WEBVTT - How Did Safety Coffins Ease Fears of Premature Burial? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.920 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Blauren 0:00:07.960 --> 0:00:12.799 Vogelbaum here. When George Washington was on his deathbed in 0:00:12.800 --> 0:00:17.040 seventeen ninety nine, he signaled for his secretary and whispered hoarsely, 0:00:17.720 --> 0:00:21.159 I am just going have me decently buried, and do 0:00:21.239 --> 0:00:23.239 not let my body be put into the vault in 0:00:23.320 --> 0:00:29.000 less than three days after I'm dead. Those were Washington's 0:00:29.040 --> 0:00:32.600 final words. Careful instructions from a man who wasn't afraid 0:00:32.600 --> 0:00:35.920 of death itself, but like many people of his time 0:00:35.960 --> 0:00:41.680 and place, was deathly afraid of being buried alive. In 0:00:41.920 --> 0:00:45.280 Washington's day and throughout the eighteen hundreds, the specter of 0:00:45.400 --> 0:00:49.720 premature burial felt very real. Medical science as we know 0:00:49.800 --> 0:00:53.120 it was in its infancy, and death could strike from anywhere, 0:00:53.400 --> 0:00:57.720 common illnesses, infected wounds, or fast spreading outbreaks of smallpox. 0:00:58.600 --> 0:01:01.680 With so much death happening and so few scientific tools, 0:01:01.960 --> 0:01:05.399 even primitive stethoscopes weren't around until the eighteen twenties, it 0:01:05.520 --> 0:01:08.840 went unquestioned that a few people were being buried while 0:01:09.120 --> 0:01:14.120 not quite dead. The acute fear of being buried alive 0:01:14.480 --> 0:01:18.640 dubbed tapaphobia, with Taffa, being Greek for burial, was part 0:01:18.680 --> 0:01:21.400 of a larger obsession with death that gripped Europe and 0:01:21.440 --> 0:01:25.600 North America in the nineteenth century. One of the wildest 0:01:25.600 --> 0:01:29.240 ways that tafaphobia manifested was through the invention of safety 0:01:29.280 --> 0:01:34.280 coffins or security coffins, basically tricked out caskets that provided 0:01:34.319 --> 0:01:37.319 a way for prematurely buried people to escape from six 0:01:37.400 --> 0:01:42.080 feet under. The first patents for safety coffins started appearing 0:01:42.160 --> 0:01:45.920 in the seventeen nineties in Central Europe. That timing lines 0:01:46.040 --> 0:01:50.440 up with when European intellectuals were swept up by German romanticism. 0:01:51.040 --> 0:01:54.400 Romanticism was a response to the cold logic and reason 0:01:54.480 --> 0:01:59.440 emphasized by the Enlightenment. Instead, romantic writers and philosophers sought 0:01:59.480 --> 0:02:02.840 after true truth and art, emotion and instinct, with a 0:02:02.880 --> 0:02:06.880 frequent focus on the natural and the supernatural, and in 0:02:07.000 --> 0:02:11.000 areas in between. For the article, this episode is based 0:02:11.040 --> 0:02:14.120 on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Adam Bisnow, an historian 0:02:14.200 --> 0:02:17.520 at the US Patent and Trademark Office. He explained that 0:02:17.600 --> 0:02:22.360 Romanticism looked into quote the unseen and unknown, the gray 0:02:22.400 --> 0:02:25.880 areas in our experience, like the gray area between life 0:02:25.880 --> 0:02:31.480 and death. A. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein or the Modern 0:02:31.520 --> 0:02:35.359 Prometheus in eighteen eighteen, a novel that captured the airs 0:02:35.400 --> 0:02:39.480 fixation on that blurry line between life and death. By 0:02:39.520 --> 0:02:42.920 the mid eighteen hundreds, seances and psychics offered ways for 0:02:42.960 --> 0:02:45.840 the living to communicate with the dead, who seemed to 0:02:45.880 --> 0:02:49.880 exist on a spiritual plane just beyond our own. A 0:02:49.919 --> 0:02:53.840 business said people were asking, are the dead really gone? 0:02:54.120 --> 0:02:56.839 Are they still here with us? The fear of live 0:02:56.960 --> 0:03:01.359 burial really tapped into that fascination. It's a figure underground 0:03:01.360 --> 0:03:04.120 who was with us and not with us, alive and 0:03:04.200 --> 0:03:10.680 not alive, a dead and somehow not dead. Bisino estimates 0:03:10.720 --> 0:03:13.560 that more than one hundred security coffin patents were granted 0:03:13.560 --> 0:03:15.880 in America by the Patent and Trademark Office during the 0:03:15.880 --> 0:03:19.639 eighteen hundreds, with each design offering more bells and whistles 0:03:19.680 --> 0:03:23.120 than the last. Literally many of the designs used noise 0:03:23.120 --> 0:03:25.480 makers like these to allow a person trapped in the 0:03:25.480 --> 0:03:30.799 coffin to alert someone above ground. One of the earliest 0:03:30.840 --> 0:03:34.080 American patents for a life preserving coffin was filed in 0:03:34.120 --> 0:03:38.280 eighteen forty three by one Christian H. Eisenbrandt of Baltimore, Maryland. 0:03:39.120 --> 0:03:41.800 The coffin had a spring loaded lid which would snap 0:03:41.840 --> 0:03:44.600 open at the slightest motion of either the head or 0:03:44.640 --> 0:03:48.000 the hand. Since that wouldn't do much good if the 0:03:48.040 --> 0:03:51.920 coffin were six feet underground, Eisenbrandt suggested leaving the coffin 0:03:51.960 --> 0:03:53.840 in an above ground fault, with a key to the 0:03:53.920 --> 0:03:56.720 vault door left inside, so that should the person not 0:03:56.840 --> 0:04:02.960 really be dead, life may be preserved. Historians found advertisements 0:04:03.000 --> 0:04:05.920 for Eisenbrandts Jack in the Box coffin dating from eighteen 0:04:06.000 --> 0:04:10.080 forty four, playing up the popular but unfounded belief in 0:04:10.120 --> 0:04:14.440 the frequency and danger of premature internment and the necessity 0:04:14.520 --> 0:04:17.680 of such a device. We don't know how many were 0:04:17.680 --> 0:04:20.720 actually made, but sales might have been helped by Edgar 0:04:20.760 --> 0:04:24.320 Allan Poe, who published his harrowing short story The Premature 0:04:24.360 --> 0:04:29.120 Burial in the same year. In the story, Poe wrote, 0:04:29.360 --> 0:04:32.640 to be buried while alive is beyond question the most 0:04:32.760 --> 0:04:35.680 terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the 0:04:35.760 --> 0:04:40.240 lot of mere mortality, that it has frequently, very frequently 0:04:40.400 --> 0:04:43.719 so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think 0:04:44.920 --> 0:04:48.119 the boundaries which divide life from death are at best 0:04:48.160 --> 0:04:52.000 shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and 0:04:52.080 --> 0:04:58.120 where the other begins. In eighteen sixty eight, one Franz 0:04:58.200 --> 0:05:01.800 Fester of Newark, New Jersey, the patent for his improved 0:05:01.839 --> 0:05:05.240 burial case, which featured a narrow tube with a ladder 0:05:05.360 --> 0:05:09.479 that allowed a reanimated person to climb to safety. If 0:05:09.520 --> 0:05:12.280 the buried individual was too weak to escape on their own, 0:05:12.520 --> 0:05:14.880 they could also pull a rope inside the coffin that 0:05:14.960 --> 0:05:18.520 rang a bell above ground to alert the living. A 0:05:18.600 --> 0:05:22.440 Vester gave demonstrations of his coffin. In eighteen sixty eight. 0:05:22.560 --> 0:05:25.520 A reporter for The New York Times chronicled one such demo, 0:05:26.080 --> 0:05:28.839 during which Vester was buried under four feet of dirt 0:05:28.880 --> 0:05:31.760 and emerged an hour later out of his living grave, 0:05:32.080 --> 0:05:37.120 to the applause and congratulations of the crowd. But the 0:05:37.200 --> 0:05:40.839 undisputed showman of nineteenth century security coffins was a man 0:05:40.920 --> 0:05:44.880 known as Count Michele de Carnice. Carnegie, described as a 0:05:45.080 --> 0:05:47.760 chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia who toured Europe and 0:05:47.800 --> 0:05:51.719 the United States demonstrating a remarkable coffin contraption that he 0:05:51.800 --> 0:05:56.839 called Lee Carnice. In eighteen ninety nine, The Chicago Tribune 0:05:56.920 --> 0:05:59.240 reported on a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in 0:05:59.240 --> 0:06:02.760 New York City, where one physician startled his fellow members 0:06:02.800 --> 0:06:05.680 with the ascertation that one out of every two hundred 0:06:05.720 --> 0:06:08.799 people buried in the US was actually in a lethargic 0:06:08.880 --> 0:06:14.200 state and is buried alive. That questionable claim served as 0:06:14.200 --> 0:06:17.760 an introduction to the Count, who then demonstrated his device. 0:06:18.760 --> 0:06:22.160 It improved on other security coffins by triggering a series 0:06:22.200 --> 0:06:24.840 of alarms and alerts with any movement of the body. 0:06:25.560 --> 0:06:27.760 There was a bell that rang and a shiny ball 0:06:27.800 --> 0:06:31.240 that lifted into the air. While waiting for help to arrive, 0:06:31.360 --> 0:06:36.200 the trapped individual could breathe and speak through a special tube. 0:06:36.920 --> 0:06:40.080 One design flaw of such safety coffins is the morbid 0:06:40.160 --> 0:06:44.120 fact that dead bodies do indeed move, though just not voluntarily. 0:06:44.880 --> 0:06:47.960 During the process of decomposition, a corpse can shift and 0:06:48.160 --> 0:06:51.479 even flip over, which would trigger a false alarm for 0:06:51.720 --> 0:06:57.120 most security coffins, but nonetheless, to show its effectiveness, the 0:06:57.160 --> 0:07:01.200 count would ask for volunteers to be buried alive. To 0:07:01.279 --> 0:07:04.680 this day, the world record of the longest voluntary live 0:07:04.720 --> 0:07:08.280 burial is held by an Italian man named Fropo Lorenzo, 0:07:08.600 --> 0:07:11.360 who consented to be entombed in Lake Carnice for nine 0:07:11.440 --> 0:07:17.320 days in eighteen ninety eight. And despite these entertaining demonstrations, 0:07:17.600 --> 0:07:21.560 the count never put Lake Carnice into production. Busino said 0:07:22.160 --> 0:07:25.760 people didn't buy it. Funeral directors weren't interested, and the 0:07:25.800 --> 0:07:29.400 public wasn't interested either. In fact, none of these inventions 0:07:29.440 --> 0:07:34.280 ever caught on. However, that's not to say that such 0:07:34.320 --> 0:07:39.520 designs were never implemented. While not exactly a security coffin, 0:07:39.760 --> 0:07:43.080 there is a grave with a window in New Haven, Connecticut. 0:07:43.760 --> 0:07:47.200 One doctor Timothy Clarksmith, who died in eighteen ninety three, 0:07:47.720 --> 0:07:50.520 was so afraid of being buried alive that he constructed 0:07:50.560 --> 0:07:53.760 a large underground tomb where his body was laid out 0:07:53.800 --> 0:07:57.360 next to a hammer and chisel. The window allowed cemetery 0:07:57.360 --> 0:08:00.200 workers and passers by to check and see if that 0:08:00.400 --> 0:08:09.200 had returned to life. No signs as of yet. Today's 0:08:09.240 --> 0:08:12.200 episode is based on the article how safety coffins eased 0:08:12.240 --> 0:08:15.680 grave fears of premature burial on HowStuffWorks dot com, written 0:08:15.720 --> 0:08:18.800 by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in 0:08:18.880 --> 0:08:21.200 partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by 0:08:21.240 --> 0:08:24.560 Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the 0:08:24.600 --> 0:08:27.640 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your 0:08:27.640 --> 0:08:28.400 favorite shows.