How Did Safety Coffins Ease Fears of Premature Burial?

and place, was deathly afraid of being buried alive. In Washington's day and throughout the eighteen hundreds, the specter of premature burial felt very real. Medical science as we know it was in its infancy, and death could strike from anywhere, common illnesses, infected wounds, or fast spreading outbreaks of smallpox.

With so much death happening and so few scientific tools, even primitive stethoscopes weren't around until the eighteen twenties, it went unquestioned that a few people were being buried while not quite dead. The acute fear of being buried alive dubbed tapaphobia, with Taffa, being Greek for burial, was part of a larger obsession with death that gripped Europe and

North America in the nineteenth century. One of the wildest ways that tafaphobia manifested was through the invention of safety coffins or security coffins, basically tricked out caskets that provided a way for prematurely buried people to escape from six feet under. The first patents for safety coffins started appearing in the seventeen nineties in Central Europe. That timing lines up with when European intellectuals were swept up by German romanticism.

Romanticism was a response to the cold logic and reason emphasized by the Enlightenment. Instead, romantic writers and philosophers sought after true truth and art, emotion and instinct, with a frequent focus on the natural and the supernatural, and in areas in between. For the article, this episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Adam Bisnow, an historian

at the US Patent and Trademark Office. He explained that Romanticism looked into quote the unseen and unknown, the gray areas in our experience, like the gray area between life and death. A. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus in eighteen eighteen, a novel that captured the airs fixation on that blurry line between life and death. By the mid eighteen hundreds, seances and psychics offered ways for the living to communicate with the dead, who seemed to

exist on a spiritual plane just beyond our own. A business said people were asking, are the dead really gone? Are they still here with us? The fear of live burial really tapped into that fascination. It's a figure underground who was with us and not with us, alive and

not alive, a dead and somehow not dead. Bisino estimates that more than one hundred security coffin patents were granted in America by the Patent and Trademark Office during the eighteen hundreds, with each design offering more bells and whistles than the last. Literally many of the designs used noise makers like these to allow a person trapped in the

coffin to alert someone above ground. One of the earliest American patents for a life preserving coffin was filed in eighteen forty three by one Christian H. Eisenbrandt of Baltimore, Maryland. The coffin had a spring loaded lid which would snap open at the slightest motion of either the head or

the hand. Since that wouldn't do much good if the coffin were six feet underground, Eisenbrandt suggested leaving the coffin in an above ground fault, with a key to the vault door left inside, so that should the person not really be dead, life may be preserved. Historians found advertisements for Eisenbrandts Jack in the Box coffin dating from eighteen forty four, playing up the popular but unfounded belief in the frequency and danger of premature internment and the necessity

of such a device. We don't know how many were actually made, but sales might have been helped by Edgar Allan Poe, who published his harrowing short story The Premature Burial in the same year. In the story, Poe wrote, to be buried while alive is beyond question the most terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality, that it has frequently, very frequently so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think the boundaries which divide life from death are at best

shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and where the other begins. In eighteen sixty eight, one Franz Fester of Newark, New Jersey, the patent for his improved burial case, which featured a narrow tube with a ladder that allowed a reanimated person to climb to safety. If the buried individual was too weak to escape on their own, they could also pull a rope inside the coffin that rang a bell above ground to alert the living. A

Vester gave demonstrations of his coffin. In eighteen sixty eight. A reporter for The New York Times chronicled one such demo, during which Vester was buried under four feet of dirt and emerged an hour later out of his living grave, to the applause and congratulations of the crowd. But the undisputed showman of nineteenth century security coffins was a man

known as Count Michele de Carnice. Carnegie, described as a chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia who toured Europe and the United States demonstrating a remarkable coffin contraption that he called Lee Carnice. In eighteen ninety nine, The Chicago Tribune reported on a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in New York City, where one physician startled his fellow members with the ascertation that one out of every two hundred people buried in the US was actually in a lethargic

state and is buried alive. That questionable claim served as an introduction to the Count, who then demonstrated his device. It improved on other security coffins by triggering a series of alarms and alerts with any movement of the body. There was a bell that rang and a shiny ball that lifted into the air. While waiting for help to arrive, the trapped individual could breathe and speak through a special tube.

One design flaw of such safety coffins is the morbid fact that dead bodies do indeed move, though just not voluntarily. During the process of decomposition, a corpse can shift and even flip over, which would trigger a false alarm for most security coffins, but nonetheless, to show its effectiveness, the

count would ask for volunteers to be buried alive. To this day, the world record of the longest voluntary live burial is held by an Italian man named Fropo Lorenzo, who consented to be entombed in Lake Carnice for nine days in eighteen ninety eight. And despite these entertaining demonstrations, the count never put Lake Carnice into production. Busino said people didn't buy it. Funeral directors weren't interested, and the public wasn't interested either. In fact, none of these inventions

ever caught on. However, that's not to say that such designs were never implemented. While not exactly a security coffin, there is a grave with a window in New Haven, Connecticut. One doctor Timothy Clarksmith, who died in eighteen ninety three, was so afraid of being buried alive that he constructed a large underground tomb where his body was laid out next to a hammer and chisel. The window allowed cemetery workers and passers by to check and see if that

had returned to life. No signs as of yet. Today's episode is based on the article how safety coffins eased grave fears of premature burial on HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.