Casket-a-go-go, Part 2

around this problem. Yeah. Yeah, that was the primary anxiety that those inventions were dealing with. That was the the main necessity. That was the mother of those inventions. However, one of the key things we're gonna talking about here concerns a different threat, a threat that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in England, well, particularly in the UK and also in the US. Yes, but but I think generally speaking most people associated with with the

UK and that is a fear of the resurrectionists. Right, So the last episode was all about the problem of you being stuck in a coffin when you want to get out. Today's episode is going to be more about you being taken out of a coffin when you want to be left in. Yeah, we're talking about grave robbing here. And grave robbing, of course, was not a new thing

in the in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Grave robbing has pretty much always been around as long as we've had graves, uh, somebody or something has been willing to dig those graves up. Some of the ore oldest tombs, for instance, the tombs from the ancient world, Egyptian tombs, for example, many of these were robbed, uh, you know during their time, you know, in these centuries, to immediately

follow almost immediately after they were sealed. Often I think sometimes the implication is that maybe people who were involved in the burial of ancient Egyptian rich people and pharaoh's or were maybe involved in the creation of these tombs, were also involved in opening the tombs back up to get the goodies out. Yeah. I mean, it's a good side hustle. If if you're if you're involved in the secreting away of the dead kings, you know, golden treasures, you can also make a nice and make a pretty

penny resurrecting that material bringing it back out. But we could make a very important distinction here between removing the body from a tomb and just removing all the goodies from a tomb, right yeah, I mean primarily, when we're talking about grave robbing in the ancient sense, we are talking about stealing badge of valuables that were interred with the dead things that we discussed this little in the

last episode. You know, valuables that they were going to either they were so important to them that they were a part of them and should therefore remain with their bodies, or perhaps something of value that would be needed in the presumed afterlife in the next world, weapons or you know,

magical items, things that would aid them. But here we're talking about the body itself, and now generally speaking, you know, if we're dealing with something stealing the body itself, generally we're thinking more about animals in the ancient sense, right, He didn't dig your grave deep enough, and so of course some scavenging animals sniffed it out, dragged it to the surface and consumed all the tasty bits, or of course, uh,

mythical ghoules, right, the graveyard lurking creatures that would eat corpse flesh. Yeah, and uh, it is interesting how I think there. You can look to some tales of the ghoules, and I think there is especially more modern tales and tales have emerged. Uh, you know post eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fears of the fears of resurrectionists are kind of combined with fears of the Googles, and and I think all of that will make more sense as we proceed here.

But these resurrectionists were not hungry. They weren't looking for a midnight snack. So what were they looking for? Well, they were working on behalf of science, or more specifically, they worked in the employ of an atom who needed human cadavers, especially for hospitals and for teaching centers. So medical science was advancing at a blistering pace, but they needed bodies to chart their way into the medical future. They already had access to executed criminals, and the dissection

of the criminals corpse was considered a vile fate indeed. Uh, But but this wasn't enough. This was not enough to meet the demand, right, because you had multiple demands, Like, for one thing, you would need fresh corpses to dissect for primary research on the human body. But also a lot of it was just for education. It was for like, you know, teaching for surgical colleges and that kind of thing exactly. But and and so here's here's the lucky

thing for these enterprising resurrectionists. Corpses at the time belonged to no one. There's a big gray area here because again generally speaking through out throughout most of human history, if someone was going to dig up a gray they were digging it up for property. They weren't digging it up for the body itself. So roaming drunken resurrectionist ruled that came to rule the night, digging up fresh bodies, delivering them to the anatomus, earning their pay. And they

even operated in gangs acting on tips. Again coming back to that idea that at times that those involved in the burial of the dead or sometimes involved in the in the breaking of the tomb, because who better who has the knowledge? Right, Um, Sometimes these gangs would even use fake mourners, and uh, they would war against each other for the you know, for the decaying goal that was,

you know, the freshly dead flesh. Like sometimes they would I was reading, they would like desecrate another graveyard that that bear gang wasn't actually dealing with, but was the sort of the domain of another gang to try and get that gang cleared out to throw the scent off. Yeah. Yeah, so, uh, you know, having when I'd read about resurrectionist in the past, I kind of just thought of like, okay, you know, just bumbling drunken criminals, uh, sort of lonely man doing

the lonely work of graveyard scavenging. But at times it was it was like a full blown kind of criminal organization. Yeah. But also I think the criminality of it is sort of a gray area sometimes, and there there are different gradations of respectability that seemed to be involved with different

types of grave robbing or grave opening. Like. So, first of all, I was reading that it seems to me around the seventeenth and eighteenth century in the UK especially, there were several different trends that all sort of combined to make body snatching and especially lucrative trade. So one of them, of course you already mentioned, is the need from medical colleges and anatomists there's an increase in demand. The other thing is criminal justice reforms leading to fewer

executed criminals. So that's a decrease in the traditional supply of bodies that these, uh, these colleges can have. And then the third thing is sort of a a sort of permissive atmosphere, like penalties were sometimes relatively minor if you were caught stealing a body as opposed to stealing grave goods, and authorities just often turned a blind eye to what was going on. I think also a lot of times the anatomists getting these bodies maybe didn't ask

a lot of questions about where they came from. Right, So there's sort of you know, you know, plausible denied idility, like like, I'm a professional, I don't have time to worry where the bodies come from. I have important work to do. Uh. If if a body comes, I'm just going to pay the standard rate for it. Uh, And I'll just leave. I'll leave law enforcement to figure out

the rest. Right. But so a quick note on the relative respectability and legality when comparing body stealing versus grave robbing. Many or most resurrection men would actually remove the body but leave the grave goods if they're were any even often I've read that they would take the clothes off of the dead person and put the clothes back in the grave, uh, and this sort of distinguish them from

common thieves. But while that distinction might have been important to a judge, say if you got caught, or to an anatomist, it was not a very good defense to the common people to like to say, look, I only stole the naked body. I left the clothes in there. I didn't steal the you know, gold trinket you left

with him. So many regular people, of course, were furious and horrified at the idea that their body or the body of a relative might be stolen for medical education or research, even if the people stealing the bodies were like, I'm not stealing any of the valuable stuff from the graves. Yeah.

I was thinking about this too in terms of the resurrection of the body, bodily resurrection, that that some Christians believe in the idea that it is important for the body, uh, you know, to remain intact because that's the body you're

going to be in well when Christ returns. Yes, that's a really interesting way that changes in religious beliefs over time I think have may have changed the demand for certain technologies, Like I think most Christians today who believe in a resurrection or afterlife believe in the resurrection of an immage, her real soul, rather than the physical resurrection of the body, though I think you can quite plausibly argue that the latter is more directly what is described,

for instance, in the epistles Paul in the New Testament. Uh. And yeah, I think it used to be a more common belief that like, I need my dead body, I need those bones. Those are what's going to come back

to life. Yeah, exactly. And you know another thing I thought about two is okay, so if the primary one of the primary fears here is just kind of like the the the appalling notion that the body of of of a deceased loved one, perhaps someone of status, would be dragged out and stripped of its of its belongings

and dragged away in the night. You also have to think about this in the in the within the legacy of the disinterment of the former Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and the subsequent public execution of his corpse and the long running display of his head or at least you know, some people some people wonder if that was actually the

skull of Cromwell have been replaced. But anyway, there was this legacy already um in England, of of desecrating the body and and and and and you know, essentially desecrating the individual through the act. Was this after the monarchy came back to power that took Cromwell's body out of the ground, and they said, well, he escaped punishment in life,

but we'll punish his body. Yeah, I mean, and it's not I mean, it seems comical now, right, And of course it's not just the English that this there there are other examples from other cultures where yeah, the body of the king of the king is he is later dragged back out and and and treated in some manner

that disrespects it. Yeah. Okay, Well, let's say that you die somewhere around Edinburgh and the you know, early eighteen hundreds, and you're incredibly concerned that your body is going to be yanked out of the grave and take into some good for nothing medical college to be dissected in front of a bunch of students. What can you do to prevent this? Well, I mean, the first thing, of course, you could do is just the whole fan only hangs

out with pitchforks and protects the grave. But I think most of us can agree that would mess with your grieving process a little bit, but people did do things that sometimes. Yeah, I mean I guess in a way it would give you something to do and something where to like focus your emotions. Of course, if you had the money to do so, you could also hire individuals

to stand guard at your grave. Now, one thing is that if you are just worried about having your body stolen, as opposed to the theft of valuable grave goods, you didn't have to hire a guard for forever until the end of time. If you hire a guard like the Scottish medical colleges and the anatomis and all these people, they're not going to be interested in a rotten, multi

year old corpse. They want a fresh body with organs and living anatomy still intact, so that they can dissect it to learn things about the body or show things about the body. So you only need to guard the body for as long as the body would be fresh. Basically, I don't know exactly what counts is fresh, but it often seems that this may consisted of you know, this may have only been a window of a few weeks or something. I mean, ultimately, it's whatever the market will bear.

It's whatever they can then turn around and sell to an anatomist. Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind too is, okay, what sort of you know, Not to be too judgmental, but what sort of individual or you're likely to hire to stand guard day and night in the cemetery watching over the grave of your loved one. There's a very strong possibility that this sort of individual is the very sort of person who would be eager

to accept a bribe from the resurrectionist gangs themselves. Yes, or maybe your grave guard just has a side hustle as a resurrectionist. I mean who Yeah, who better to get the tips from and stuff like? If you've got a guard on your payroll, you don't even have to stake out a fake mourner at the funeral to see where the bodies are going in fresh You can just hear from the guard. Now. Another solution would be cemmetary wide security, right, so you get fences, walls, locked gates.

But these options, of course, wouldn't work all the time and wouldn't be available to everybody. If you were rich, you could lock your families bodies inside a secured crypt or vault. But I think most people, you know, they couldn't afford that. Uh. So we're gonna talk about inventions for individual burials, specifically to prevent the theft of corpses and the theft of grave goods. But before we do that,

we're gonna take a quick break. All right, we're back. So, yes, we've discussed the threat the resurrectionists maybe coming to steal our freshly dead bodies away so that they can sell them to anatomus. What do we do to protect them? We've already discussed the possibility of posting guards. Now we're

going to get more into the hardware. Right, So have you ever walked through an old cemetery and come across what looks like grotesque wrought iron animal cages, half buried protruding from the earth They or if you haven't, you should at least look up pictures of these, because what they remind me of the most are the cages that are often put over air conditioning units in our contemporary world for the very same purpose we're discussing here, to

prevent someone from walking off with said air conditioning unit. Uh These are known as mort safes, and this is one of the main interventions that was invented to protect bodies from being stolen by the resurrection men or the resurrectionists. They're not vampire traps. Despite the appearance. They're not made to trap the dead down in the earth. There are a lot of urban legends about this, apparently, especially in

places where mort Safes are common. They were invented in the early eighteen hundreds, and the design is pretty simple. They're essentially just a metal cage. The purposes to prevent human bodies from being disinterred, and so they're partially buried wrought iron cages that fit over top of the coffin, preventing anybody from digging it up. Um. Now another thing about mort said Now, of course they came in multiple shapes, right.

You could have bigger mort safes that are sort of like a big boxy cage that is partially buried in the ground. Found uh, prevents you from digging down to the coffin. You could have other ones that are just pretty small and snug and fit over top of the coffin, but it prevents you from just breaking the coffin open because you've got iron bars in the way. Now with some of these more it's safe again. You benefit from the fact that what the anatomists are looking for are

fresh corpses. So again, the mort safes would not necessarily have to be bought and kept in place in perpetuity. You really only needed it as long as it took for the corpse to become unappetizing. Too. It's it's buyer, So you could put a more safe in place until you're good and putrid, and then you dig it up or dismantle it with the tackle system, and then it

can be reused on another grave. Now I've read in multiple sources that mort safes are mostly found in Scotland, and of course that would line up with a lot of other stuff we were reading about body snatching being a particular historical problem in eighteenth and nineteenth century Scotland. I think, especially like around Edinburgh or there. You know, there's a lot of medical college stuff going on there. But I know I have seen these in the United States.

I like to walk around old cemeteries, and while I can't say for sure, I'm almost positive i've seen them in old southern cities, like in Savannah, Georgia, or in Charleston, South Carolina. Yeah, that's interest. I don't believe I have seen one in Atlanta, and I've I've walked around Atlantis cemeteries a fair amount. It's possible I've missed it. But

it does make sense. I mean, you again, you would need to You would be most concerned about grave sites that are located in large enough areas that there would be an atomist present, right. So I've read that these are most common like around Edinburgh, around London, around Philadelphia, places where there would be learning taking place, uh that where where a dead body might come in useful. I wonder to what extent to this is? Like ultimately it's

a calm. It's a clash of cultures, you know, the this this new the new science, the new anatomy, versus the more supernatural ideas of what our body is for, you know, and this is kind of the conflict that emerges where those two worlds meet. Because totally yeah. Because one thing that also comes to mind is like if I if I was if I really didn't care about the state of my body, Like one way to to try and keep this from happening is to say, look, um, my body, I'm gonna let it make sure it's plenty

rotted before it's buried. You know, or or I'm going to make sure my body is mangled in such a way that it will be a little used to the anatomus um. But obviously, the people burying the dead, you know, they still were very concerned with the idea of getting the body in the grave before it decomposed, before the you know, the signs of death were really apparent and

and certainly not you know, predsecrating it in anyway. Right, Well, you could leave instructions like Frederick Chapan in the last episode, who is like, make sure they cut my heart out so I don't get buried alive. Yes, but he wanted to be dissected actually to prevent being buried alive. Here you could come out from the other hand and say, I don't want to be dissected, so instead cut me up into little pieces so I will be of no

use to the anatomists. But then again, I'm not sure that's always true, because I've also read accounts of sometimes people working in mortuary services at the time being able to just say, snip off certain extremities from dead bodies that would be obviously obviously of lesser value to an anonomous than a full dead body, but still maybe of some value, right, you know, and we see some of this, uh, I mean, certainly today we live in a time when

plenty of people will will donate their body to science when they die or they're you know, they certainly make sure that their organ donors, like people realize to varying degrees that they will not need a body once they are dead, and if they're things that can be gained, uh, you know, certainly for the for the medical world or other people's lives and livelihoods, then those organs should be taken out, or even the whole body should be utilized for that purpose. But this was this would have been

an extremely radical idea at the time. Yeah, I think it reflects a a sea change in cul tural attitudes towards uh, anatomy and medical science and medical education and all that kind of stuff, because that would obviously be another way to cut out the resurrectionist man, is to deal directly with the anatomis um and and then some individuals likely did that, I'm guessing, but they would have

certainly been the exception to the rule, yes, uh. And there there would be other advantages to dealing directly with the anatomists, such as avoiding what I'm about to talk about. Uh So, the trade and dead bodies at this time also sometimes took ludicrous and horrific turns. In the late eighteen twenties, there was one famously awful incident that resulted in uh well, you could say it came basically from

the direct pressures of the dead body economy. So at this stage, due to legal and technological restraints like the introduction of mort safes in the early eighteen hundreds, legally dessectible bodies are in very short supply. But Edinburgh and the medical colleges and the anatomist still need bodies for science. And one such anatomist was the Scottish physician and scholar Robert Knox, who was an esteemed member of the Royal

College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. And Knox, like his peers, would arrange payments to have bodies brought to his dissecting room. And it seems like many of his other peers, he again didn't ask a whole lot of questions about where they came from. You know, let's just assume that the cadavers are legit. So here into the story come two

dudes named William Burke and William Hair. Both were born in Ireland, but by the eighteen twenties they both immigrated to Edinburgh and Scotland, and in eighteen seven Hair was working as the keeper of a public lodging house. So

that year Burke also showed up in the house. I believe he was originally a lodger there, but they sort of got together and started collaborating, and in November of eighteen twenty seven, Hair became annoyed because one of the people living in the house that where he was renting out the rooms died while owing him four pounds in rent, and in order to recuperate the back owed rent, Burke and Hair came up with a plan to sell the body of the dead tenant to local anatomist Robert Knox.

Again the the anatomist I just mentioned a minute ago. So they got seven pounds for the body. That's a nice profit. They were owed four they got seven for it, or they got more than seven, I think seven pounds and tenpence or so. You can see how one might begin to get ideas. It's almost kind of like the Cobra problem the economics that we've talked about on stuff to blow your mind before you put a price tag on on cobras, it's going to it's going to change

the way people interact with cobras. It's going to change the value of Cobra's right, it's not actually an incentive to get rid of all the cobras from the city. It's just an incentive for people to bring you cobra, to raise cobras, etcetera. Right, So, an incentive paying people for dead bodies might not necessarily mean bring us already dead bodies. It can just mean you need to show up here with a dead body. How it got dead.

I don't know that. Yeah, I mean, especially if there's a premium on freshness, which you know there is exactly so. Over the next year, Burke and Hair, with some assistance from their wives, apparently murdered fifteen other people by luring them into the lodging house and then suffocating them and selling their fresh bodies to Robert Knox. Uh. The scheme was uncovered and they were caught I think on Halloween

eighty eight. Apparently Hair turned State's evidency. He testified against Burke, and Hair was released for testifying against his accomplice, and Burke was hanged, and of course that that means that Burke's body was likely than used by anatomis. Oh, I bet it probably was. I don't know that detail, but I can't imagine that irony did not happen. Uh, And Burke said in his confession, so he was like, Okay, Knox was innocent. He didn't know anything about this. He

was not involved in the murdering of these people. But it's still essentially ruined Knox's reputation. And evidence of this is captured in an often quoted children's rhyme from the time. Have you heard this before, Robert? I'm not sure, let's hear it. Okay, up the clothes and doing the stair ben the hoose with Burke and Hair. Burke's the butcher, Hair's the thief knocks the boy who buys the beef. Oh that's good. That's the whole story encapsulated right there.

But less we unfairly single them out alone. Burke and Hair were not the only people to figure out this scheme. If you need a fresh dead body, you know, you save yourself the digging and you just murder people. Similar murders for the anatomous body trade happened over the years in Britain and in the United States, apparently from the name William Burke, one of the two murderers here. Uh, a person who was murdered so that their corpse could be sold to a dissection room was said to have

been burked. Oh wow, such a grizzly in episode from history. Uh. Now, well, one thing I think we might have skipped over was, you know we mentioned Burke having been hanged, his body would have likely gone to the anatomus as well. That was, of course a pre existing place that you would actually obtain the bodies that were being used for the anatomist. Oh do we not mention that at the top? Yeah?

That was like the original legitimate route to get fresh dead bodies was from the bodies of condemned criminals, right and then but then what happens if you're not hanging as many of your criminals, right, Yeah, that's that's going to reduce the uh, the number of legit corpses, and that is just going to grow the demand for illicit corpses brought up by the resurrectionists. Now, I want to briefly turn to resurrectionist techniques physically, techniques, like what do

they do to get the bodies out. You. Often if you see a scene like this in a movie or something, you will see the resurrectionists digging all the way down, like digging a grave sized toll and then prying open the lid of the coffin. Right, that is not usually what happened, And if you think about it, that doesn't really make a lot of sense. Like that introduces all kinds of unnecessary difficulties into your body extraction routine. Uh so, like digging a grave, digging a fresh grave is is

in some intense work. And then even redigging a grave where the at least the soil has been loosened for you, that's still quite an endeavor. Oh yeah. I mean. One thing is that sometimes there could be structural defenses in the ground. This is something people occasionally thought of. Put a heavy stone slab on top of the ground. That's one simple This is old school grave defense against a scavenging predators. Right, if if the family could afford it,

maybe a mort safe if you could afford it. But even if you couldn't think about it, even if you have a relatively limited means, you can think of ways to make digging up a coffin extremely difficult about throwing tree branches into the ground as you as you filled the earth back in and right, this would make it like trying to dig through roots, the digging would be extremely difficult. Or throwing in big stones as you fill the grave back in. This makes the digging up very hard.

So there were a lot of things you could do. And then if you think about it, even if they haven't done that, and it's just normal earth fill beck and you'd have to dig out a lot of space, like you're saying, to get the lid open. So instead resurrectionists had a method where they would break open an

aperture somewhere at the head of the coffin. They'd either dig down a narrow tunnel near the head of the coffin and they would break open through the through the roof of the coffin or the lid of the coffin, and then throw a rope around the neck and haul the body out either through a hole in the coffin lid, or sometimes they would do a thing where they would dig a tunnel down nearby and then dig a horizontal tunnel into the side of the head of the coffin,

break a hole in the side and pull the body out laterally either way that this common method was a rope or a hook around the neck and then pull the body out leave the coffin in place. And there was a further invention that was an insurance policy against exactly this kind of removal. The solution is kind of ingenious. I think it's called a coffin collar. I was looking at one example in the collection of the National Museum Scotland.

It's from around eighteen twenty from a village called King's Kettle in Fife, and it's basically a huge block of wood with an iron horseshoe shape bolted onto it, and this iron horseshoe would fit around the neck of the cadaver, locking it in place inside the coffin. So if a resurrectionist loops a rope around your neck and tries to pull you out, you just stay firmly stuck in place because of the iron collar, unless your head comes off.

This is one of those situations though, where if if they get that far, like they've essentially already desecrated your grave, you're just essentially putting in a safeguard to keep them from profiting from the desecration, or just taking off of your entire body. Yeah, I mean, maybe you wouldn't care if somebody has already dug down and desecrated your grave

as long as your body stays put. Uh. Now, maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back we can discuss a really interesting invention that has many supposed benefits, one of which is the supposed ability to thwart grave robbers. But but how a lot of cool features too. Alright, we're back. Are you ready to talk about the fisk? Yeah, let's talk about the fisk. I really enjoyed this one. Um fisk. So humans are are really hard to please when it comes to the

state of their corps. Right. On one hand, we're squeamish about the prospect of decay, we're squeamish about things being done to our body after we die. But on the other hand, present them with a cast iron Victorian Mecca suit that contains your body and an anaerobic environment and allows visitors to gaze at your uncorrupted face through a glass face plate for all eternity, and they get a little creeped out. Yeah it sounds creepy. Yeah, maybe that's

just me. Well, I I feel like I mean, I'm really leaning into the creepiness here, but a lot of people did not think this was creepy as well discussed. But some people did think it was creepy, even at the time that wrote about it. Yeah, this was the case of Almond Fisk eight Patton for the Fisk air tight coffin of cast or raised metal a k a. The Fisk money so good. Uh. We should say, by the way, the inventor's full name, not just Almond Fisk,

Almond Dunbar Fisk, so good. If that name hasn't been pilfered for fictional purposes of some kind, you're really missing out now. I should note that Almond Fisk did not invent the iron casket. There were already iron caskets and used going back as far as eighteen thirty six by others. But he really, like he really presented a new concept on the iron casket, and certainly was able to to market it and sell it to a great number of individuals.

I tried to find some sort of ballpark estimate for how many were sold, and I was not able to find it. But but and of course, once they're sold, they're under the ground usually unless they're accidentally unearthed later as some have been. But it is right like it was a successful product. So like, what's the main selling

point of this product? What are they advertise? Well, from the patent itself, fisk rights from a coffin of this description, the air may be exhausted so completely as entirely to prevent the decay of the contained body on principles well understood, or if preferred, the coffin may be filled with any

gas or fluid having the property of preventing putrification. So wow, So you stave off the you stave off rotting by either sucking all the gas out of this cast iron jar that you're in, or you can fill it with what pickling fluid or something you can brine your body And and and I do want to stress like two more things than this. First of all, there is a glass face plate. Uh there's there's a lid to it, but you pull back the lid and you can see the face of the corpse. That was key. That was

like a freshness guarantee. You can look in and see the face and see that it is not decayed. And then likewise, when we talk about it being looking like a mummy, looking like as a sarcophagus and being a little alien looking. We are not, you know, we're not elaborating too much here, Like you can you can look up images of this. It does have a strong Egyptian

air to it. Oh yeah, I was reading in a book by Marcella Sorg and William Haglind called Forensic Taffonomy The post Born and Fate of Human Remains from CRC Press nine, and the authors here really emphasized the parallels with the mummy tradition. The coffins were mummy shaped. You'd imagine like if you've seen a mummy wrapped, it's the same same type of shape, but the arms folded over the chest, the wider at the chest, the figure narrowing as it approaches the ankles with the bulge, and the

feet poking up also fisks. Early designs included decorative shaping of the outer metal with patterns that quote simulated the folds of drapery and ornamental scrolls and flowers. Again all iron or cast metal on the outside. Yeah. When I look at them, it looks like something that that a warhammer for space marine, maybe a necromonger would be buried in. You know, it has that kind of like Gothic, uh,

but also semi Egypt shouldn't feel to it. But so there's some kind of like preservation impulse here, kind of like with mummification going on. Yeah. Yeah. The the primary idea here, like the primary selling point was that this would protect the body from swift decay, from seepage from from vermin that might get in and uh and start messing with the body, and more importantly, allow the body body to be transported a greater distance, which indeed was you know, one of the reasons for the rise of

modern embalming practices in the US as well. But I've seen it to you know, commented on that, like one of the cool things here is that essentially you have this, you have this cast iron casket, you have this steam punk casket, and indeed this is the age of steam and iron. Uh. Steam and iron have enabled people, certainly in the United States at the time, to travel vast distances.

But the thing about traveling vast distances away from home, away from the place that you would prefer to be buried, is that your corpse may not survive the trip back if it is not somehow uh, you know, preserved or in this case contained within a special vessel, and this was you know, this was a major thing for people.

You know, you're dealing in again, increased means of travel inventions haven't enabled people to travel greater distances, live the greater distances, and then your body dies when it's across the continent there just may know, there just maybe no bringing at home. It may have to be buried, uh there in California and not make the return trip to say,

you know that the Carolina's well. Another thing I would wonder about is if you're transporting dead bodies across long distances now that you've got trains and stuff like that, wouldn't there also be hygiene concerns and stuff, Yeah, exactly getting into the seepage in the vermin. Yeah, I mean it's it's one thing to transport the body, but then you know to who's going to ship it if you're gonna have to deal with all this foulness. And this is all even more important if the individual died of

an illness such as cholera. Right, So the cholera is not like dripping out on whatever exact train car you've got the body on. It's like trapped in there in the sealed iron casket. One of the really interesting things about this is that there are a number of these that apparently were used in the American South. Um For instance, there's one there's an actual specimen of the fisc casket.

It can be seen at the Pink Palace in Memphis, Tennessee, which is a kind of a I think I went to it when I was a small child, so I have no memory of it. But it's like a museum of sort of a museum of bodities, like they had like a lot of stuffed and mounted heads in All Tennessee version of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and sort of I guess. But but it was a case where somebody was like working a field and they hit something

in the field and then upcomes this casket. And according to an article at Atlas Obscura which highlights places where you can go and actually see one of these casts, it's there's another one in Tennessee at the Museum of Appalachia in Clinton, Tennessee, marking that for a road trip. Now, of course this was this was a more expensive option for your burial purposes. According to that Atlas Obscure article,

which was written by Alison Meyer. You're your standard. You know, casket was just going to run you a couple of bucks. This one would have run you between seven and forty bucks. You get a lot for bucks back then, though, Yeah, uh so it was expensive to some. It was a little disturbing, and in eighteen forty nine FISTS workshop and showroom burned down and Fisk himself was severely injured and

died the following year. Um but you know, as well discussed that doesn't mean that the casket wasn't a hit like. The company continued to sell them after his death. However, as reported in eighteen fifty eight by the Chicago Press, there was an accusation that these air tight caskets could explode due to the breakdown of the body inside, but apparently the f company denied this, stating that thousands of their product had been deployed without explosions and that none

had been deployed in Chicago. Now, now we do that is a mention of like thousands of of the product, But I don't know to what extent we can, you know, trust the marketing. How would they know for sure? Well, I mean well, I mean they potentially know for sure but would you know you might want to inflate that number when you're mentioning in the press, I guess. But also, I mean I can see that there might be something to this. The idea of sealing something shut when there

is a thing decomposing inside. This is this is a problem today with modern lock in the freshness coffins. Yeah. Yeah, In fact, I was I was looking around about this, and I was reading the U. S. Department of Health

and Human Services Radiation Emergency Medical Management website. They have an article on management of the Deceased and radiation emergencies, uh, and it I noticed that it it touched on what seemed to be a standard fact of sealed metal caskets, which are by the way, far preferred to would in k is of radioactive remains. Metal caskets and coffins should have a quote seal that releases pressure from inside the

casket and retards the entry of groundwater. Well, yeah, I mean you'd want it to have some kind of if you must have a sealed casket. I mean, again, the reasons for having that are not necessarily super clear, but but it should be able to burp, right, because they're going to be gases released from decomposition. And uh yeah, I can totally see the possibility that a sealed cast

iron casket would explode. Now, one thing you're probably wondering though, is is, ultimately did this casket work, assuming it didn't explode, like the manufacturer stated, does it actually preserve the body right now? On one hand, it doesn't have to preserve the body very long because these were designed to go in the ground um once they made it back home.

So it just needs to last long enough that the customer can be satisfied that that's their leved one inside the casket, they can perhaps be identified, and then you can just have a you know, a normal funeral for the individual. But like I said, some of these end up popping back up again. They end up being exhumed, you know, due to farm work, construction, et cetera. And I was looking around and according to a two thousand and six Fined chronicle in the two thousand tin article,

a Fisk patent metallic burial case from Western Missouri. Uh, here's how it all broke down. Basically, this is an example where farm equipment hit it and they had to bring it up, and they went ahead and just examined it. I mean, it's it's a historical curiosity also an anatomical curiosity. So they point out that the glass viewing window was still intact, but it was no longer transparent, so you

couldn't actually see through it anymore. The casket was damaged when it was unearthed again by accidents, so uh, you know, they that alone had ruptured the container. But they also said, quote, the coffin contained a moderately well preserved skeleton in anatomical position. The majority soft tissue had decomposed, but head and pubic hair, along with many of the fingers and toenails, were discovered

in their proper anatomical location. While the coffin seal had been compromised allowing water into the case, it does not appear to have caused any significant movement of the bones or artifacts. Is it common to note whether the pubic hair is in the right place? Well, I mean, it's it's just a you know, a statement on what's there

and what is what is, what is rotted away, etcetera. Um. But but I was interesting to the authors end up kind of going through the history of the fist casket and all, and they point out that, you know, this was a successful product, quote fulfilling the practical, aesthetic, and emotional needs of mid nineteenth century Americans, as well as the recent technological advancements allowing for the standardization, mass production,

and large scale distribution in the Eastern United States. And even after Fisk's death and and also after his presumed burial within one of these, the company continued to operate and sell their product. Avenge really with the Egyptian elements the more alien elements of the design somewhat relaxed, especially when the company was sold to Crane, Breed and Company in eighteen fifty three. A fun fact, former US Vice President and Secretary of State John C. Calhoun was buried

in one of these. May his passionate defenses of slavery Forever suffocate in that petred iron jar. Yeah, I was reading there were some other like notable members of the Confederacy that Jefferson into these, or he was into I don't think he ever, I don't. I did not read anything to indicate it that he ended up in one,

but he liked the idea of them. Also, former First Lady Dolly Madison was also laid to rest in a fist casket, and this Yeah, and this seemingly may have actually helped make the choice more popular, which is a trend setter. But eventually the market moved on to a different type of metal casket, to the sheet metal casket,

which still remains in use today. And I think that's important to drive home, especially if if through most of this discussion you've been thinking, oh, stron casket, that's weird, you know, when most of the caskets that are used today in the United States are still sheet metal caskets. They're still they have evolved from this basic trend. Yeah. I think today they look less like space sarcophag guy and more like they're kind of polished. Sometimes were made

to look like wood or some of their ambiguous material. Um. According to Sorgan Haglin's book, which I mentioned earlier, the sealed cast iron coffin was mainly used uh in a window of time from about eighteen fifty to eighteen eighty, and the eighteen eighties were when embalming became very popular, So you can see that as sort of like a tradeoff technology. Uh. And they write that this, uh, this

accompanied a shift in funerary culture. Changing emphasis from quote encasement of a body for immediate burial to its presentation and display. And also with the change in caskets, it led to greater attention to the interior furnishings of a casket rather than the exterior decoration. And I think this is because of the idea of like open casket funerals.

Of course, not everybody today is stuck, you know, even if you're going to be buried stuck with the plane, metal or wooden caskets that are most common in the West, there there are still I think some really creative and beautiful and unique funerary art cultures in the world. That's right. The Ga people of Ghana are known for their beautiful and and often and often very modern looking fantasy coffins. So if I imagine a lot of people have seen

images of these. But if you if you've ever seen a picture just in passing of say a casket or coffin that looks like a fancy shoe or perhaps uh it looks like a shell, I mean it looks like, yeah, a boat. Uh. They're beautiful to behold. They take the ships of you know, all these things, buildings, animals, especially, um, some item that might be a part of an individual's

trade or craft. H The idea here is to bury the individual in a vest so that resembles something that meants something to them when they were alive, so that they can remember it in the next life. It's sort of like a more abstract version of the grave goods concept. So like you could bury somebody with the tools or things that they love to use in their life, or you could bury them within a representation of the things they loved. Yeah. Yeah, and and again these they're really

splendid um. You should definitely do yourself a favor and look up, look up some images of these local clients will pay something like a thousand dollars or their their

their coffins in these cases. And again it's because there's a big emphasis placed on them, but also their international clients that might pay between five and fifteen k uh this, you know, due to the higher quality materials that may be used in these cases, but also the international standards that have to be met, you know, for wherever this this casket is going. But but I love the idea. I mean, I don't know if this is what I want from me, but I think it's uh, I think

it's a beautiful concept. Like so especially in the United States, we have this very grim and dour view of the funeral, and certainly a funeral can be just that. But the idea that it might be a little more flashy, that it might that you might be buried in it as in an image of something that defines you, uh, you know, something that you loved. I think that's a beautiful idea. Yeah.

What I found really striking about these caskets is the idea that they are artistic and very expressive and colorful and personalized, as opposed to the most common like funerary customs I can think of in the United States, where all of the hardware is extremely kind of like serious and muted and uh and standardized. You know, it's almost like it wants to be elegant without being flashy or something. Uh. But like I love the idea of like individually artistically

created vessels for burial. I can only hope Nicolas Cage has one of these picked out, that he's one of the international clients, because we've discussed before, you know, he's he's he seems to think a little outside the box when it comes to his own his own funeral, his own you know, his own resting place. He has that beautiful pyramid. Uh stiful. It is beautiful, beautiful pyramid set aside in New Orleans for his burial. Um. I've seen it, Yeah, I've I've been to it as well. I've touched it.

It's nice. I felt the power radiating off of it, if I remember correctly. One important thing to stay is he's not He's not the first individual in New Orleans to have a pyramid um grave. So it's not like he's coming in with some sort of whackadoodle idea that doesn't line up with tradition at all. He's not the first Louisiana pharaoh, right, But yeah, I would hope that that he would also be buried within uh you know the form of something that Nicolas Cage loves in life.

He goes around saying, did you know that this here pyramids symbolizes my individuality and belief in personal freedom? Well, one one can only hope at any rate, Um that we're gonna have to close it out there. We're gonna come back with another episode on inventions that that revolve around of funeral rites, around caskets, around protecting the body of the deceased. But again, we're just gonna we're gonna close this one out right here. Uh. Certainly we want

to hear from everybody. If you have, if you've gotten to see any of these examples of these different devices and inventions in your travels, let us know we'd love to hear from you. Uh. If you want to check out the show itself invention pod dot com. That's where you'll find it. You'll also find it wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that might be. We just ask you to subscribe and rate and review. That really helps us out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio

producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pot dot com. Invention is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio is the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H