October 24, 2017 • 44 mins
Pseudoscience often enters our world where magic fails us, seeming to make the impossible possible via the invocation of actual scientific and technological marvels. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore the unmistakably necromantic world of optography, a 19th century notion that the last images seen by the dead might be retrieved from the flesh and fluid of the eye.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
This incredible. What's the last thing? Increase? It's a funny's
inspecting the image just being contained in the fluid exactly.
The treat's visual memory is located nothing it's brain, but
(00:30):
in the eye itself. Welcome to stuff to Blow your
Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you welcome
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
(00:51):
Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Hey, Robert, if you were murdered,
would you mind if I scooped your eyeball out, cut
it in half, dipped it in some chemicals, and then
looked at that to see if I could find the
image of your murderer on your eye. Only if you
had the professionals like the late great Christopher Lee and
Peter Cushing doing the investigating as they as they do
(01:13):
in this clip that we just heard from the nineteen
seventy two horror film Horror Express. I have to confess
I've never seen this movie, So tell me and tell
the audience what is what's it about? Well? This is yeah,
this is the fun wild little film that uh it
is shockingly public domain property at the moment. You can
find it on on YouTube and and pretty much anywhere
(01:36):
that you're going to grab your your horror cinema. It's
a it has a shockingly star studded cast. You got
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and not in our audio clip,
Telly savalis as a as a Cossack captain. Wow with
without any attempt at at a Russian act center anything,
just straight up tell Y savalas. So it's just Ko
Jack pretending like he's a Cossack captain on this train. Yeah, exactly.
(01:59):
And there is a oh god goodness that they're all
these additional character actors as well. There is a there's
a respute and sue character uh that's walking around. It
all takes place on a Trans Siberian Express from China
to Moscow, and it concerns this uh, this alien possessed,
reanimated prehistoric commented. They just starts running amuck, draining the
(02:22):
memories from its victims, leaving them with milky white eyes.
And there's this fabulous scene which we we just heard
the audio from where the scientists use a microscope on
the creature's eye fluid to reveal its final sites, as
well as a kind of hilarious glimpse at the prehistoric world.
But so that may sound totally ridiculous in the scheme
of this film, and and it did when I first
(02:44):
saw it. I first saw this, I think in college,
and I had no idea that it had any connection
to the rational world. I was like, what kind of
dove for these guys on when they wrote this, because
this is the most crazy pseudo scientific idea I've ever heard.
And it turns out that it is that actually over
two hundred year old theory that still floats around occasionally,
(03:05):
though we mainly just see it in our film nowadays.
But man, it connected to forensic science for almost a
century and to the criminal mind in terms of what
they needed to do to get away with their murderous crimes. Yeah,
and and of course as well get into the topic
will explore to what extent it was it was tied
to forensic science, It has a it has an interesting
(03:27):
history there. Essentially it is it is still a pseudoscience, um.
But you know, pseudoscience often enters our world where magic fails,
us seeming to make the impossible possible via the invocation
of actual scientific and technological marvels. And and so today
what we're discussing is is unmistakably necromantic. You know, it's
(03:50):
it's communicating with the dead, but it's wrapped up in
these nineteenth century technological advancements, and uh, it's extremely fascinating.
I can't believe it's taking me this long to finally
get to the the actual science behind this ridiculous movie. Yeah,
it's it's fun, but it's also utterly bizarre. What we're
(04:12):
talking about here is optography. There's a name for this
scientific practice. What we're gonna do is we're gonna give
you kind of a precursor to optography, and then discuss
the experiments surrounding it, and then how that led to
a lot of confusion of forensic science for a long time. Alright,
So in order to to understand how this false notion
(04:35):
could have gained any traction, we have to first look
at the scientific advancements that preceded it and made it
seem possible even to serious researchers at the at the time.
As as we'll get into. Uh, but as always, you know,
a little bit of knowledge is always a dangerous thing.
So in eighteen thirty seven, French artist and physicist Louis
(04:57):
Daguerre invented the Dagara type. This is the first commercially
successful photographic process, and it used an iodine synthitized silverized
plate and mercury vapor to capture the image, and it
produced very detailed images. And while it took minutes of
exposure time, this was still swifter than previous photographic methods. Uh,
(05:18):
they couldn't be replicated. Um, and each Daguara type image
was a mirror image, but still it had just an
incredible cultural impact at the time, right, Yeah, I mean
we're still close enough I think in the like relative
scheme of history that some of us have seen Decara
types before. I have this book that's utterly macabre and
somewhat related to this, that's just Daguero types of dead
(05:41):
bodies from the nineteenth century because that was a thing
where people would photograph the dead before they were buried.
And uh, it's fascinating and there's like a cultural history within.
It's not just me being a weird secko looking at corpses.
But the Daguera types have a specific texture to them
that I don't think you see photographs today. Yeah, And
(06:01):
it's it's also just it's hard for us to put
ourselves and given just how how how photographs fill our
world and how a custom we are to the technology.
It's it's hard for us to imagine what it was
like to suddenly have this technology more readily available. Um.
But but when you looked at some of the commentary
from the time, you can really begin to to to
(06:23):
to zero in on it. Um. For instance, Oliver Wendell
Holmes called the aa Gara type quote the mirror with
a memory, which which I think is rather fitting. And
Edgar Allan Poe uh wrote about the invention in eighteen
forty and I want to read uh some quotes from
him because I think he's he summed up. They're just
(06:44):
the wonder and awe of this invention rather nicely. And
it's Halloween. So what Poe has to say, if we
examine a work of ordinary art by means of a
powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear.
But the closest scrutiny of the photogenetic rawling discloses only
a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect
(07:06):
with the thing represented. The variations of shade, the gradiations
of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth
itself and the supremeness of its perfection, the results of
the invention cannot even remotely be seen. But all experience
in matters of philosophical discovery teaches us that in such
a discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must
(07:28):
calculate most largely. It is a theorem almost demonstrated that
the consequences of any new scientific invention will at the
present day exceed by very much the wildest expectations of
the most imaginative. So I hear that Poe quote, and
it sounds to me like the advent of photography was
really changing how people thought about the world, right, Because
(07:52):
up until then, let's be honest, like our awareness of
the world is essentially from the self, because we're looking
out from ourselves to the world. Right. But with this photograph,
you can start perceiving the world through the eyes of
the other. Yeah, And that sounds uncanny, like a complete change,
And thought, Yeah, you don't have to depend on the
(08:13):
fallibility of memory, you don't have to depend on on
an artistic representation that is created by somebody. It's virtually
instant compared to two artistic techniques and uh, and has
just incredible detail. So it makes sense that people would
be just applying photography to everything, and and you know,
to your point about taking pictures of the dead to
(08:35):
commemorate them. Uh, it reminds me. For instance, you remember
when everybody was getting these um these picture frames that
would throw up multiple digital images. Yes, I got one
for my grandmother a couple of years ago. Yeah, because
all of our photos were digital and she didn't have
a computer, So we got her one of those. And
then my sister brother and I we just all like
(08:55):
uploaded like a hundred photos into the thing and sent
it to her for Christmas. Yeah. I mean they still
have them, I obviously, but I feel like for a
while there everybody had them. It was it was the thing.
And even at the time, I remember thinking, this is
this is gonna be a detail in a historic reenactment
in the future. This is gonna this is a technology
that is going to quickly fade because it's a bit weird.
(09:15):
It's just not working in the way that a digital
image and a more traditional digital medium works, or as
a or or the way the physical uh photograph works
in a frame. Right, Yeah, yeah, it is. It is
a strange thing. I think you're right, that's going to
be one of those things that like period pieces fifty
years from now, well they'll they'll throw those weird digital
frames in. All right, So you had the degerotype. It
(09:38):
was new, technology was game changing, it was exciting and
uh and you had a lot of people already appropriating
all of this excitement to the pseudo to pseudoscientific and
mystical purposes. And we're not gonna get into all those
purposes today. But obviously this was the era of spirit photography. Um,
you know, images of ectoplasm and ghosts and fair area's.
(10:00):
Uh So, anything we're talking about today that gets a
little uh mystical in nature is really nothing compared to
some of the other uses that were out there. Right,
But this led to how we study the eyeball right,
because there was this cultural idea that the function of
a camera was the same as the biological function of
(10:22):
an eye, whether that being a human being or a
rabbit or a rat. That's right. And you know, at
the same time, we were also making huge strides and
studying the eye itself. Uh. In in eighteen fifty we
saw the invention and and some argue this was just
an independent reinvention of the ophthalmaloscope by German physiologist and
(10:44):
physicist Herman von Helmholtz and the engage revolutionized ophthalmology and
that it allowed the doctors to see inside the fundness
of the eye. Okay, so this is like the thing
when I go to the optometrist every year and they
look at my eye with what feels to me like
it's like a microscope or something. But it's obviously a
lot more complicated than what Helmholtz was working with. So
(11:07):
you take these two technological advancements and in retrospect, it
seems inevitable that we would get to this realm of
optimology because we're learning more about the eye. We have
this fabulous news technology, and time and time again, we
can't help but think about the human experience in the
human body in terms of the technology we use. When
(11:27):
we've talked about memory on the show, we often talk
about how we we fall into this trap of thinking
about the eyes as video cameras and memory as like
the tape database, and when it's really nothing like that,
you know, aside from the most simplistic uses of that metaphor. Yeah,
it's actually interesting when you look at that period of
(11:49):
time during the Industrial Revolution, after this invention, right, there
is a lot of focus in sort of fantastic fiction
on the ideas of being able to do the things
that you do in industry better with the biology of
the human body, whether that's like moving faster or being stronger,
or having better eyesight, like all of those things, like
(12:11):
how can it uh increase the production? Right? And then
you start seeing investigations like this in science where it's like, oh, well,
maybe if we peek inside of here, we'll we'll get
some idea how to make it so everybody's got superhuman vision.
And yet it's still so hard to shake mystical interpretations
of vision. Uh. For instance, just consider that the long
(12:33):
outdated emission theory of vision. This is the idea that
you see with I beams, the idea that there's some
sort of force that comes out of my eye and
touches something that, you know, the the thing I'm trying
to see, and relates the information back to my eyes somehow. Uh.
This has long been abandoned, but according to the to
(12:53):
an American Psychologist article published in two thousand two, as
many as fifty percent of adults still bought the emission
theory rather than the correct intromission theory. Really. Yeah, I've
never even heard the emission theory outside of like comic books.
Well in the comic books is a great example because
it comes down to local Cyclops. The x Cyclops is
(13:14):
who I immediately think of. It gets into this idea
that without like really thinking about it and room and
even in many cases I think, just reminding yourself, oh yeah,
light is entering my eyes and that's how I see.
You end up thinking about reality and thinking about sight
in terms of Cyclops's laser vision. Right, something's coming out
blasting things. If someone staring at you, they're like peering
(13:37):
into you with some sort of a force. Yeah, yeah,
this is interesting. It says more I think about our
uncomfortableity with looking at a living being's eyes than it
does about what we think about how we see things,
you know what I mean. Alright, So, so far we
have the inherent mystical nature of sight or the experience
of sight. We have these new technological advancements up. Plus
(14:00):
you can throw in a little bit of experiential support
as well. If you stare at something for a long
time and then you gaze at a blank wall, what happens? Yeah,
you can still see an impression of that image. And
you may experience this too with computer screens and whatnot
as well. And to the point of what we're going
to discuss with optography, that effect is heightened if you
(14:20):
go from being in a dark place to a bright
place or vice versa. Yeah. And in eighteen fifty four,
English scientist Reverend William Scoresby UH connected this experiment where
you would stare in an object and then look at
the wall and then time the image to see how
long it lasted. Um. And that there was this uh
(14:42):
that the paper was on pictorial and photochromatic impressions of
the retina and of the human eye. Uh. And there's
this wonderful quote. This is from an eighteen fifty four
right up in the uh Antheneum. Upon removing the eyes
from the object, the author explained the early appearance of
the picture or image which had been thus impressed on
(15:02):
the retina, or as he expressed it, photographed upon the retina.
So we have the technology observable perks of human side
backed up in an experiment, and a general human history
of seeing the eyes as windows into the soul, as
well as observeration observational changes in the eyes of say
a fish, because how do you judge the freshness of
a fish? You look to its eyes. Right when they
(15:24):
start changing and getting cloudy, you know they've been dead longer. Right, Yeah, Okay,
so let's take a break, and when we get back,
we're gonna take this step and we're gonna move forward
into the rise of optography. All right, we're back. So
optography seems to have begun in the mid seventeenth century actually,
(15:48):
or at least the rumors of something like it, when
a Jesuit friar called Christopher sheen Or observed a faint
image that was disappearing from the bare retina of a
dissected frog. So, like you were saying, just before a break, right,
we look at fish's eyes to see if they're starting
to decompose, essentially, and it seems like he was doing
something similar with a frog. But then he was like, wait,
(16:08):
I see a picture in this frog's eyes. This means something,
right now, Remember what we were talking about earlier with photography.
Photography wasn't really invented until the eighteen forties. This is
what gave rise though, to the idea that the animal
I worked like a camera. So, uh, Shiner's kind of
hypothesis of that there was an image left over in
(16:29):
the frog's eye seems to have connected with that become
somewhat of an urban legend. Then we get in eighteen
sixty three, there's an English photographer who takes a photograph
of an ox's eye right after the ox dies, and
he uses a microscope to search for any evidence of
the images left inside. This ox is retina. The photographer
(16:49):
claims that he could see the fleeting image of stones
arranged just like the slaughterhouse road that the ox was
facing just before it received a blow to the head
that killed it. Okay, so this helps spur this on
even further. It becomes a little bit more of a
so it's sort of just like a rumor, like, oh,
(17:10):
did you know, like the last thing you see before
you die is imprinted on your eyeball. Then it was
really studied for the first time by Franz Christian Bull
and in eighteen seventies six he discovered that there was
a pigment hiding in the back of the eye that
could bleach in light and then would recover in the dark,
and he called this visual purple. Now today we call
(17:33):
it rhodopson. I'll give you a little bit of a
lesson on rhodopsin, but but he's certainly worth noting in
all this that that that bull was the real deal.
Like this, This wasn't just a photographer who is making
some judgments based on the photographs that he take. In
this is a guy who who studied and made some
real achievements. Absolutely, so we now know today that rhodopson
(17:54):
is a pigment that contains sensory proteins and that converts
light into an electrical signal. This is a common pigment.
It's in a lot of organisms, from vertebrates to bacteria.
In fact, I was seeing all kinds of academic papers yesterday.
You're doing this research on how there's there's some potential animals,
like some octopi that may have rhodopsin in their skin
(18:18):
that allows them to quote see through their skin in
some ways. It's common, but it's also required for vision
in dim light, and it's located in the tightly packed
disks that make up the outer segment of the retina's
photo receptive rod cells. Basically, the way it works is
it sends an electrical signal along the optic nerve to
(18:40):
the visual cortex in the brain. The eye sensitivity is
dependent on how much rhodopsin is present, and part of
the visual process involves it being destroyed in this bleaching
process that I mentioned when it's exposed to light. Now
here's a weird thing. Mutations in the rhodopsin gene can
actually lead to night blindness. So this is where the
(19:02):
eye fails to adapt to darkness. So radoption is really
important for us being too in D and D terms
like low light vision right um. And it can be
affected by environmental factors, especially vitamin A deficiency. So if
your vitamin A is low, this can mess with your
adoption and how well you see at night. Now I
(19:23):
love despite Bowl's scientific pedigree. I love how his experiments
sounds so much like alchemy. I ran across a bit
from his writings as quoted in Optagrams and Criminology, Science
News Reporting and Fanciful Novels by Douglas J. Lanska, and
here's what both said. I simultaneously decapitated a dozen dark
(19:44):
adapted frogs and kept their heads dark in order to
examine their eyes consecutively at stated intervals. Yeah, man, that
is a common thing with optography, cutting animals heads off
and just keeping them around in the dark. Get ready
for it, because everybody does this, and they even do
it to a couple of people. Yeah, and it's the same,
it's it's it's lines up so well with accounts you
(20:05):
read about how to make a homunculous right exactly. So. Actually,
before bowl there's this report that in eighteen sixty eight,
a doctor in the German town of Vosquez presented pictures
that he made of the images from to murder victims eyes,
and a medical expert named August Gabriel Maxim Vernois was
(20:28):
asked to examine this concept and tested empirically. So he's
basically the outsider scientist comes to this town, he takes
a look. Was he do experiments on sixteen dogs and cats,
presumably cutting up their eyeballs in their heads. He finds
no pictures. He finds that this isn't true. This but
something's wrong here, right, Yeah. I think one of the
interesting things though, particularly about bowls experiments um, is that
(20:51):
that he was excited by the chemical process that seemed
to be taking place there because it was it was
rather like the silver nitrate in photograph plates. It was
like this chemical process that was a part of this
exciting technology. So again we can't help but see the
comparisons between the technology and the human experience. Yeah, and
(21:12):
I think that's the difference here, right, is that bull
was actually like working with the chemistry and biology, whereas
like whatever went on in this town of Vosquez, like
it was really just somebody taking pictures of murder victims
eyes and thinking they saw something there. Right, But this
all changes and in Germany. Germany seems to be the
(21:33):
center point for a lot of this. I wonder if
there's something specific to German culture that revolves around the
idea of being able to see an image on a
dead person's eyeball. Oh, I don't know, I mean to
I mean to a certain extent. I think just sort
of necromatic ideas about communicating with the dead or or
perhaps universal. Now on the chemistry side, though, of course,
you can look to the the huge achievements in chemistry
(21:55):
that were made in Germany, you know, around this time
and into the they Well, German listeners, if you've got
some insights into this, we'd love to hear from you.
But here comes Wilhelm Friederic Kuhn now Kun, was a
professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg and he
studied rhodopson. He devised a process to fix the chemical
(22:18):
in the eyeball and then develop an image from it.
And these experiments grew out of his accidental observation of
the shape of a gas flame from his laboratory on
the retina of a frog. So Kun performs this famous experiment.
This is the one. Like any time you look at
optography articles or anything, this always comes up. This is
(22:39):
the most famous experiment. He takes an albino rabbit in
seven and he fastens this rabbit's head so that it's
forced to look at a barred window. Then he covers
its head for several minutes I think with like a
bag or something, uh, and this lets the rhodopson accumulate
in the rabbit's eyeballs. Then takes the bag or whatever
(23:01):
off of the rabbit's head, lets the eyeball be exposed
to light for three minutes, and then decapitates the rabbit.
He removes the rabbit's eyeball, cuts the eyeball open, and
takes the retina and lays it in a solution of alum.
Then he would bathe the eyeball afterward in sulfuric acid
(23:22):
and this would cement these images. The next day, the
image would then become printed and it would show a
clear pattern of this window that the rabbit was looking
at with its bars right before it died. So Kun
is actually the one who coins the term optography, and
he calls these images optographs. So we're looking at the
(23:46):
beginning of what is maybe going to be a science
but really doesn't end up panning out. And the reason
why is con himself really felt like this wasn't you know,
something that was reliable enough that you could use it
over and over again, right, So his experiments ultimately showed
that only simple, high contrast surroundings were able to produce
(24:06):
interpretable optograms, and that the retina, whatever it was, whether
it was from a frog or a human being or rabbit,
needs to be removed very quickly from the deceased. He
determined for rabbits the limitation you need to get it
out of their head between sixty and ninety minutes of death.
In oxen it was useless after one hour. Yeah, and
(24:27):
then one of the problems with it with human eyes
that I've seen pointed out is that human eyes are
arguably more like bird's eyes than mammalian eyed. This according
to author Simon Ings, author of A Natural History of Seeing,
the Art and Science of Vision. Um. Yeah, Coon's history
with this technology is rather interesting because on one side
there is just sort of the grizzly and very specific
(24:49):
nature of of the research. For instance, when he was
trying to figure out in a better way of fixing
the images, which again is akin to fixing bath in
the chemical the process of photo development. Uh, he eventually
realized that a retinal image would fade and vanish, you know,
due to just metabolic processes in the eye even a
short time after death. So in one experiment with with
(25:12):
a dog that had essentially been put under and then
put on artificial respiration respiration, and that dog he had
previously hooked up it's corona artery with an injection apparatus
so as to quote drive a rapid stream of warm
alumn solution into the head and into the eye. Okay,
so it sounds like here what he's looking to do
(25:33):
then is is basically limit the after effect right by
having the animals still living while he's injecting the chemical
fluid for the processing. Yeah, poor dog. Well yeah, I mean, hey,
but those rabbits, those rabbits didn't have it easy. Those rabbits. Yeah. No,
I wouldn't want to be those rabbits either, But at least,
(25:53):
I mean, I'm assuming the decapitation was quick. I hope. Well,
he's in a hurry. I mean, he has to see.
This dog is like, you know, thankfully put under, But
it's got all the stuff running directly into its eyeball.
But but it does boil down. Just how difficult it
would be to use this uh in any way, for
(26:13):
especially for forensic purposes, because in order to pull it off,
he realized, you need a a a very simple, high
contrast target to look at anyway, so you know, like
window beams, et cetera, these things we've talked about. You
need a paralyzing agent or some other means of locking
the eyes on the target, and then the eye would
have to be rapidly removed and opened in darkness the
(26:35):
retina hardened and fixed, and even then the method often
failed because the pigment regenerated and obscured the image. Now,
while others out there in the world speculated on the
potential forensic applications here. Coon initially dismissed these possibilities. He
wanted no part of the quote various popular accounts to
which my name has been in the most unusual manner
(26:57):
attached still um. When presented with the opportunity, he gave
it a shot. Yeah, he couldn't pass it up. So
he actually retrieved the eyeball from a human being named
Earhard Gustav Reef. And this was a man who was
sentenced to death for drowning his two children. This is
eight we're talking about here. And this guy was killed
(27:20):
by guillotine, so his head was decapitated. Kon creates an
optagram in ten minutes, he like grabs his head the
minute falls off, scoops the eyeball out, and just immediately
begins his chemical process. Now, when the image came out,
Coon and other people who saw it, they were all like, oh, wait,
I see this, I see that. They but then nobody
could really agree what it was, and ultimately it was
(27:42):
decided this is too ambiguous. It didn't really so there
might have been an impression, but was it a useful
impression in any way shape or form. Wasn't an identifiable
pre impression doesn't seem to be especially in any way
that could be used to like, for instance, identify a
murder victims killer now. Coon later worked with American physician Dr. W. C. Ayers,
(28:04):
who have conducted a long series of experiments. We're talking
a thousand plus experiments, and he concluded that optography would
never have a place in forensics. Uh. This is a
quote here from that Douglas J. Lanscope piece I cited earlier,
And this is and the sources this into an anonymous
source that he quotes. He meaning airs believes it utterly
(28:25):
idle to look for the picture of a man's face
or of the surroundings on the retina of a person
who has met with sudden death, even amid the most
favorable circumstances. And you know it would it would remain
this way. There's no evidence of a human optography experiment
ever producing as as as clear an image as we
saw with those rabbit experiments. And and even then those
(28:47):
rabbit experiments, again, it just looks very abstract. It's like
three beams. If you're told that it's a window, then
you can say, okay, I can see where that would
be a window. Yeah, we actually have the photo here
in our notes if if you want to look it up,
I'm sure you could find it if you just google optography.
But yeah, I mean it really it's a very simple, basic,
high contrast image. I doubt that you would be able
(29:09):
to even with a rabbit, uh, discern a person's face, right,
And that is the vast consensus from people who dealt
with the science. It was just refuted again and again
all the way up into the twentieth century. And yet
the idea didn't quite die out. Yeah, it's it still
hasn't panned out, and yet for some reason it's like
(29:31):
stuck in our cultural memory. Maybe it's because of the
pop cultural implications. But people just forged ahead and kept
trying and trying and trying. And at the same time
you had various individuals and pop culture writers or or
celebrities that were either playing with this idea or they
just outright talking about how photography had this link with
(29:52):
the supernatural. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author
of Sherlock Holmes Stories and uh self self experiment or
of poisons, as we know from our recent Poisons episode.
Yet in nine three he gave a talk on spiritualism
in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Uh. And
he made use of photography to make his point. Um.
(30:14):
And this was eight years after the attempted forensic use
of optography that we're discussing here. Uh. He he showed
off spirit photography as proof of the afterlife and it
was well received. And he's talking about photography as this
means of communicating with the dead, and in the spiritualist
(30:34):
enthusiasm of the day, people were still buying into it.
And this gets back into what we were talking about
in that Poisons episode. How Like most people associate those
Sherlock Home stories and Arthur Conan Doyle with being like
pretty firmly grounded in reality, right, But there's always this
like lingering kind of whiff of the occult in them.
And that was something that I think both you and
(30:55):
I were always attracted to by those stories. Right. And
it turns out it's because he like had one foot
in the occult a little bit. Yeah. And you know what,
at the same time, it's Um, it is important to
note that he wasn't being completely illogical in all of this.
He was applying a logic to it, like he's saying, yeah,
(31:17):
there's there's a there's an afterlife, there's there's a spirit world,
there's more to us than what we see, and here's
the evidence. Now, there's some some fallacies involved there, but
it wasn't like a blind illogical um exercise for sa
and Doyle. Well, I think we are all owed an
(31:37):
episode of Benedict Cumber patches uh Sherlock Holmes where he's
hunting down ghosts. Yeah, yeah, I get into it. I
believe there was some sort of a TV series, and
I don't recall the name of it. I think it
maybe it had something like The Great Detective in the
in the title, but it was it was a fictionalized
account of Sacon and Doyle's interest in the super natural. Okay,
(32:01):
I've never heard of that. Yeah, it was a British series.
I don't I don't know that it went more than
a single series. Okay, cool, Well, now that we've got
the biggest fictional example out of the way, why don't
we take a break and the when we get back,
we're going to look at the forensic history of people
trying to use optagrams in actual criminal investigations. So all right,
(32:22):
we discussed that Coon showed optography wasn't feasible, even he
himself came to this conclusion, but the idea still took hold,
and it still leapt into fiction. People continued to claim
that they were using the technique. There was a hope
that the technique would be allowed to determine a murder
victims assailant. And you see this across the century. You've
(32:44):
got a Jules Verne wrote a story about it there,
They've used it in Doctor Who a couple of times,
and there's an episode of that TV show Fringe that
they used optography and as well. It seems like a
missed opportunity for the TV series Hannibal. Uh not, because
I can clearly imagine a scenario where the killer tries to,
(33:05):
uh to, to put his own image on the retina
of a murder victim and then he like makes a
specific meal with that eyeball like on the top of it,
like a child. Well, I would hope the episode ends
we have with Hannibal eating the killer's eyes. Yeah, well
that maybe if they get a fourth season, we'll see
that episode. By the way, if anyone out there wants
(33:25):
to check out the Kipling story, its title is at
the end of the passage and the Jewels Verne story
from nine two is the Kip Brothers. That's interesting. I
wonder if he named it after Kipling. I don't know.
I haven't read it, but perhaps some of you have,
and you can you can give us your thoughts. So
here's an example of where this was first starting to
(33:45):
be used by actual police. They in eighteen seventy seven
April police photographed the eye of a murdered man. They
were only partly aware of what optography involved, so they
had clearly heard about Coon's experiments, but they they were
just taking pictures of somebody's of a corpse's eyes. Uh.
And in fact, the investigators on the Jack the Ripper
(34:07):
case may have also considered the technique. There's a rumor, uh,
it's never been confirmed, but that the technique of optography
was carried out on Ripper victim Mary Jane Kelly in
eight Yeah. Apparently this comes from a memoir by Scotland
yard inspector Walter do And even in his account he
(34:27):
claimed he basically says that they took the photos but
they had no real hope that anything would come of it.
But you know, like you said, they kind of heard
that this was a thing, so why not get in
there and take some get the best camera over here,
take some shots of the eyes in case the boys
in the bat can do something with it. So they
were just they were desperate at that point because it
was I mean, they've never experienced anything like a serial
(34:49):
killer at all that point. So but but you see
the same scenario time and time again, where where the
inspectors don't really have any intimate knowledge of the science
that's an evolved here. They just have this general idea
that technology can make use of the image of an
individual's eye to see what they saw before death, and
therefore go ahead and take the photos justin case, just
(35:11):
to be on the safe side. Well, the next example
that I found of this came from a German newspaper
article that reports an optography attempt in the nine trial
of Fritz A. Gerstein. And this is for the murder
of his wife and seven other people. So again we've
got like pretty you know, elaborate case of murder here. Uh.
(35:32):
The corner in this case claimed that he saw images
of the killer holding a hatchet axe in the eyes
of not one but two of the victims. So Angerstein
was convicted and executed partly due to this optographic evidence.
It wasn't even and I'm saying evidence with quotes surround it, like,
they didn't take pictures, they didn't do the whole coon
(35:55):
thing where they cut the eyeball up and they soaked
it and fluid, none of that. This guy just went, yeah,
I saw an ax in those people's eyes, and that
was admitted as evidence. Yeah, Lanska talked a little bit
about this in his his ride up and Yeah, essentially
it was just a case of the police rolling up
a suspect by telling him, look, we grabbed the image
of you, you know, wielding the murder weapon from the
(36:16):
dead gardener's eyes, and and there probably wasn't even a photo,
but the police only needed the threat of it to
force a confession out of a man who was willing
to believe that such things were possible. So this totally
renewed the interest and the supposed credibility and using it
for forensic investigation. Now on the other side of the Atlantic,
in nineteen fourteen, a headline from the Washington Times reports
(36:41):
that an image was taken from a murder victims retina
that might show who her killer was, and that this
victim was twenty year old Teresa Hollander in Illinois. Now,
the police had hoped that the face of her murderer
was imprinted like a photo negative on her retina's but
the technique never revealed anything in the case, and it
(37:01):
was used to accuse Hollander's former boyfriend, Anthony Petris of
the crime. However, he was tried twice for this crime
and he was never found guilty, so it was not
successfully used there. And again, I just want to reiterate this,
like we're talking about these examples and we're saying, oh,
this is so ridiculous, can you believe it? It sounds
silly and unbelievable to us today, But in the nineteenth
(37:23):
century and obviously early twenty century here people were fascinated
by the developments between biology and photography and the fact
that they just they could not get out of their
heads that they thought, oh, the human eye and a
camera the same thing essentially, right, So surely we can
just do what we do with a camera to the
human eye and figure out who these killers are. So
(37:44):
that brings us to the nineteen seven murder case of
police officer George William Gutteridge. And this is in the UK.
The perpetrators who killed Officer Gutteridge believed in optagrams, and
so they shot him through the eyes after killing him
to destroy the evidence. Ah, so this is just the
(38:07):
kind of the reverse of the whole take photos of
the eyes just in case, shoot out the eyes just
in case, exactly. So this goes all the way up
until nine we've got We're back in Heidelberg, Germany. This
is where Coon did his research, and the Heidelberg police
department in town are like, you know what, we might
want to revisit this. Let's one more crack at. It's
(38:29):
been a century, but let's take a look. So they
invite physiologists Evangelos Alexandridas to reevaluate Coon's experiments. So he
comes up there, he performs similar rabbit experiments. He places
them in front of paintings and images, he cuts their
heads off or takes their eyeballs out, all of this stuff.
(38:50):
This seems like it's the last serious optography research that
has has been performed, or at least reported to be performed.
But he again found owned nothing particularly valuable there. And
that should be enough, because the whole history of optography
entailed experts refuting it time and time again. So you know,
(39:11):
someone would get it in their mind that hey, we
should we can look at the eyes of this murder victim,
right and see what happened, And then the experts would say, no,
actually you can't. There's even even if we had the
most pristine environment, you had total control over it, like
even before the individual's death, which is totally unrealistic. Even
if if conditions were perfect, it would probably be useless. Yeah,
(39:33):
I'm trying to be sympathetic and imagine not a science
fiction possibility, but something that seems within the realm of
the empirical where clearly raddoption does have the ability to
retain an image for a certain amount of time. Yeah,
there's no doubting that that there is an image there
that that that that that for instance, the crossbars and
(39:55):
lines that we have from the rabbit's eyes, those are
the effects of the the eyeball looking at the window
and taking in this this contrast. Yeah. So I'm just
trying to like, potentially somebody's gonna come along another ten years,
twenty years and say, well, I don't know, like, let's
let's try that thing. Where we pump a fluids directly
(40:16):
into the eyeball of a dog again or something, or
or maybe they'll they'll take a corpse and they'll try
to like uh, reverse engineer the re adopts in process
on it, and it seems like something that might work.
It seems like they're onto something right, but it's just
not quite there. Well, the interesting thing about all this
is that, you know I mentioned earlier that book in
(40:37):
Natural History of Seeing, the Art and Science of Vision
by Simon Inings. Yeah, well I ran across an interview
with him for PRX Media, and and in it um
he he suspects that modern brain scanning technology could wind
some of us up in some of us up in
very similar territory years from now, when we've learned more
(40:58):
about what the evidence actually is compared to all the
things we're taking away from it right now. And he
specifically suspects that this will be the case with the
first time a suspect is placed in a brain scanner
to see if they remember a crime. So I think
that is probably that's probably the best way to try
and put ourselves in the heads of people who are
(41:20):
studying this and even advocating it. And entertaining the idea
of its usefulness you know on up into basically modern
modern day is that you know, we're we're likely doing
some of the same missteps today with with some of
our brain scanning technology. You know, we we have this
amazing ability to look inside the brain and see what's happening.
(41:42):
And you know, there's not a day goes by that
there's not some cool study that's talking about what this
may reveal about cognition and UH and memory. But are
are all of those connections legitimate and uh and where
do we start uh misapply rying the technology to forensics.
So it sounds here like rather than looking at the rhodoption,
(42:05):
rather than looking at the chemical itself interacting with light
and turning it into electricity, that maybe the idea here
is that if we can look at that electrical signal somehow,
if we can get ahold of that somehow from the brain,
then that might be a possible way to make optography
come to life. Unintended, I mean, I guess optography comes
to life in the future if you have a sort
(42:28):
of black mirror scenario where you have some sort of
computer brain interface. Right then, as is often the case
with with with technology, it makes the magic possible. Something
that was previously pure necromancy or or or you know,
scientific reality that could not really be inflated to equal
(42:48):
the magic. Suddenly it's possible because of some sort of
you know, technological grain that's been implanted in the in
the in the head. Well, listeners, what do you think
do you think that there's some value to of, you know,
continuing experiments like this on the eyeball, whether it's with
human beings or other animals, or do you think that
maybe we're onto something here talking about potential brain computer interfaces.
(43:12):
Will we ever be able to see what the last
image was on a dead person's by right us on
social media if you've got an answer. We're on Twitter,
we're on Facebook, we're on tumbler, and we're on Instagram,
and hey, maybe even send us pictures of what your
eyeballs are seeing. That's right, Uh yeah, don't forget to
check out the the mother ship. That's stuff to bluing
(43:34):
your Mind dot com and you can email us all
of your inquiries, all of your questions at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works.
(43:55):
Dot com
This incredible. What's the last thing? Increase? It's a funny's
inspecting the image just being contained in the fluid exactly.
The treat's visual memory is located nothing it's brain, but
(00:30):
in the eye itself. Welcome to stuff to Blow your
Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you welcome
to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
(00:51):
Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Hey, Robert, if you were murdered,
would you mind if I scooped your eyeball out, cut
it in half, dipped it in some chemicals, and then
looked at that to see if I could find the
image of your murderer on your eye. Only if you
had the professionals like the late great Christopher Lee and
Peter Cushing doing the investigating as they as they do
(01:13):
in this clip that we just heard from the nineteen
seventy two horror film Horror Express. I have to confess
I've never seen this movie, So tell me and tell
the audience what is what's it about? Well? This is yeah,
this is the fun wild little film that uh it
is shockingly public domain property at the moment. You can
find it on on YouTube and and pretty much anywhere
(01:36):
that you're going to grab your your horror cinema. It's
a it has a shockingly star studded cast. You got
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and not in our audio clip,
Telly savalis as a as a Cossack captain. Wow with
without any attempt at at a Russian act center anything,
just straight up tell Y savalas. So it's just Ko
Jack pretending like he's a Cossack captain on this train. Yeah, exactly.
(01:59):
And there is a oh god goodness that they're all
these additional character actors as well. There is a there's
a respute and sue character uh that's walking around. It
all takes place on a Trans Siberian Express from China
to Moscow, and it concerns this uh, this alien possessed,
reanimated prehistoric commented. They just starts running amuck, draining the
(02:22):
memories from its victims, leaving them with milky white eyes.
And there's this fabulous scene which we we just heard
the audio from where the scientists use a microscope on
the creature's eye fluid to reveal its final sites, as
well as a kind of hilarious glimpse at the prehistoric world.
But so that may sound totally ridiculous in the scheme
of this film, and and it did when I first
(02:44):
saw it. I first saw this, I think in college,
and I had no idea that it had any connection
to the rational world. I was like, what kind of
dove for these guys on when they wrote this, because
this is the most crazy pseudo scientific idea I've ever heard.
And it turns out that it is that actually over
two hundred year old theory that still floats around occasionally,
(03:05):
though we mainly just see it in our film nowadays.
But man, it connected to forensic science for almost a
century and to the criminal mind in terms of what
they needed to do to get away with their murderous crimes. Yeah,
and and of course as well get into the topic
will explore to what extent it was it was tied
to forensic science, It has a it has an interesting
(03:27):
history there. Essentially it is it is still a pseudoscience, um.
But you know, pseudoscience often enters our world where magic fails,
us seeming to make the impossible possible via the invocation
of actual scientific and technological marvels. And and so today
what we're discussing is is unmistakably necromantic. You know, it's
(03:50):
it's communicating with the dead, but it's wrapped up in
these nineteenth century technological advancements, and uh, it's extremely fascinating.
I can't believe it's taking me this long to finally
get to the the actual science behind this ridiculous movie. Yeah,
it's it's fun, but it's also utterly bizarre. What we're
(04:12):
talking about here is optography. There's a name for this
scientific practice. What we're gonna do is we're gonna give
you kind of a precursor to optography, and then discuss
the experiments surrounding it, and then how that led to
a lot of confusion of forensic science for a long time. Alright,
So in order to to understand how this false notion
(04:35):
could have gained any traction, we have to first look
at the scientific advancements that preceded it and made it
seem possible even to serious researchers at the at the time.
As as we'll get into. Uh, but as always, you know,
a little bit of knowledge is always a dangerous thing.
So in eighteen thirty seven, French artist and physicist Louis
(04:57):
Daguerre invented the Dagara type. This is the first commercially
successful photographic process, and it used an iodine synthitized silverized
plate and mercury vapor to capture the image, and it
produced very detailed images. And while it took minutes of
exposure time, this was still swifter than previous photographic methods. Uh,
(05:18):
they couldn't be replicated. Um, and each Daguara type image
was a mirror image, but still it had just an
incredible cultural impact at the time, right, Yeah, I mean
we're still close enough I think in the like relative
scheme of history that some of us have seen Decara
types before. I have this book that's utterly macabre and
somewhat related to this, that's just Daguero types of dead
(05:41):
bodies from the nineteenth century because that was a thing
where people would photograph the dead before they were buried.
And uh, it's fascinating and there's like a cultural history within.
It's not just me being a weird secko looking at corpses.
But the Daguera types have a specific texture to them
that I don't think you see photographs today. Yeah, And
(06:01):
it's it's also just it's hard for us to put
ourselves and given just how how how photographs fill our
world and how a custom we are to the technology.
It's it's hard for us to imagine what it was
like to suddenly have this technology more readily available. Um.
But but when you looked at some of the commentary
from the time, you can really begin to to to
(06:23):
to zero in on it. Um. For instance, Oliver Wendell
Holmes called the aa Gara type quote the mirror with
a memory, which which I think is rather fitting. And
Edgar Allan Poe uh wrote about the invention in eighteen
forty and I want to read uh some quotes from
him because I think he's he summed up. They're just
(06:44):
the wonder and awe of this invention rather nicely. And
it's Halloween. So what Poe has to say, if we
examine a work of ordinary art by means of a
powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear.
But the closest scrutiny of the photogenetic rawling discloses only
a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect
(07:06):
with the thing represented. The variations of shade, the gradiations
of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth
itself and the supremeness of its perfection, the results of
the invention cannot even remotely be seen. But all experience
in matters of philosophical discovery teaches us that in such
a discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must
(07:28):
calculate most largely. It is a theorem almost demonstrated that
the consequences of any new scientific invention will at the
present day exceed by very much the wildest expectations of
the most imaginative. So I hear that Poe quote, and
it sounds to me like the advent of photography was
really changing how people thought about the world, right, Because
(07:52):
up until then, let's be honest, like our awareness of
the world is essentially from the self, because we're looking
out from ourselves to the world. Right. But with this photograph,
you can start perceiving the world through the eyes of
the other. Yeah, And that sounds uncanny, like a complete change,
And thought, Yeah, you don't have to depend on the
(08:13):
fallibility of memory, you don't have to depend on on
an artistic representation that is created by somebody. It's virtually
instant compared to two artistic techniques and uh, and has
just incredible detail. So it makes sense that people would
be just applying photography to everything, and and you know,
to your point about taking pictures of the dead to
(08:35):
commemorate them. Uh, it reminds me. For instance, you remember
when everybody was getting these um these picture frames that
would throw up multiple digital images. Yes, I got one
for my grandmother a couple of years ago. Yeah, because
all of our photos were digital and she didn't have
a computer, So we got her one of those. And
then my sister brother and I we just all like
(08:55):
uploaded like a hundred photos into the thing and sent
it to her for Christmas. Yeah. I mean they still
have them, I obviously, but I feel like for a
while there everybody had them. It was it was the thing.
And even at the time, I remember thinking, this is
this is gonna be a detail in a historic reenactment
in the future. This is gonna this is a technology
that is going to quickly fade because it's a bit weird.
(09:15):
It's just not working in the way that a digital
image and a more traditional digital medium works, or as
a or or the way the physical uh photograph works
in a frame. Right, Yeah, yeah, it is. It is
a strange thing. I think you're right, that's going to
be one of those things that like period pieces fifty
years from now, well they'll they'll throw those weird digital
frames in. All right, So you had the degerotype. It
(09:38):
was new, technology was game changing, it was exciting and
uh and you had a lot of people already appropriating
all of this excitement to the pseudo to pseudoscientific and
mystical purposes. And we're not gonna get into all those
purposes today. But obviously this was the era of spirit photography. Um,
you know, images of ectoplasm and ghosts and fair area's.
(10:00):
Uh So, anything we're talking about today that gets a
little uh mystical in nature is really nothing compared to
some of the other uses that were out there. Right,
But this led to how we study the eyeball right,
because there was this cultural idea that the function of
a camera was the same as the biological function of
(10:22):
an eye, whether that being a human being or a
rabbit or a rat. That's right. And you know, at
the same time, we were also making huge strides and
studying the eye itself. Uh. In in eighteen fifty we
saw the invention and and some argue this was just
an independent reinvention of the ophthalmaloscope by German physiologist and
(10:44):
physicist Herman von Helmholtz and the engage revolutionized ophthalmology and
that it allowed the doctors to see inside the fundness
of the eye. Okay, so this is like the thing
when I go to the optometrist every year and they
look at my eye with what feels to me like
it's like a microscope or something. But it's obviously a
lot more complicated than what Helmholtz was working with. So
(11:07):
you take these two technological advancements and in retrospect, it
seems inevitable that we would get to this realm of
optimology because we're learning more about the eye. We have
this fabulous news technology, and time and time again, we
can't help but think about the human experience in the
human body in terms of the technology we use. When
(11:27):
we've talked about memory on the show, we often talk
about how we we fall into this trap of thinking
about the eyes as video cameras and memory as like
the tape database, and when it's really nothing like that,
you know, aside from the most simplistic uses of that metaphor. Yeah,
it's actually interesting when you look at that period of
(11:49):
time during the Industrial Revolution, after this invention, right, there
is a lot of focus in sort of fantastic fiction
on the ideas of being able to do the things
that you do in industry better with the biology of
the human body, whether that's like moving faster or being stronger,
or having better eyesight, like all of those things, like
(12:11):
how can it uh increase the production? Right? And then
you start seeing investigations like this in science where it's like, oh, well,
maybe if we peek inside of here, we'll we'll get
some idea how to make it so everybody's got superhuman vision.
And yet it's still so hard to shake mystical interpretations
of vision. Uh. For instance, just consider that the long
(12:33):
outdated emission theory of vision. This is the idea that
you see with I beams, the idea that there's some
sort of force that comes out of my eye and
touches something that, you know, the the thing I'm trying
to see, and relates the information back to my eyes somehow. Uh.
This has long been abandoned, but according to the to
(12:53):
an American Psychologist article published in two thousand two, as
many as fifty percent of adults still bought the emission
theory rather than the correct intromission theory. Really. Yeah, I've
never even heard the emission theory outside of like comic books.
Well in the comic books is a great example because
it comes down to local Cyclops. The x Cyclops is
(13:14):
who I immediately think of. It gets into this idea
that without like really thinking about it and room and
even in many cases I think, just reminding yourself, oh yeah,
light is entering my eyes and that's how I see.
You end up thinking about reality and thinking about sight
in terms of Cyclops's laser vision. Right, something's coming out
blasting things. If someone staring at you, they're like peering
(13:37):
into you with some sort of a force. Yeah, yeah,
this is interesting. It says more I think about our
uncomfortableity with looking at a living being's eyes than it
does about what we think about how we see things,
you know what I mean. Alright, So, so far we
have the inherent mystical nature of sight or the experience
of sight. We have these new technological advancements up. Plus
(14:00):
you can throw in a little bit of experiential support
as well. If you stare at something for a long
time and then you gaze at a blank wall, what happens? Yeah,
you can still see an impression of that image. And
you may experience this too with computer screens and whatnot
as well. And to the point of what we're going
to discuss with optography, that effect is heightened if you
(14:20):
go from being in a dark place to a bright
place or vice versa. Yeah. And in eighteen fifty four,
English scientist Reverend William Scoresby UH connected this experiment where
you would stare in an object and then look at
the wall and then time the image to see how
long it lasted. Um. And that there was this uh
(14:42):
that the paper was on pictorial and photochromatic impressions of
the retina and of the human eye. Uh. And there's
this wonderful quote. This is from an eighteen fifty four
right up in the uh Antheneum. Upon removing the eyes
from the object, the author explained the early appearance of
the picture or image which had been thus impressed on
(15:02):
the retina, or as he expressed it, photographed upon the retina.
So we have the technology observable perks of human side
backed up in an experiment, and a general human history
of seeing the eyes as windows into the soul, as
well as observeration observational changes in the eyes of say
a fish, because how do you judge the freshness of
a fish? You look to its eyes. Right when they
(15:24):
start changing and getting cloudy, you know they've been dead longer. Right, Yeah, Okay,
so let's take a break, and when we get back,
we're gonna take this step and we're gonna move forward
into the rise of optography. All right, we're back. So
optography seems to have begun in the mid seventeenth century actually,
(15:48):
or at least the rumors of something like it, when
a Jesuit friar called Christopher sheen Or observed a faint
image that was disappearing from the bare retina of a
dissected frog. So, like you were saying, just before a break, right,
we look at fish's eyes to see if they're starting
to decompose, essentially, and it seems like he was doing
something similar with a frog. But then he was like, wait,
(16:08):
I see a picture in this frog's eyes. This means something,
right now, Remember what we were talking about earlier with photography.
Photography wasn't really invented until the eighteen forties. This is
what gave rise though, to the idea that the animal
I worked like a camera. So, uh, Shiner's kind of
hypothesis of that there was an image left over in
(16:29):
the frog's eye seems to have connected with that become
somewhat of an urban legend. Then we get in eighteen
sixty three, there's an English photographer who takes a photograph
of an ox's eye right after the ox dies, and
he uses a microscope to search for any evidence of
the images left inside. This ox is retina. The photographer
(16:49):
claims that he could see the fleeting image of stones
arranged just like the slaughterhouse road that the ox was
facing just before it received a blow to the head
that killed it. Okay, so this helps spur this on
even further. It becomes a little bit more of a
so it's sort of just like a rumor, like, oh,
(17:10):
did you know, like the last thing you see before
you die is imprinted on your eyeball. Then it was
really studied for the first time by Franz Christian Bull
and in eighteen seventies six he discovered that there was
a pigment hiding in the back of the eye that
could bleach in light and then would recover in the dark,
and he called this visual purple. Now today we call
(17:33):
it rhodopson. I'll give you a little bit of a
lesson on rhodopsin, but but he's certainly worth noting in
all this that that that bull was the real deal.
Like this, This wasn't just a photographer who is making
some judgments based on the photographs that he take. In
this is a guy who who studied and made some
real achievements. Absolutely, so we now know today that rhodopson
(17:54):
is a pigment that contains sensory proteins and that converts
light into an electrical signal. This is a common pigment.
It's in a lot of organisms, from vertebrates to bacteria.
In fact, I was seeing all kinds of academic papers yesterday.
You're doing this research on how there's there's some potential animals,
like some octopi that may have rhodopsin in their skin
(18:18):
that allows them to quote see through their skin in
some ways. It's common, but it's also required for vision
in dim light, and it's located in the tightly packed
disks that make up the outer segment of the retina's
photo receptive rod cells. Basically, the way it works is
it sends an electrical signal along the optic nerve to
(18:40):
the visual cortex in the brain. The eye sensitivity is
dependent on how much rhodopsin is present, and part of
the visual process involves it being destroyed in this bleaching
process that I mentioned when it's exposed to light. Now
here's a weird thing. Mutations in the rhodopsin gene can
actually lead to night blindness. So this is where the
(19:02):
eye fails to adapt to darkness. So radoption is really
important for us being too in D and D terms
like low light vision right um. And it can be
affected by environmental factors, especially vitamin A deficiency. So if
your vitamin A is low, this can mess with your
adoption and how well you see at night. Now I
(19:23):
love despite Bowl's scientific pedigree. I love how his experiments
sounds so much like alchemy. I ran across a bit
from his writings as quoted in Optagrams and Criminology, Science
News Reporting and Fanciful Novels by Douglas J. Lanska, and
here's what both said. I simultaneously decapitated a dozen dark
(19:44):
adapted frogs and kept their heads dark in order to
examine their eyes consecutively at stated intervals. Yeah, man, that
is a common thing with optography, cutting animals heads off
and just keeping them around in the dark. Get ready
for it, because everybody does this, and they even do
it to a couple of people. Yeah, and it's the same,
it's it's it's lines up so well with accounts you
(20:05):
read about how to make a homunculous right exactly. So. Actually,
before bowl there's this report that in eighteen sixty eight,
a doctor in the German town of Vosquez presented pictures
that he made of the images from to murder victims eyes,
and a medical expert named August Gabriel Maxim Vernois was
(20:28):
asked to examine this concept and tested empirically. So he's
basically the outsider scientist comes to this town, he takes
a look. Was he do experiments on sixteen dogs and cats,
presumably cutting up their eyeballs in their heads. He finds
no pictures. He finds that this isn't true. This but
something's wrong here, right, Yeah. I think one of the
interesting things though, particularly about bowls experiments um, is that
(20:51):
that he was excited by the chemical process that seemed
to be taking place there because it was it was
rather like the silver nitrate in photograph plates. It was
like this chemical process that was a part of this
exciting technology. So again we can't help but see the
comparisons between the technology and the human experience. Yeah, and
(21:12):
I think that's the difference here, right, is that bull
was actually like working with the chemistry and biology, whereas
like whatever went on in this town of Vosquez, like
it was really just somebody taking pictures of murder victims
eyes and thinking they saw something there. Right, But this
all changes and in Germany. Germany seems to be the
(21:33):
center point for a lot of this. I wonder if
there's something specific to German culture that revolves around the
idea of being able to see an image on a
dead person's eyeball. Oh, I don't know, I mean to
I mean to a certain extent. I think just sort
of necromatic ideas about communicating with the dead or or
perhaps universal. Now on the chemistry side, though, of course,
you can look to the the huge achievements in chemistry
(21:55):
that were made in Germany, you know, around this time
and into the they Well, German listeners, if you've got
some insights into this, we'd love to hear from you.
But here comes Wilhelm Friederic Kuhn now Kun, was a
professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg and he
studied rhodopson. He devised a process to fix the chemical
(22:18):
in the eyeball and then develop an image from it.
And these experiments grew out of his accidental observation of
the shape of a gas flame from his laboratory on
the retina of a frog. So Kun performs this famous experiment.
This is the one. Like any time you look at
optography articles or anything, this always comes up. This is
(22:39):
the most famous experiment. He takes an albino rabbit in
seven and he fastens this rabbit's head so that it's
forced to look at a barred window. Then he covers
its head for several minutes I think with like a
bag or something, uh, and this lets the rhodopson accumulate
in the rabbit's eyeballs. Then takes the bag or whatever
(23:01):
off of the rabbit's head, lets the eyeball be exposed
to light for three minutes, and then decapitates the rabbit.
He removes the rabbit's eyeball, cuts the eyeball open, and
takes the retina and lays it in a solution of alum.
Then he would bathe the eyeball afterward in sulfuric acid
(23:22):
and this would cement these images. The next day, the
image would then become printed and it would show a
clear pattern of this window that the rabbit was looking
at with its bars right before it died. So Kun
is actually the one who coins the term optography, and
he calls these images optographs. So we're looking at the
(23:46):
beginning of what is maybe going to be a science
but really doesn't end up panning out. And the reason
why is con himself really felt like this wasn't you know,
something that was reliable enough that you could use it
over and over again, right, So his experiments ultimately showed
that only simple, high contrast surroundings were able to produce
(24:06):
interpretable optograms, and that the retina, whatever it was, whether
it was from a frog or a human being or rabbit,
needs to be removed very quickly from the deceased. He
determined for rabbits the limitation you need to get it
out of their head between sixty and ninety minutes of death.
In oxen it was useless after one hour. Yeah, and
(24:27):
then one of the problems with it with human eyes
that I've seen pointed out is that human eyes are
arguably more like bird's eyes than mammalian eyed. This according
to author Simon Ings, author of A Natural History of Seeing,
the Art and Science of Vision. Um. Yeah, Coon's history
with this technology is rather interesting because on one side
there is just sort of the grizzly and very specific
(24:49):
nature of of the research. For instance, when he was
trying to figure out in a better way of fixing
the images, which again is akin to fixing bath in
the chemical the process of photo development. Uh, he eventually
realized that a retinal image would fade and vanish, you know,
due to just metabolic processes in the eye even a
short time after death. So in one experiment with with
(25:12):
a dog that had essentially been put under and then
put on artificial respiration respiration, and that dog he had
previously hooked up it's corona artery with an injection apparatus
so as to quote drive a rapid stream of warm
alumn solution into the head and into the eye. Okay,
so it sounds like here what he's looking to do
(25:33):
then is is basically limit the after effect right by
having the animals still living while he's injecting the chemical
fluid for the processing. Yeah, poor dog. Well yeah, I mean, hey,
but those rabbits, those rabbits didn't have it easy. Those rabbits. Yeah. No,
I wouldn't want to be those rabbits either, But at least,
(25:53):
I mean, I'm assuming the decapitation was quick. I hope. Well,
he's in a hurry. I mean, he has to see.
This dog is like, you know, thankfully put under, But
it's got all the stuff running directly into its eyeball.
But but it does boil down. Just how difficult it
would be to use this uh in any way, for
(26:13):
especially for forensic purposes, because in order to pull it off,
he realized, you need a a a very simple, high
contrast target to look at anyway, so you know, like
window beams, et cetera, these things we've talked about. You
need a paralyzing agent or some other means of locking
the eyes on the target, and then the eye would
have to be rapidly removed and opened in darkness the
(26:35):
retina hardened and fixed, and even then the method often
failed because the pigment regenerated and obscured the image. Now,
while others out there in the world speculated on the
potential forensic applications here. Coon initially dismissed these possibilities. He
wanted no part of the quote various popular accounts to
which my name has been in the most unusual manner
(26:57):
attached still um. When presented with the opportunity, he gave
it a shot. Yeah, he couldn't pass it up. So
he actually retrieved the eyeball from a human being named
Earhard Gustav Reef. And this was a man who was
sentenced to death for drowning his two children. This is
eight we're talking about here. And this guy was killed
(27:20):
by guillotine, so his head was decapitated. Kon creates an
optagram in ten minutes, he like grabs his head the
minute falls off, scoops the eyeball out, and just immediately
begins his chemical process. Now, when the image came out,
Coon and other people who saw it, they were all like, oh, wait,
I see this, I see that. They but then nobody
could really agree what it was, and ultimately it was
(27:42):
decided this is too ambiguous. It didn't really so there
might have been an impression, but was it a useful
impression in any way shape or form. Wasn't an identifiable
pre impression doesn't seem to be especially in any way
that could be used to like, for instance, identify a
murder victims killer now. Coon later worked with American physician Dr. W. C. Ayers,
(28:04):
who have conducted a long series of experiments. We're talking
a thousand plus experiments, and he concluded that optography would
never have a place in forensics. Uh. This is a
quote here from that Douglas J. Lanscope piece I cited earlier,
And this is and the sources this into an anonymous
source that he quotes. He meaning airs believes it utterly
(28:25):
idle to look for the picture of a man's face
or of the surroundings on the retina of a person
who has met with sudden death, even amid the most
favorable circumstances. And you know it would it would remain
this way. There's no evidence of a human optography experiment
ever producing as as as clear an image as we
saw with those rabbit experiments. And and even then those
(28:47):
rabbit experiments, again, it just looks very abstract. It's like
three beams. If you're told that it's a window, then
you can say, okay, I can see where that would
be a window. Yeah, we actually have the photo here
in our notes if if you want to look it up,
I'm sure you could find it if you just google optography.
But yeah, I mean it really it's a very simple, basic,
high contrast image. I doubt that you would be able
(29:09):
to even with a rabbit, uh, discern a person's face, right,
And that is the vast consensus from people who dealt
with the science. It was just refuted again and again
all the way up into the twentieth century. And yet
the idea didn't quite die out. Yeah, it's it still
hasn't panned out, and yet for some reason it's like
(29:31):
stuck in our cultural memory. Maybe it's because of the
pop cultural implications. But people just forged ahead and kept
trying and trying and trying. And at the same time
you had various individuals and pop culture writers or or
celebrities that were either playing with this idea or they
just outright talking about how photography had this link with
(29:52):
the supernatural. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author
of Sherlock Holmes Stories and uh self self experiment or
of poisons, as we know from our recent Poisons episode.
Yet in nine three he gave a talk on spiritualism
in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Uh. And
he made use of photography to make his point. Um.
(30:14):
And this was eight years after the attempted forensic use
of optography that we're discussing here. Uh. He he showed
off spirit photography as proof of the afterlife and it
was well received. And he's talking about photography as this
means of communicating with the dead, and in the spiritualist
(30:34):
enthusiasm of the day, people were still buying into it.
And this gets back into what we were talking about
in that Poisons episode. How Like most people associate those
Sherlock Home stories and Arthur Conan Doyle with being like
pretty firmly grounded in reality, right, But there's always this
like lingering kind of whiff of the occult in them.
And that was something that I think both you and
(30:55):
I were always attracted to by those stories. Right. And
it turns out it's because he like had one foot
in the occult a little bit. Yeah. And you know what,
at the same time, it's Um, it is important to
note that he wasn't being completely illogical in all of this.
He was applying a logic to it, like he's saying, yeah,
(31:17):
there's there's a there's an afterlife, there's there's a spirit world,
there's more to us than what we see, and here's
the evidence. Now, there's some some fallacies involved there, but
it wasn't like a blind illogical um exercise for sa
and Doyle. Well, I think we are all owed an
(31:37):
episode of Benedict Cumber patches uh Sherlock Holmes where he's
hunting down ghosts. Yeah, yeah, I get into it. I
believe there was some sort of a TV series, and
I don't recall the name of it. I think it
maybe it had something like The Great Detective in the
in the title, but it was it was a fictionalized
account of Sacon and Doyle's interest in the super natural. Okay,
(32:01):
I've never heard of that. Yeah, it was a British series.
I don't I don't know that it went more than
a single series. Okay, cool, Well, now that we've got
the biggest fictional example out of the way, why don't
we take a break and the when we get back,
we're going to look at the forensic history of people
trying to use optagrams in actual criminal investigations. So all right,
(32:22):
we discussed that Coon showed optography wasn't feasible, even he
himself came to this conclusion, but the idea still took hold,
and it still leapt into fiction. People continued to claim
that they were using the technique. There was a hope
that the technique would be allowed to determine a murder
victims assailant. And you see this across the century. You've
(32:44):
got a Jules Verne wrote a story about it there,
They've used it in Doctor Who a couple of times,
and there's an episode of that TV show Fringe that
they used optography and as well. It seems like a
missed opportunity for the TV series Hannibal. Uh not, because
I can clearly imagine a scenario where the killer tries to,
(33:05):
uh to, to put his own image on the retina
of a murder victim and then he like makes a
specific meal with that eyeball like on the top of it,
like a child. Well, I would hope the episode ends
we have with Hannibal eating the killer's eyes. Yeah, well
that maybe if they get a fourth season, we'll see
that episode. By the way, if anyone out there wants
(33:25):
to check out the Kipling story, its title is at
the end of the passage and the Jewels Verne story
from nine two is the Kip Brothers. That's interesting. I
wonder if he named it after Kipling. I don't know.
I haven't read it, but perhaps some of you have,
and you can you can give us your thoughts. So
here's an example of where this was first starting to
(33:45):
be used by actual police. They in eighteen seventy seven
April police photographed the eye of a murdered man. They
were only partly aware of what optography involved, so they
had clearly heard about Coon's experiments, but they they were
just taking pictures of somebody's of a corpse's eyes. Uh.
And in fact, the investigators on the Jack the Ripper
(34:07):
case may have also considered the technique. There's a rumor, uh,
it's never been confirmed, but that the technique of optography
was carried out on Ripper victim Mary Jane Kelly in
eight Yeah. Apparently this comes from a memoir by Scotland
yard inspector Walter do And even in his account he
(34:27):
claimed he basically says that they took the photos but
they had no real hope that anything would come of it.
But you know, like you said, they kind of heard
that this was a thing, so why not get in
there and take some get the best camera over here,
take some shots of the eyes in case the boys
in the bat can do something with it. So they
were just they were desperate at that point because it
was I mean, they've never experienced anything like a serial
(34:49):
killer at all that point. So but but you see
the same scenario time and time again, where where the
inspectors don't really have any intimate knowledge of the science
that's an evolved here. They just have this general idea
that technology can make use of the image of an
individual's eye to see what they saw before death, and
therefore go ahead and take the photos justin case, just
(35:11):
to be on the safe side. Well, the next example
that I found of this came from a German newspaper
article that reports an optography attempt in the nine trial
of Fritz A. Gerstein. And this is for the murder
of his wife and seven other people. So again we've
got like pretty you know, elaborate case of murder here. Uh.
(35:32):
The corner in this case claimed that he saw images
of the killer holding a hatchet axe in the eyes
of not one but two of the victims. So Angerstein
was convicted and executed partly due to this optographic evidence.
It wasn't even and I'm saying evidence with quotes surround it, like,
they didn't take pictures, they didn't do the whole coon
(35:55):
thing where they cut the eyeball up and they soaked
it and fluid, none of that. This guy just went, yeah,
I saw an ax in those people's eyes, and that
was admitted as evidence. Yeah, Lanska talked a little bit
about this in his his ride up and Yeah, essentially
it was just a case of the police rolling up
a suspect by telling him, look, we grabbed the image
of you, you know, wielding the murder weapon from the
(36:16):
dead gardener's eyes, and and there probably wasn't even a photo,
but the police only needed the threat of it to
force a confession out of a man who was willing
to believe that such things were possible. So this totally
renewed the interest and the supposed credibility and using it
for forensic investigation. Now on the other side of the Atlantic,
in nineteen fourteen, a headline from the Washington Times reports
(36:41):
that an image was taken from a murder victims retina
that might show who her killer was, and that this
victim was twenty year old Teresa Hollander in Illinois. Now,
the police had hoped that the face of her murderer
was imprinted like a photo negative on her retina's but
the technique never revealed anything in the case, and it
(37:01):
was used to accuse Hollander's former boyfriend, Anthony Petris of
the crime. However, he was tried twice for this crime
and he was never found guilty, so it was not
successfully used there. And again, I just want to reiterate this,
like we're talking about these examples and we're saying, oh,
this is so ridiculous, can you believe it? It sounds
silly and unbelievable to us today, But in the nineteenth
(37:23):
century and obviously early twenty century here people were fascinated
by the developments between biology and photography and the fact
that they just they could not get out of their
heads that they thought, oh, the human eye and a
camera the same thing essentially, right, So surely we can
just do what we do with a camera to the
human eye and figure out who these killers are. So
(37:44):
that brings us to the nineteen seven murder case of
police officer George William Gutteridge. And this is in the UK.
The perpetrators who killed Officer Gutteridge believed in optagrams, and
so they shot him through the eyes after killing him
to destroy the evidence. Ah, so this is just the
(38:07):
kind of the reverse of the whole take photos of
the eyes just in case, shoot out the eyes just
in case, exactly. So this goes all the way up
until nine we've got We're back in Heidelberg, Germany. This
is where Coon did his research, and the Heidelberg police
department in town are like, you know what, we might
want to revisit this. Let's one more crack at. It's
(38:29):
been a century, but let's take a look. So they
invite physiologists Evangelos Alexandridas to reevaluate Coon's experiments. So he
comes up there, he performs similar rabbit experiments. He places
them in front of paintings and images, he cuts their
heads off or takes their eyeballs out, all of this stuff.
(38:50):
This seems like it's the last serious optography research that
has has been performed, or at least reported to be performed.
But he again found owned nothing particularly valuable there. And
that should be enough, because the whole history of optography
entailed experts refuting it time and time again. So you know,
(39:11):
someone would get it in their mind that hey, we
should we can look at the eyes of this murder victim,
right and see what happened, And then the experts would say, no,
actually you can't. There's even even if we had the
most pristine environment, you had total control over it, like
even before the individual's death, which is totally unrealistic. Even
if if conditions were perfect, it would probably be useless. Yeah,
(39:33):
I'm trying to be sympathetic and imagine not a science
fiction possibility, but something that seems within the realm of
the empirical where clearly raddoption does have the ability to
retain an image for a certain amount of time. Yeah,
there's no doubting that that there is an image there
that that that that that for instance, the crossbars and
(39:55):
lines that we have from the rabbit's eyes, those are
the effects of the the eyeball looking at the window
and taking in this this contrast. Yeah. So I'm just
trying to like, potentially somebody's gonna come along another ten years,
twenty years and say, well, I don't know, like, let's
let's try that thing. Where we pump a fluids directly
(40:16):
into the eyeball of a dog again or something, or
or maybe they'll they'll take a corpse and they'll try
to like uh, reverse engineer the re adopts in process
on it, and it seems like something that might work.
It seems like they're onto something right, but it's just
not quite there. Well, the interesting thing about all this
is that, you know I mentioned earlier that book in
(40:37):
Natural History of Seeing, the Art and Science of Vision
by Simon Inings. Yeah, well I ran across an interview
with him for PRX Media, and and in it um
he he suspects that modern brain scanning technology could wind
some of us up in some of us up in
very similar territory years from now, when we've learned more
(40:58):
about what the evidence actually is compared to all the
things we're taking away from it right now. And he
specifically suspects that this will be the case with the
first time a suspect is placed in a brain scanner
to see if they remember a crime. So I think
that is probably that's probably the best way to try
and put ourselves in the heads of people who are
(41:20):
studying this and even advocating it. And entertaining the idea
of its usefulness you know on up into basically modern
modern day is that you know, we're we're likely doing
some of the same missteps today with with some of
our brain scanning technology. You know, we we have this
amazing ability to look inside the brain and see what's happening.
(41:42):
And you know, there's not a day goes by that
there's not some cool study that's talking about what this
may reveal about cognition and UH and memory. But are
are all of those connections legitimate and uh and where
do we start uh misapply rying the technology to forensics.
So it sounds here like rather than looking at the rhodoption,
(42:05):
rather than looking at the chemical itself interacting with light
and turning it into electricity, that maybe the idea here
is that if we can look at that electrical signal somehow,
if we can get ahold of that somehow from the brain,
then that might be a possible way to make optography
come to life. Unintended, I mean, I guess optography comes
to life in the future if you have a sort
(42:28):
of black mirror scenario where you have some sort of
computer brain interface. Right then, as is often the case
with with with technology, it makes the magic possible. Something
that was previously pure necromancy or or or you know,
scientific reality that could not really be inflated to equal
(42:48):
the magic. Suddenly it's possible because of some sort of
you know, technological grain that's been implanted in the in
the in the head. Well, listeners, what do you think
do you think that there's some value to of, you know,
continuing experiments like this on the eyeball, whether it's with
human beings or other animals, or do you think that
maybe we're onto something here talking about potential brain computer interfaces.
(43:12):
Will we ever be able to see what the last
image was on a dead person's by right us on
social media if you've got an answer. We're on Twitter,
we're on Facebook, we're on tumbler, and we're on Instagram,
and hey, maybe even send us pictures of what your
eyeballs are seeing. That's right, Uh yeah, don't forget to
check out the the mother ship. That's stuff to bluing
(43:34):
your Mind dot com and you can email us all
of your inquiries, all of your questions at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works.
(43:55):
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