A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes

https://hyperallergic.com/406959/preserving-the-dead-in-glass/

by ohjeez • 1 year ago

35 26 1 year ago

HPsquared• 1 year ago

I wonder if there was a rush to patent anything and everything back then. Perhaps like the dotcom rush for domain names, patenting hundreds of random ideas in a similar way to domain squatting.

yummypaint• 1 year ago

This is still a common practice, the difference is ordinary people have mostly been cut out between the switch to first-to-file and routine abuse of the patent and trademark system. This is how apple got Samsung's phones forcibly pulled from markets for rounding the corners using the same curves highway engineers had been using for half a century before. Whether or not one believes the patent system is fully corrupted yet, it's undeniably coin operated.

Retric2• 1 year ago

Plenty of phones had rounded corners without being pulled from the shelves so obviously something else was going on.

Samsung deliberately aimed for imitation and it bit them.

adzm• 1 year ago

Highly recommend everyone check out the Corning museum of glass, it is so incredibly interesting and there is a real depth to the deeper parts of the museum.

xattt• 1 year ago

The success of this initiative… remains to be seen.

y-curious• 1 year ago

Brilliant.

dcminter• 1 year ago

If we were suddenly taken with the urge to do this now I wonder how good a job we could do? Maybe a high gamma sterilization to kill off any bacteria in or around the body, then cast it in resin; presumably there would still be mere chemical decay paths for the corpses' components though. I suppose embalming would still be the best way...?

cess112• 1 year ago

One person has been somewhat successful in this area, Gunther von Hagens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_von_Hagens

He has a method of plastination that he has used for decades to preserve corpses, notably as the exhibition Body Worlds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Worlds

https://bodyworlds.com/

cookiengineer• 1 year ago

Oof, I never expected Koerperwelten to appear here on HN.

Growing up in that area, I never understood how unique this exhibition was. We've been there multiple times with school classes, and it weirdly scared the shit out of me and stunningly fascinated me at the same time.

I didn't know that he reopened the Koerperwelten exhibition in 2017 again. Can fully recommend going there. It's not for the light stomach, and your head will be busy processing what you saw for weeks afterwards.

The best analogy I can give someone else about this exhibition: It's something in between geniusness and madness, and it will question your authority on learned morality and ethical standards. But it's so much accessible biological/medical science in one place, it's hard to find anything else that comes close to the impressions it leaves behind.

cess112• 1 year ago

It's great. I'm not a fan of immaterial rights but I think Hagens having a patent on his technique is a good thing, since even he hasn't been able to steer clear of accusations of unethically sourced cadavers.

Seems like the books based on the exhibition are still available through Bezos' webshop and second hand, the one I've got is quite nice, really good colour print.

They didn't stop at human cadavers, they've also done at least one horse and at some point a giraffe, apparently a massive undertaking. His and his teams' work is in a really interesting space, somewhere between science, ethics and art.

miniatureape• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the account of the macrobians by Herodotus:

and after this [the Persian spies] saw last of all their receptacles of dead bodies, which are said to be made of crystal in the following manner:—when they have dried the corpse, whether it be after the Egyptian fashion or in some other way, they cover it over completely with plaster 21 and then adorn it with painting, making the figure as far as possible like the living man. After this they put about it a block of crystal hollowed out; for this they dig up in great quantity and it is very easy to work: and the dead body being in the middle of the block is visible through it, but produces no unpleasant smell nor any other effect which is unseemly, and it has all its parts visible like the dead body itself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrobians

jihadjihad• 1 year ago

OT wrt. TFA, but per your comment--for anyone who hasn't read Herodotus's Histories, do yourself a favor and pick it up. Great storytelling and thought provoking throughout.

elzbardico• 1 year ago

Two words:

Epoxy resin.

threeseed• 1 year ago

There is a hamburger that has lasted at least 50 years in resin:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/alberta-legislature-bu...

A_D_E_P_T• 1 year ago

There's a Golden Age science fiction short story by Henry Kuttner -- "Home is the Hunter," anthologized and reprinted a dozen times -- where an aristocratic caste of duelists entomb the bodies of their vanquished foes in transparent resin and keep them on display. When they are inevitably defeated in turn, all of their corpse-trophies are surrendered to the victor. It's a pretty important plot point in a very influential 1940s story.

RajT88• 1 year ago

it’s hard to imagine that, even if perfectly sealed, the clothed body would look at all natural after being coated in the wet sodium silicate and then dried out, much less after being exposed to the elevated temperatures required to cast glass around it.

This is the kind of stuff that indie horror movies are made about.

Case in point: Body Worlds art exhibit by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, and the film Anatomy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_(film)

dracovolans• 1 year ago

"Russian born" - i don't think so. Surename is 100% Polish and is written using Polish lettering - not a transliteration from Russian.

MisterTea3• 1 year ago

Depends. The borders were different back then. There are people in my family who are ethnically Polish but from White Russia, which is now known as Belarus.

msm_2• 1 year ago

White Russia

Careful. The literal meaning would be "White Ruthenia" (Ruthenia != Russia). In general this etymology is complex, and politically charged[1], but deriving it from "Russia" is most certainly wrong.

But I agree with your main point - ethnicity and nationality gets more confusing the further back past we go.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

I wonder how Lenin's Tomb was done.

There's a bunch of "hush-hush" stuff about it, but it appears to just be very well-done standard mortuary stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Mausoleum#Preserving...

gwern• 1 year ago

OP fails to link the patent, which is at https://patents.google.com/patent/US748284A/en https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8f/2f/9b/bc599b6...

(The patent is only 2 pages, and the 1pg text description doesn't address the question of anaerobic bacterial decay or the removal of water to solve decay that way, but it also only claims 'indefinite' preservation, so it's not necessarily claiming perpetual preservation. It could just be intended for a few months or years, and who knows how well it'd work?)

All these methods of sealing the body into airtight contraptions ignores the fact that decomposition comes from within. When the heart stops, the autolysis, or self-digestion, of the flesh begins, through its enzymes consuming cell membranes. Trapping a body in with its own bacteria means it is producing gas that has nowhere to go.

One thing worth noting here is that this was the era of germ theory and vitamin-ization and initial success in blood/organ transplants (eg. https://www.amazon.com/Immortalists-Charles-Lindbergh-Alexis... ). There had been such huge gains in health that some of the projections and assumptions are hard to recognize (and are part of why science fiction from before the 1950s can be so strange to read). For example, given how pervasive germs turned out to be, and how deadly, but also how beneficial things like vaccination or pasteurization were, there was something of a vogue for imagining a future germ-free world: https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/microbiome/germ-free/2012-kir... This would help lead to greatly reduced sickness and mortality, and help extend lifespans to centuries. (After all, the contemporary fad of 'microbiome'-everything aside, mammals like mice or humans get along pretty well without any microbes, as we now know from the later germ-free animal research and bubble boys.)

You might ask how they imagined this working in practice, as sterilizing the entire world seems infeasible? Well, one idea was... Perfectly-sealed glass cubes, using similar techniques as germ-free animal or bubble boy environments. For example, the 1927 "The Machine Man of Ardathia" https://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/FrancisFlagg/Ardathia/The... imagines a far future germ-free man traveling back in time in his glass cube to inspect us short-lived disease-plagued primitives who wander around naked. So it's not a big step to imagine sealing them into a block for indefinite preservation post-mortem.

ninalanyon• 1 year ago

It's not at all the same idea but it reminds me of Slow Glass in Bob Shaw's heartbreaking Light of Other Days.

A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes

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