Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Blauren
Speaker 1: Vogelbaum here. When George Washington was on his deathbed in
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety nine, he signaled for his secretary and whispered hoarsely,
Speaker 1: I am just going have me decently buried, and do
Speaker 1: not let my body be put into the vault in
Speaker 1: less than three days after I'm dead. Those were Washington's
Speaker 1: final words. Careful instructions from a man who wasn't afraid
Speaker 1: of death itself, but like many people of his time
Speaker 1: and place, was deathly afraid of being buried alive. In
Speaker 1: Washington's day and throughout the eighteen hundreds, the specter of
Speaker 1: premature burial felt very real. Medical science as we know
Speaker 1: it was in its infancy, and death could strike from anywhere,
Speaker 1: common illnesses, infected wounds, or fast spreading outbreaks of smallpox.
Speaker 1: With so much death happening and so few scientific tools,
Speaker 1: even primitive stethoscopes weren't around until the eighteen twenties, it
Speaker 1: went unquestioned that a few people were being buried while
Speaker 1: not quite dead. The acute fear of being buried alive
Speaker 1: dubbed tapaphobia, with Taffa, being Greek for burial, was part
Speaker 1: of a larger obsession with death that gripped Europe and
Speaker 1: North America in the nineteenth century. One of the wildest
Speaker 1: ways that tafaphobia manifested was through the invention of safety
Speaker 1: coffins or security coffins, basically tricked out caskets that provided
Speaker 1: a way for prematurely buried people to escape from six
Speaker 1: feet under. The first patents for safety coffins started appearing
Speaker 1: in the seventeen nineties in Central Europe. That timing lines
Speaker 1: up with when European intellectuals were swept up by German romanticism.
Speaker 1: Romanticism was a response to the cold logic and reason
Speaker 1: emphasized by the Enlightenment. Instead, romantic writers and philosophers sought
Speaker 1: after true truth and art, emotion and instinct, with a
Speaker 1: frequent focus on the natural and the supernatural, and in
Speaker 1: areas in between. For the article, this episode is based
Speaker 1: on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Adam Bisnow, an historian
Speaker 1: at the US Patent and Trademark Office. He explained that
Speaker 1: Romanticism looked into quote the unseen and unknown, the gray
Speaker 1: areas in our experience, like the gray area between life
Speaker 1: and death. A. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein or the Modern
Speaker 1: Prometheus in eighteen eighteen, a novel that captured the airs
Speaker 1: fixation on that blurry line between life and death. By
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen hundreds, seances and psychics offered ways for
Speaker 1: the living to communicate with the dead, who seemed to
Speaker 1: exist on a spiritual plane just beyond our own. A
Speaker 1: business said people were asking, are the dead really gone?
Speaker 1: Are they still here with us? The fear of live
Speaker 1: burial really tapped into that fascination. It's a figure underground
Speaker 1: who was with us and not with us, alive and
Speaker 1: not alive, a dead and somehow not dead. Bisino estimates
Speaker 1: that more than one hundred security coffin patents were granted
Speaker 1: in America by the Patent and Trademark Office during the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, with each design offering more bells and whistles
Speaker 1: than the last. Literally many of the designs used noise
Speaker 1: makers like these to allow a person trapped in the
Speaker 1: coffin to alert someone above ground. One of the earliest
Speaker 1: American patents for a life preserving coffin was filed in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty three by one Christian H. Eisenbrandt of Baltimore, Maryland.
Speaker 1: The coffin had a spring loaded lid which would snap
Speaker 1: open at the slightest motion of either the head or
Speaker 1: the hand. Since that wouldn't do much good if the
Speaker 1: coffin were six feet underground, Eisenbrandt suggested leaving the coffin
Speaker 1: in an above ground fault, with a key to the
Speaker 1: vault door left inside, so that should the person not
Speaker 1: really be dead, life may be preserved. Historians found advertisements
Speaker 1: for Eisenbrandts Jack in the Box coffin dating from eighteen
Speaker 1: forty four, playing up the popular but unfounded belief in
Speaker 1: the frequency and danger of premature internment and the necessity
Speaker 1: of such a device. We don't know how many were
Speaker 1: actually made, but sales might have been helped by Edgar
Speaker 1: Allan Poe, who published his harrowing short story The Premature
Speaker 1: Burial in the same year. In the story, Poe wrote,
Speaker 1: to be buried while alive is beyond question the most
Speaker 1: terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the
Speaker 1: lot of mere mortality, that it has frequently, very frequently
Speaker 1: so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think
Speaker 1: the boundaries which divide life from death are at best
Speaker 1: shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and
Speaker 1: where the other begins. In eighteen sixty eight, one Franz
Speaker 1: Fester of Newark, New Jersey, the patent for his improved
Speaker 1: burial case, which featured a narrow tube with a ladder
Speaker 1: that allowed a reanimated person to climb to safety. If
Speaker 1: the buried individual was too weak to escape on their own,
Speaker 1: they could also pull a rope inside the coffin that
Speaker 1: rang a bell above ground to alert the living. A
Speaker 1: Vester gave demonstrations of his coffin. In eighteen sixty eight.
Speaker 1: A reporter for The New York Times chronicled one such demo,
Speaker 1: during which Vester was buried under four feet of dirt
Speaker 1: and emerged an hour later out of his living grave,
Speaker 1: to the applause and congratulations of the crowd. But the
Speaker 1: undisputed showman of nineteenth century security coffins was a man
Speaker 1: known as Count Michele de Carnice. Carnegie, described as a
Speaker 1: chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia who toured Europe and
Speaker 1: the United States demonstrating a remarkable coffin contraption that he
Speaker 1: called Lee Carnice. In eighteen ninety nine, The Chicago Tribune
Speaker 1: reported on a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in
Speaker 1: New York City, where one physician startled his fellow members
Speaker 1: with the ascertation that one out of every two hundred
Speaker 1: people buried in the US was actually in a lethargic
Speaker 1: state and is buried alive. That questionable claim served as
Speaker 1: an introduction to the Count, who then demonstrated his device.
Speaker 1: It improved on other security coffins by triggering a series
Speaker 1: of alarms and alerts with any movement of the body.
Speaker 1: There was a bell that rang and a shiny ball
Speaker 1: that lifted into the air. While waiting for help to arrive,
Speaker 1: the trapped individual could breathe and speak through a special tube.
Speaker 1: One design flaw of such safety coffins is the morbid
Speaker 1: fact that dead bodies do indeed move, though just not voluntarily.
Speaker 1: During the process of decomposition, a corpse can shift and
Speaker 1: even flip over, which would trigger a false alarm for
Speaker 1: most security coffins, but nonetheless, to show its effectiveness, the
Speaker 1: count would ask for volunteers to be buried alive. To
Speaker 1: this day, the world record of the longest voluntary live
Speaker 1: burial is held by an Italian man named Fropo Lorenzo,
Speaker 1: who consented to be entombed in Lake Carnice for nine
Speaker 1: days in eighteen ninety eight. And despite these entertaining demonstrations,
Speaker 1: the count never put Lake Carnice into production. Busino said
Speaker 1: people didn't buy it. Funeral directors weren't interested, and the
Speaker 1: public wasn't interested either. In fact, none of these inventions
Speaker 1: ever caught on. However, that's not to say that such
Speaker 1: designs were never implemented. While not exactly a security coffin,
Speaker 1: there is a grave with a window in New Haven, Connecticut.
Speaker 1: One doctor Timothy Clarksmith, who died in eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: was so afraid of being buried alive that he constructed
Speaker 1: a large underground tomb where his body was laid out
Speaker 1: next to a hammer and chisel. The window allowed cemetery
Speaker 1: workers and passers by to check and see if that
Speaker 1: had returned to life. No signs as of yet. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article how safety coffins eased
Speaker 1: grave fears of premature burial on HowStuffWorks dot com, written
Speaker 1: by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in
Speaker 1: partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the
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