingdom.
And in this kingdom, if I remember correctly, you have
the ghouls, the supernatural ghouls, the creatures that feast on
the dead, and you know, inevitably worship some dark uh
you know, uh, you know, necromatic deity underneath the city.
(26:26):
And then you have humans living in the city above.
And they've simply established a funerary practice where the dead
are handed over to the ghouls and uh and I've
made arrangements. They made arrangements and and it works. Uh.
I think that in the story, if I remember correctly,
the intrigue is because you have some outsiders who show
up and they don't know what's going on, and then
they inevitably, you know, run a foul with the ghouls.
(26:48):
But I was I think that's a clever solution here,
Like the the ghouls need the bodies, the living no
longer need them. And here the ghouls and the mortals
have worked out a deal. They've worked out an arrangement
and it works for everyone. But that's essentially that is
essentially the original arrangement, that is the original arrangement between
the living, living beings and the natural world as well.
(27:12):
Uh yeah, that's right. Like if your when your body
is is finished, when life leaves it, uh, there is
a process that will take care of it, that will
return it to the sort. Well yeah, I mean I
think there's also there's an interesting cultural and emotional thing
going on about the desire for preservation. Again, the desire
(27:32):
for preservation of the of the physical body after death
not being a totally new thing there. There's it kind
of comes and goes at different times and places in history,
Like it seems like it was less of a concern,
you know, five hundred years ago in the United States
or Europe. But uh is more of a concern after
the reintroduction of embalming as a common procedure. But of
(27:52):
course you find it as this hugely important and desirable
thing in the ancient world. I mean, it was an
attractive thing that pulled them in. Yeah, and like why
is it so attractive? It doesn't occur to me naturally
to find a good reason for that, but but there
must be something going on there for a lot of people. Yeah,
there's this idea of you know, of of of of
(28:15):
creating this unlife. You know, this the space between that
is uh, at least perceived to be incorruptible. Right. I
also wonder too, in our modern celebrity culture, you look
at like, what are some of the examples of celebrities
that are the most worshiped. There are people who died
young and left a beautiful corpse, right, Um, And I
(28:35):
wonder if we get into that that similar idea there, Like,
there's this idea that if you know, this particular Hollywood star,
they died young and in a way they remain young forever.
They're they're kind of embalmed. The idea of them is
embalmed in our popular culture. They get on the Forever
twenty seven poster. Yeah exactly, Uh, yeah, which is which is?
(28:59):
I think it's it's a it's a different thing. It's
not a physical embalming procedure, but it it essentially accomplishes
the same thing. Play your cards right, and you get
to come back as a hologram or you know, a
character and a TV commercial as well. Well. You know,
one thing I think we might be doing is using
our social media accounts to create embalmed versions of ourselves
as earlier, younger versions of ourselves to survive as we
(29:21):
and our decrepit bodies grow old. You know, you don't
even have to wait to grow old. I think every
social media embodiment of ourselves is essentially a version of ourselves,
that is, that has been deprived of any natural essence
and value. It is already a uh, you know, a
wraith we have unleashed on the world. The me on
(29:41):
the Internet is the me I was when I was
twenty five. It just like doesn't go anywhere after. Yeah,
but of course this is this is of course we're
cracking some jokes here, but of course this is a
big concern for the future as the as the number
of the dead on social media will inevitably outlive outnumber
the living. Oh, I'm never thought of that before. But yeah, yeah,
I mean it's it's I forget the exact date on it,
(30:03):
but it's definitely going to happen. And um yeah, it's
and uh and and and then we're going to find
that our social media accounts, or at least the ones
that have been around for any number of years, are
going to be it's going to be an acropolis. It
would be the underworld. Yeah, okay, should we call it there? Yeah,
we'll have to call it there, but it but it,
I mean, it really does go to show that, you know,
with new technology comes new ways of having to confront
(30:27):
mortality and deal with death and grieving and bereave in
all these things. You know, even something like Facebook, which
when it was developed, I doubt anyone was thinking, yeah,
we're gonna have to look death square in the eyes
over this one, but inevitably you do. Like that's just
technology is a part of living and death is a
part of life as well. So there we have it.
(30:48):
You know, hey, maybe we'll come back to caskets in
the future, come back to embalming. Uh, you know, I'm
not sure. There's plenty within the broad world, the broad
spectrum of invention, there are plenty of inventions that revolve
around death. Um. If you want to check out other
episodes of the show, head on over to invention pod
dot com. That is where you will find them. And
(31:09):
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(31:32):
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this is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our
exploration of coffin tech. It's death Tech month at at
Invention here. In the last couple episodes we talked about
like special types of coffins. Originally, in the first episode,
(00:25):
I think we focus mainly on coffins that we're designed
to keep you from being prematurely buried and uh and
thrashing about inside your your grave sealed for doom forever. Uh.
And in the last episode we focused mainly on well,
we we looked at length of the fist coffin the
f I s K. How can you say fisk coffin.
(00:45):
That's almost impossible. Yeah, I'm surprised that it sold so
well with a name like that, which was a strange
and elegant invention. And it's all right, But a lot
of what we talked about was stuff to prevent people
from having their bodies stolen by resurrection men or resurrectionists
who took bodies from graves in order to sell them
to medical colleges and dissection rooms and anatomists. Yeah so
(01:10):
so yeah, we talked about ways to to safeguard the
the the casket, the burial ground, putting cages over them,
having specially designed caskets to keep people out, weird gadgets
to go around your neck, etcetera. But now we're going
to get into Uh, I guess what we would call
active measures? Right? A casket or a coffin that fights back. Right,
(01:31):
So what if all the last solutions we are, all
the previous solutions we talked about were just too wimpy.
Here is a possible solution. If you want to keep
people from stealing your corpse, turn them into a corpse
and then they'll have their own and they won't need yours. Uh,
you're talking about a casket that kills. Like if it
were like a seventies or eighties horror film, it would
(01:53):
be instead of being death Spa or deathback the beat
it kills, it would be death casket, the casket that killed.
Maybe that's too close, are it is too on the nose?
So you know, one thing I was thinking about is
if you go by Indiana Jones as your main source,
you would think that the booby trapping of tombs with
(02:14):
deadly mechanisms for crushing, impaling, fatally desiccating, plucking out the
eyeballs of grave robbers was sort of a time honored tradition,
right that this goes back into the ancient world. Lots
of tombs are like this. But the sad fact is
that I can find almost no real evidence of booby
trapped tombs from the ancient world, with essentially one possible exception,
(02:38):
and that only exception is rumors about the unexcavated tomb
of the ancient Chinese emperor Chin chi Huang, which we
already did an episode of our other podcast, Stuff to
Blow your mind about, So if you want a whole
episode on that subject, you should look up our Chin
chi Huang episode. But the short version is some ancient
accounts claim that the tomb of Chin chi Huong is
(02:58):
rigged with weapons and poisons to slaughter any potential looters.
And I've got a description of the tomb here from
the first century b c. Chinese historian uh Sima Cuyon,
and it's translated by Burton Watson. Uh So it goes
like this. It says they dug down to the third
layer of underground springs and poured in bronze to make
(03:20):
the outer coffin. Replicas of palaces, scenic towers, and the
Hundred Officials, as well as rare utensils and wondrous objects
were brought in to fill the tomb. Craftsmen were ordered
to set up crossbows and arrows rigged so that they
would immediately shoot down anyone attempting to break in. Mercury
was used to fashion imitations of the Hundred Rivers, the
(03:43):
Yellow River, and the Young Sea, and the seas, constructed
in such a way that they seemed to flow above
or representations of all the heavenly bodies below the features
of the earth. Whale oil was used for lamps, which
were calculated to burn for a long time without going out.
That is nice. They're like, this is really top shelf
(04:04):
when it comes to tombs. Yeah, and tomb technology. I mean,
you got your mercury, you got your automatic crossbows. Uh,
you'd assume maybe the mercury works kind of like a
toxic poison to fill the room with fumes. Very interesting stuff.
But of course the tomb remains unopened, to which on
one level means I mean, granted, it's unopened for a
variety of reasons. But you could say that, hey, just
(04:27):
just the idea that there are crossbows in there there
in there, that they are deadly traps in there, could
have contributed to its protection over the centuries. That's a
very good point that it could could be like a
mimetic protection um. And of course the thing is, we
don't know if there's anything to these stories, and even
if it was true when the tomb was crafted, I
strongly doubt that like crossbow mechanisms from two thousand years
(04:51):
plus ago would still work today right now. It will
be interesting though, because, as we discussed in that episode
of Stuff to Blow your Mind, we may have actually
we find out what what is going on in that tomb.
There's been talk of of actually entering it or sending
in you know, the drones to explore it a little bit, uh,
you know, as much as exploration, but also to to
(05:13):
make sure that the area is protected, that that the
the artifacts inside are not destroyed in due course due
to say seismic events or something like that. Right, but
maybe we'll send that first drone in and it'll get
hit by a crossbow bowls, you never know. That would
be very cool. But like I said, the kind of
strange and disappointing thing is this seems to be the
(05:34):
only case I can find of a booby trapped tomb
from the ancient world. But I would say, on the
other hand, the general lack of Indiana Jones style traps
does not mean that ancient people's weren't very keen on
keeping their graves undisturbed. Of course, one thing is just
standard type security features like you would find on the
tombs we've already talked about in the previous episodes, you know, seals, gates,
(05:59):
things being filled in, or having huge slabs placed on
top of or in front of them, that kind of thing,
just to keep people out. But the other thing I
would say, picking up on the idea of mimetic security
is like the idea of the mythical curse of the Pharaohs. Now.
Of course, that is more or less a twentieth century
mythical invention, but it does take slight inspiration from reality
(06:22):
in that some ancient tombs are marked with like curses
or warnings against people who might disturb them. I was
reading a really interesting thing about tomb curses on the
National Museum Scotland blog and a post by assistant curator
Dr Dan Potter with a translation that I'll get to
in a second. Uh. Now, when I imagine ancient tomb
(06:43):
curses and warnings and stuff, I often imagine really vividly
violent threats, the like may your teeth turn into bees
kind of thing, or may rot erect, you know, the
the poe poe kind of direction. But as an example
of the kind of two mornings, you're more likely to
actually find an ancient Egypt. Potter translates a stone with
(07:05):
an inscription from roughly between twelve to ten sixty nine
b C. And it's from the necropolis of sheik Abbot Alcerna,
which is in where ancient Thebes would have been. And
this is Potter's translation. It is to you that I
speak all people who will find this tomb passage. Watch
out not to take even a pebble from within it outside.
(07:27):
If you find this stone, you shall not transgress against it. Indeed,
the gods since the time of pre who rest in
the midst of the mountains, gained strength every day even
though their pebbles are dragged away. Look for a place
worthy of yourselves and rest in it, And do not
constrict gods in their own houses. As every man is
happy in his place, and every man is glad in
(07:49):
his house. As for he who will be sound, beware
of forcefully removing this stone from its place. As for
he who covers it in its place, great lords of
the West will reproach him very very very very very
very very very much. That is a stern tongue lashing.
(08:10):
I really like that. At the end though, it's kind
of quaint and polite. It's like, don't mess with my tomb.
I'm dead, I'm a god. Now you go find your
own tomb, become a god in your own way, and please, please, please, please,
please please please don't mess with it. I love this. Yeah,
the excessive use of the very here, because that would
not be considered you know, proper in English, modern English
(08:32):
anyway to to use that. But but really it gets
the point across. The more varies, the better it reminds me.
I had a professor once of I believe it was
a uh, you know, Canterbury Tales classes that I was taking.
He was the professor, and he he liked to stress
that while we're not fond of double negatives now, uh,
there was a time when you would just quote Negate
(08:54):
the hell out of something if you wanted to to
make sure it was negated. They're great old instances of
word repetition in in older languages, especially like from the
ancient world. I think about the idea of holy, holy holy.
You know, it's just saying like, you don't say extremely holy,
you say holy, holy holy. You keep repeating the word
(09:15):
to emphasize the superlativeness of work. But yeah, I like
this idea of thinking about the mythology that surrounds two
warnings is a kind of meme based security invention. And
you could think of that in a religious context as
it's invoked here, like you're gonna upset the gods. Things
are going to be very bad for you if you
disturb this tomb, or you could think about it in
(09:35):
a chin chi huang kind of context where you could
seed stories out with the historians, or you know, just
throughout the culture that there's some mega like killer robots
in this tomb you don't want to go inside. Yeah.
One thing I was thinking about is if you just
have the the curse posted, it depends on literacy for
what to really convey its meaning. Uh. Not everyone may
(09:57):
be able to read, but everyone speaks the language crossbow. Um.
But then again, if you're if it's not just about
making sure that you have a sign posted, but to
spread the word of it, to make sure that the
curse is known, that's a different thing altogether. Well, should
we take a quick break and then come back to
discuss some gorrier, more modern versions of active measures protecting
(10:20):
it to him? Let's do it. Alright, we're back, so
let's let's get into the gory details. Right. So we
were discussing previously that even when ancient tombs have curses,
it seems like they're often less gruesome than you would expect.
But leave it to modern Americans and Europeans to take
(10:40):
tomb security to ridiculously nasty, violent places. As exhibit A,
I would like to read a report from the Stark
County Democrat, which was a Canton, Ohio newspaper, the addition
of January one. This is this article is called a
torpedo blows them up. This is wonderful days pleasuated this
(11:03):
in its entirety Mount vernon January nineteen, So you got
your dateline. A report reaches here that on Monday night,
three body snatchers, while attempting to rob a grave of
near Gan this county met with a fatal accident. The
story goes that while excavating the grave, the Picks came
in contact with a torpedo, which exploded, killing one of
(11:25):
the ghouls named Dipper, and mangling the leg of another
whose name could not be learned. The third part, the
third party was occupying a sleigh as a lookout and
after the accident, succeeded in getting his disabled companion in
the sleigh and driving off. This is one of This
is like a page from you know, Coran McCarthy book
that we can only find the Library of Babble. Yeah, Dipper,
(11:49):
they only know one of their names. And again I
love the description as ghouls because I think we mentioned
this in the last episode. But Google's, of course, are
aditionally monsters of a necrophageous persuasion. They lurk in graveyards
and they scavenge the flesh of the dead. But let's
come back to that other detail that I meagined. A
lot of people latched onto, uh the idea that a
(12:11):
torpedo exploded, right, Yeah, a torpedo blows them up. So
I'm thinking like a torpedo on a submarine, Like did
somebody bury an explosive charge among their great uncle's grave goods,
which exploded when the ghoul's broke in. No, this was
not an accidental explosion of something that happened to be
down there. This apparently was a specific technology designed to
(12:34):
protect graves by maiming and murdering resurrection men and grave robbers. Yeah,
that the coffin torpedo. I ran across this as well.
I was not familiar with it previously, and when I
read it, of course, the thing that entered my mind
is the idea that you have a casket that is
fired out of a torpedo tube on a submarine. I thought, well,
that's what it is. How weird that I've run across
(12:55):
such an invention. But no, it's even weirder. Yes, So
I've come across two major records of booby trap coffin inventions.
Uh so. One is that on October eight eight, an
Ohio inventor named Philip K. Clover received a patent for
what he called a coffin torpedo. It was designed to
(13:16):
quote prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies. To presume
the authorized one would be the end times one, right, Yeah,
it would need to be Jesus or you know, an
accepted uh spokesperson for Jesus, or a sufficiently powerful necromancer. Uh.
The torpedo would be loaded with a shotgun style spray
(13:37):
of lead balls, and then we would be buried facing
up inside the lid of the coffin, and if triggered,
the Coffin torpedo would of course blast the thief and
possibly killed them. Okay, so in a way it gets
even grizzlier because what we're talking about he is really
more comparable with a land mine or or a shotgun trap.
The probably a landmine is the more accepted comparison here. Yes,
(13:59):
actually one person I'm going to sit in a minute
makes exactly that comparison. So another coffin torpedo came out
a few years later. This one was patented by a
guy named Thomas In Howell, also of Ohio. So it
seems like maybe Grave like unauthorized resurrection was happening a
lot in Ohio at the time. Howell says in his
patent that other Grave torpedoes already exist, but that he's
(14:22):
improved the Grave torpedo design by including quote exterior nipples
on the shell and quote pivoted swinging hammers combined with
a rotary disc or collar for engaging the hammers and
by its rotary movement, release the hammers, which constitute the
essential and important feature of my invention. So he's all
about nipples and hammers. Yeah, I don't really have a
(14:44):
clear vision of what these hammers are accomplishing. You can
look up a diagram on the I've got a link
here to the to the patent for you. But basically
it ends up working sort of the same. It's like
a landmine thing. In fact, I was reading a blog
post about this invention by an anthropologist named Katie Myers Emery,
who has written a lot on like a Burial of
(15:04):
the Dead, traditions and stuff, in which she says that
Howell's model was really more like a landmine than a gun.
But she also quotes a contemporary advertisement for one of
these grave torpedoes. I think it's for Howell's model, which
reads sleep well, sweet angel, Let no fears of ghouls
disturb thy rest. For above thy shrouded form lies a
(15:26):
torpedo ready to make minced meat. If anyone who attempts
to convey you to the pickling vat I think it's
really also drives home that the use of the word
torpedo has has shifted some in our in our usage.
I think so too, because I think of essentially an
underwater missile, like a run for Red October or something.
(15:46):
But I love this this pitch here, sleep well, sweet angel,
let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest. It's it's
good copy, but it's also not catchy. I mean, I
feel like the Howell's model needs a catch your jingle,
Like they won't use me for science. I'd rather stay
here and rot. You know. The other thing I'm thinking
is that at this point in our history, like an
(16:08):
undisturbed grave is so normal, you know. I feel like
I almost I want to attract the ghoules, like it
would kind of make my death more of a celebration.
But it's just just a thought. Yeah, why not have
another boring burial like everybody else, you know, why not
get things of popping around your grave? Uh So. In fact,
the strangest thing of the story is that this torpedo
(16:31):
was not even the first lethal trap for grave robbers
of the Resurrectionist age. It seems that since the eighteenth century,
there had been what are known as cemetery guns. Uh,
that's not a trick name. That just means guns used
for cemeteries. So I found a link to one in
particular being auctioned at Southeby's in January of sixteen. It
(16:54):
is an eighteenth or early nineteenth century flintlock gun, originally
made out of ash would steel and wrought iron by
the Jurgenson Machine Company of New York. I've got a
picture of it for you here, Robert. I think this
gun being sold at auction is one of the same
ones I've read about elsewhere, being displayed at a museum
called the Museum of Mourning Art at Arlington Cemetery in Pennsylvania.
(17:19):
And so this gun would have been positioned on a
swivel mount and then it would be mounted at the
site of the grave that needed to be protected, and
then it would be fired by trip wires. So you'd
place trip wires that linked to the triggering mechanism, and
if somebody pulls the trip wire, if the tension you know,
goes up on the wire, it triggers the gun and
(17:40):
the shot or the ball I guess, goes out at
in the direction of the grave. This seems excessive yeah,
I'd have to imagine that if these were ever deployed
at any kind of scale, they would kill innocent people. Right.
And if people just happened to be going through the
graveyard and they you know, trip over the trip, are
they you know, kicked the wrong thing? Oh? Yes, her
(18:03):
squirrels would set them off birds, I mean small children.
It's yeah, this is this is this is ridiculous. Well,
now you might wonder if like, okay, this sounds excessive.
So maybe things like this were made but never actually used.
But there are accounts of them being used. I found
a couple in a book by an author named Susie Lennox.
(18:24):
The book is called Body Snatchers, Digging Up the Untold
Stories of Britain's Resurrection Men from Pin and Sword, which
is a history press published in and So Lennox says, uh,
this following account was reported in The Times, I mean
the Times of London in eighteen seventeen. So apparently there
was a really tall guy. There was a British grenadier
(18:46):
who was seven feet tall, and he passed away and
for some reason, his very tall body was highly coveted
by an atomis. Maybe they just I don't know, they
wanted to see what made him so taller, and there
was a standard fee increase were for you know, excessively
tall or excessively short specimens. Maybe, oh, maybe in the
medical college it's easier to see a larger specimen from
(19:08):
the sitting up in the gallery. Or maybe they saw
him in half and sell him as too. I don't know,
but for some reason, yeah, his very tall body was
highly desired by the resurrection men. So his body was
buried in the cemetery of St Martin in the Fields,
which is this Anglican church in Westminster's in London. And
because the seven foot corps was known to be of
(19:30):
great value to the body snatchers, the sexton of the
church quote put together a number of gun barrels so
as to form a magazine that they might all be
discharged together. So he set up a bunch of grave guns,
all aimed at this grave. And apparently the trip wire
that pulled the trigger on the gun battery was attached
to a piece of wood, and then the wood was
(19:52):
buried just under the surface of the grave. So if
you start digging down to access the coffin, you would
hit the wood and you'd have to remove it, so
in removing it you would pull on the wood. This
would pull the triggers of the gun battery and the
person standing over the grave would get hit by a
volley of bullets. And according to this Times report, one
night after the burial, at about four thirty am, the
(20:14):
sexton of the church heard a tremendous report. So he
goes out to the churchyard and the sexton finds a
bunch of picks and shovels lying around on the ground,
and to quote from the Lennox's retelling here quote, he
also found a man's hat with a bullet hole in
one side of it. As there was no exit hole.
The sexton concluded that it must have lodged in the
(20:36):
head of one of the body snatchers, killing him instantly,
with his friends taking his lifeless body away with them.
So immediately I was wondering, wait a second, now, if
you are a group of resurrection men, you're trying to
dig up a body and one of your buddies gets killed,
I mean for the other ones, isn't that just as good?
Like you just run off and you sell this fresh
(20:58):
dead body. Now, yeah, I wonder if new racket was
born that night they're like, hey, we just keep we
just need to keep hiring new guys into our gang,
and we'll just kill them and sell their bodies. Yeah, hey, Jeff,
you move the wood. Yeah, well better yet, we don't
even have to kill them ourselves. We just bring them
to the cemetery. We have this crazy gun that shoots people. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You always get the new guy to move the wood
(21:20):
and pull the string, and you get a fresh body
every night. Now, needless to say, this would be quite
illegal if you were to sit try and set something
like this up today. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean,
I think the risk that these guns posed too obviously
innocent people would be a clear thing that would make
them illegal over time. But even so, I mean, even
(21:40):
if you're aiming them at criminals, I don't know, I
don't know if it seems right to just like shoot
people when they're trying to do something in the kind
of gray area space of digging up dead bodies at
the time. Now, on the other hand, of course, the
guns didn't always work. Lennox also recounts the story from
Camden Town in eighty three, where body snatchers succeeded in
breaching a gun protected grave just by dismantling the trip wire.
(22:03):
So they saw what was going on there and they
just took the system apart. So maybe we should take
a quick break and then when we come back we
can discuss something like the end of the resurrection Men period. Alright,
we're back, So yeah, obviously this threat comes to an
(22:24):
end because I mean, imagine, like most people out there,
if you've ever been to a funeral or helps to
put one together, the resurrectionist men did not come up.
None of these features were offered to you at your
local funeral home. Nobody was telling you about how you
might need to invest in a torpedo for that expensive
new casket. Right, So I think there were multiple things
(22:46):
that brought about the end of this phenomenon, and of
course the phenomenon came in different waves of different places,
different times. Uh, it would be against subject to kind
of economic demands like where and when are there anatomists
that need these bodies? Is where and when can they
not get bodies through other legitimate means? But one blow
to the trade and dead bodies like this came with
(23:09):
changes not in technology but in social norms and laws.
And this this first shift, I think would be in
the UK occurring around eighteen thirty two when Parliament passed
the Anatomy Act, and this acted several things, but one
of them was that it expanded the range of categories
of unclaimed bodies that could be used legally for medical
(23:30):
education and research. So now it's not just like executed criminals,
but lots of different kinds of bodies can be used.
And similar laws were passed in the United States later on,
so that was one change, but it obviously didn't completely
do away with this fear because again, some of the
stories we were just looking at were people in the
eighteen eighties in Ohio who were afraid of getting their
bodies stolen and and and there seemed to be people
(23:53):
out to steal the bodies. Yes, absolutely, uh so, so
that doesn't fully do away with it, but that's that's
one dent I would say in another big thing is
actually a further round of technological changes, and I think
specifically it's the most important thing is when body preservation
technology changed, so you'd get embalming, which became common in
(24:15):
the second half of the nineteenth century. I think it
became common in the United States around like the eighteen eighties.
I've read that it was in a large part kind
of a post civil war thing too, because this is
certainly a situation where he had a lot of of
of dead young people who needed to then be shipped
back home. Right. But another big thing, of course, coming
soon after that in the in the nineteen hundreds would
(24:36):
be chemical refrigeration and body freezers, and back to a
previous invention that we've touched on exactly, yeah, air conditioning
for the dead. So when human bodies could be stored
and protected against decay for a long time or even indefinitely,
I think much of the body supply problem went away,
but you could probably also say that there might be
(24:58):
a I don't know exactly how demand changed over time.
I mean, obviously human dissections still occur, and you know
that that still can be a part of medical research
and education, but it might not be as prevalent a
necessity as it once was. But certainly the supply issue
has been changed by technology, because now you can just
have frozen bodies on hand, right, And again the culture
(25:20):
has changed to like more people, it's it's not this, uh,
this taboo thing for the anatomist to eventually have your
body and make use of it. And yet at the
same time, you know, obviously graves are still robbed from
time to time, grave desecrations do still occur. They just
they don't have the the economic factor behind them. It's
(25:42):
got just it's left going to be left to the
domain of just pure uh pure ghouls uh pure you know,
necromantics and so forth, individuals who are probably doing this
as a passion, as a hobby, but not as you know,
their primary means of earning a living. Now, one thought
that comes to mind is there was an old Clark
(26:03):
Ashton Smith short story I read. It took place in
kind of like a you know, a dark, darkly fantastic kingdom.
And in this kingdom, if I remember correctly, you have
the ghouls, the supernatural ghouls, the creatures that feast on
the dead, and you know, inevitably worship some dark uh
you know, uh, you know, necromatic deity underneath the city.
(26:26):
And then you have humans living in the city above.
And they've simply established a funerary practice where the dead
are handed over to the ghouls and uh and I've
made arrangements. They made arrangements and and it works. Uh.
I think that in the story, if I remember correctly,
the intrigue is because you have some outsiders who show
up and they don't know what's going on, and then
they inevitably, you know, run a foul with the ghouls.
(26:48):
But I was I think that's a clever solution here,
Like the the ghouls need the bodies, the living no
longer need them. And here the ghouls and the mortals
have worked out a deal. They've worked out an arrangement
and it works for everyone. But that's essentially that is
essentially the original arrangement, that is the original arrangement between
the living, living beings and the natural world as well.
(27:12):
Uh yeah, that's right. Like if your when your body
is is finished, when life leaves it, uh, there is
a process that will take care of it, that will
return it to the sort. Well yeah, I mean I
think there's also there's an interesting cultural and emotional thing
going on about the desire for preservation. Again, the desire
(27:32):
for preservation of the of the physical body after death
not being a totally new thing there. There's it kind
of comes and goes at different times and places in history,
Like it seems like it was less of a concern,
you know, five hundred years ago in the United States
or Europe. But uh is more of a concern after
the reintroduction of embalming as a common procedure. But of
(27:52):
course you find it as this hugely important and desirable
thing in the ancient world. I mean, it was an
attractive thing that pulled them in. Yeah, and like why
is it so attractive? It doesn't occur to me naturally
to find a good reason for that, but but there
must be something going on there for a lot of people. Yeah,
there's this idea of you know, of of of of
(28:15):
creating this unlife. You know, this the space between that
is uh, at least perceived to be incorruptible. Right. I
also wonder too, in our modern celebrity culture, you look
at like, what are some of the examples of celebrities
that are the most worshiped. There are people who died
young and left a beautiful corpse, right, Um, And I
(28:35):
wonder if we get into that that similar idea there, Like,
there's this idea that if you know, this particular Hollywood star,
they died young and in a way they remain young forever.
They're they're kind of embalmed. The idea of them is
embalmed in our popular culture. They get on the Forever
twenty seven poster. Yeah exactly, Uh, yeah, which is which is?
(28:59):
I think it's it's a it's a different thing. It's
not a physical embalming procedure, but it it essentially accomplishes
the same thing. Play your cards right, and you get
to come back as a hologram or you know, a
character and a TV commercial as well. Well. You know,
one thing I think we might be doing is using
our social media accounts to create embalmed versions of ourselves
as earlier, younger versions of ourselves to survive as we
(29:21):
and our decrepit bodies grow old. You know, you don't
even have to wait to grow old. I think every
social media embodiment of ourselves is essentially a version of ourselves,
that is, that has been deprived of any natural essence
and value. It is already a uh, you know, a
wraith we have unleashed on the world. The me on
(29:41):
the Internet is the me I was when I was
twenty five. It just like doesn't go anywhere after. Yeah,
but of course this is this is of course we're
cracking some jokes here, but of course this is a
big concern for the future as the as the number
of the dead on social media will inevitably outlive outnumber
the living. Oh, I'm never thought of that before. But yeah, yeah,
I mean it's it's I forget the exact date on it,
(30:03):
but it's definitely going to happen. And um yeah, it's
and uh and and and then we're going to find
that our social media accounts, or at least the ones
that have been around for any number of years, are
going to be it's going to be an acropolis. It
would be the underworld. Yeah, okay, should we call it there? Yeah,
we'll have to call it there, but it but it,
I mean, it really does go to show that, you know,
with new technology comes new ways of having to confront
(30:27):
mortality and deal with death and grieving and bereave in
all these things. You know, even something like Facebook, which
when it was developed, I doubt anyone was thinking, yeah,
we're gonna have to look death square in the eyes
over this one, but inevitably you do. Like that's just
technology is a part of living and death is a
part of life as well. So there we have it.
(30:48):
You know, hey, maybe we'll come back to caskets in
the future, come back to embalming. Uh, you know, I'm
not sure. There's plenty within the broad world, the broad
spectrum of invention, there are plenty of inventions that revolve
around death. Um. If you want to check out other
episodes of the show, head on over to invention pod
dot com. That is where you will find them. And
(31:09):
if you want to support our show, rate and review
us wherever you have the power to do so. That
really helps the show out huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, for just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is
(31:32):
production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
this is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Invention News
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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