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