Optography: Image in a Dead Man's Eye

Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Hey, Robert, if you were murdered, would you mind if I scooped your eyeball out, cut it in half, dipped it in some chemicals, and then looked at that to see if I could find the image of your murderer on your eye. Only if you had the professionals like the late great Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing doing the investigating as they as they do in this clip that we just heard from the nineteen

seventy two horror film Horror Express. I have to confess I've never seen this movie, So tell me and tell the audience what is what's it about? Well? This is yeah, this is the fun wild little film that uh it is shockingly public domain property at the moment. You can find it on on YouTube and and pretty much anywhere that you're going to grab your your horror cinema. It's a it has a shockingly star studded cast. You got Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and not in our audio clip,

Telly savalis as a as a Cossack captain. Wow with without any attempt at at a Russian act center anything, just straight up tell Y savalas. So it's just Ko Jack pretending like he's a Cossack captain on this train. Yeah, exactly. And there is a oh god goodness that they're all these additional character actors as well. There is a there's

a respute and sue character uh that's walking around. It all takes place on a Trans Siberian Express from China to Moscow, and it concerns this uh, this alien possessed, reanimated prehistoric commented. They just starts running amuck, draining the memories from its victims, leaving them with milky white eyes.

And there's this fabulous scene which we we just heard the audio from where the scientists use a microscope on the creature's eye fluid to reveal its final sites, as well as a kind of hilarious glimpse at the prehistoric world. But so that may sound totally ridiculous in the scheme of this film, and and it did when I first saw it. I first saw this, I think in college, and I had no idea that it had any connection

to the rational world. I was like, what kind of dove for these guys on when they wrote this, because this is the most crazy pseudo scientific idea I've ever heard. And it turns out that it is that actually over two hundred year old theory that still floats around occasionally, though we mainly just see it in our film nowadays. But man, it connected to forensic science for almost a century and to the criminal mind in terms of what

they needed to do to get away with their murderous crimes. Yeah, and and of course as well get into the topic will explore to what extent it was it was tied to forensic science, It has a it has an interesting history there. Essentially it is it is still a pseudoscience, um. But you know, pseudoscience often enters our world where magic fails, us seeming to make the impossible possible via the invocation of actual scientific and technological marvels. And and so today

what we're discussing is is unmistakably necromantic. You know, it's it's communicating with the dead, but it's wrapped up in these nineteenth century technological advancements, and uh, it's extremely fascinating. I can't believe it's taking me this long to finally get to the the actual science behind this ridiculous movie. Yeah, it's it's fun, but it's also utterly bizarre. What we're talking about here is optography. There's a name for this

scientific practice. What we're gonna do is we're gonna give you kind of a precursor to optography, and then discuss the experiments surrounding it, and then how that led to a lot of confusion of forensic science for a long time. Alright, So in order to to understand how this false notion could have gained any traction, we have to first look at the scientific advancements that preceded it and made it seem possible even to serious researchers at the at the time.

As as we'll get into. Uh, but as always, you know, a little bit of knowledge is always a dangerous thing. So in eighteen thirty seven, French artist and physicist Louis Daguerre invented the Dagara type. This is the first commercially successful photographic process, and it used an iodine synthitized silverized plate and mercury vapor to capture the image, and it produced very detailed images. And while it took minutes of

exposure time, this was still swifter than previous photographic methods. Uh, they couldn't be replicated. Um, and each Daguara type image was a mirror image, but still it had just an incredible cultural impact at the time, right, Yeah, I mean we're still close enough I think in the like relative scheme of history that some of us have seen Decara

types before. I have this book that's utterly macabre and somewhat related to this, that's just Daguero types of dead bodies from the nineteenth century because that was a thing where people would photograph the dead before they were buried. And uh, it's fascinating and there's like a cultural history within. It's not just me being a weird secko looking at corpses. But the Daguera types have a specific texture to them

that I don't think you see photographs today. Yeah, And it's it's also just it's hard for us to put ourselves and given just how how how photographs fill our world and how a custom we are to the technology. It's it's hard for us to imagine what it was like to suddenly have this technology more readily available. Um. But but when you looked at some of the commentary from the time, you can really begin to to to

to zero in on it. Um. For instance, Oliver Wendell Holmes called the aa Gara type quote the mirror with a memory, which which I think is rather fitting. And Edgar Allan Poe uh wrote about the invention in eighteen forty and I want to read uh some quotes from him because I think he's he summed up. They're just the wonder and awe of this invention rather nicely. And

it's Halloween. So what Poe has to say, if we examine a work of ordinary art by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear. But the closest scrutiny of the photogenetic rawling discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. The variations of shade, the gradiations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself and the supremeness of its perfection, the results of

the invention cannot even remotely be seen. But all experience in matters of philosophical discovery teaches us that in such a discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely. It is a theorem almost demonstrated that the consequences of any new scientific invention will at the present day exceed by very much the wildest expectations of

the most imaginative. So I hear that Poe quote, and it sounds to me like the advent of photography was really changing how people thought about the world, right, Because up until then, let's be honest, like our awareness of the world is essentially from the self, because we're looking out from ourselves to the world. Right. But with this photograph, you can start perceiving the world through the eyes of

the other. Yeah, And that sounds uncanny, like a complete change, And thought, Yeah, you don't have to depend on the fallibility of memory, you don't have to depend on on an artistic representation that is created by somebody. It's virtually instant compared to two artistic techniques and uh, and has just incredible detail. So it makes sense that people would be just applying photography to everything, and and you know, to your point about taking pictures of the dead to

commemorate them. Uh, it reminds me. For instance, you remember when everybody was getting these um these picture frames that would throw up multiple digital images. Yes, I got one for my grandmother a couple of years ago. Yeah, because all of our photos were digital and she didn't have a computer, So we got her one of those. And then my sister brother and I we just all like uploaded like a hundred photos into the thing and sent

it to her for Christmas. Yeah. I mean they still have them, I obviously, but I feel like for a while there everybody had them. It was it was the thing. And even at the time, I remember thinking, this is this is gonna be a detail in a historic reenactment in the future. This is gonna this is a technology that is going to quickly fade because it's a bit weird.

It's just not working in the way that a digital image and a more traditional digital medium works, or as a or or the way the physical uh photograph works in a frame. Right, Yeah, yeah, it is. It is a strange thing. I think you're right, that's going to be one of those things that like period pieces fifty years from now, well they'll they'll throw those weird digital

frames in. All right, So you had the degerotype. It was new, technology was game changing, it was exciting and uh and you had a lot of people already appropriating all of this excitement to the pseudo to pseudoscientific and mystical purposes. And we're not gonna get into all those purposes today. But obviously this was the era of spirit photography. Um, you know, images of ectoplasm and ghosts and fair area's.

Uh So, anything we're talking about today that gets a little uh mystical in nature is really nothing compared to some of the other uses that were out there. Right, But this led to how we study the eyeball right, because there was this cultural idea that the function of a camera was the same as the biological function of an eye, whether that being a human being or a rabbit or a rat. That's right. And you know, at the same time, we were also making huge strides and

studying the eye itself. Uh. In in eighteen fifty we saw the invention and and some argue this was just an independent reinvention of the ophthalmaloscope by German physiologist and physicist Herman von Helmholtz and the engage revolutionized ophthalmology and that it allowed the doctors to see inside the fundness of the eye. Okay, so this is like the thing when I go to the optometrist every year and they look at my eye with what feels to me like

it's like a microscope or something. But it's obviously a lot more complicated than what Helmholtz was working with. So you take these two technological advancements and in retrospect, it seems inevitable that we would get to this realm of optimology because we're learning more about the eye. We have this fabulous news technology, and time and time again, we can't help but think about the human experience in the

human body in terms of the technology we use. When we've talked about memory on the show, we often talk about how we we fall into this trap of thinking about the eyes as video cameras and memory as like the tape database, and when it's really nothing like that,

you know, aside from the most simplistic uses of that metaphor. Yeah, it's actually interesting when you look at that period of time during the Industrial Revolution, after this invention, right, there is a lot of focus in sort of fantastic fiction on the ideas of being able to do the things that you do in industry better with the biology of the human body, whether that's like moving faster or being stronger, or having better eyesight, like all of those things, like

how can it uh increase the production? Right? And then you start seeing investigations like this in science where it's like, oh, well, maybe if we peek inside of here, we'll we'll get some idea how to make it so everybody's got superhuman vision. And yet it's still so hard to shake mystical interpretations of vision. Uh. For instance, just consider that the long

outdated emission theory of vision. This is the idea that you see with I beams, the idea that there's some sort of force that comes out of my eye and touches something that, you know, the the thing I'm trying to see, and relates the information back to my eyes somehow. Uh. This has long been abandoned, but according to the to an American Psychologist article published in two thousand two, as many as fifty percent of adults still bought the emission

theory rather than the correct intromission theory. Really. Yeah, I've never even heard the emission theory outside of like comic books. Well in the comic books is a great example because it comes down to local Cyclops. The x Cyclops is who I immediately think of. It gets into this idea that without like really thinking about it and room and even in many cases I think, just reminding yourself, oh yeah, light is entering my eyes and that's how I see.

You end up thinking about reality and thinking about sight in terms of Cyclops's laser vision. Right, something's coming out blasting things. If someone staring at you, they're like peering into you with some sort of a force. Yeah, yeah, this is interesting. It says more I think about our uncomfortableity with looking at a living being's eyes than it does about what we think about how we see things,

you know what I mean. Alright, So, so far we have the inherent mystical nature of sight or the experience of sight. We have these new technological advancements up. Plus you can throw in a little bit of experiential support as well. If you stare at something for a long time and then you gaze at a blank wall, what happens? Yeah, you can still see an impression of that image. And you may experience this too with computer screens and whatnot

as well. And to the point of what we're going to discuss with optography, that effect is heightened if you go from being in a dark place to a bright place or vice versa. Yeah. And in eighteen fifty four, English scientist Reverend William Scoresby UH connected this experiment where you would stare in an object and then look at the wall and then time the image to see how long it lasted. Um. And that there was this uh that the paper was on pictorial and photochromatic impressions of

the retina and of the human eye. Uh. And there's this wonderful quote. This is from an eighteen fifty four right up in the uh Antheneum. Upon removing the eyes from the object, the author explained the early appearance of the picture or image which had been thus impressed on the retina, or as he expressed it, photographed upon the retina.

So we have the technology observable perks of human side backed up in an experiment, and a general human history of seeing the eyes as windows into the soul, as well as observeration observational changes in the eyes of say a fish, because how do you judge the freshness of a fish? You look to its eyes. Right when they

start changing and getting cloudy, you know they've been dead longer. Right, Yeah, Okay, so let's take a break, and when we get back, we're gonna take this step and we're gonna move forward into the rise of optography. All right, we're back. So optography seems to have begun in the mid seventeenth century actually, or at least the rumors of something like it, when a Jesuit friar called Christopher sheen Or observed a faint image that was disappearing from the bare retina of a

dissected frog. So, like you were saying, just before a break, right, we look at fish's eyes to see if they're starting to decompose, essentially, and it seems like he was doing something similar with a frog. But then he was like, wait, I see a picture in this frog's eyes. This means something, right now, Remember what we were talking about earlier with photography. Photography wasn't really invented until the eighteen forties. This is what gave rise though, to the idea that the animal

I worked like a camera. So, uh, Shiner's kind of hypothesis of that there was an image left over in the frog's eye seems to have connected with that become somewhat of an urban legend. Then we get in eighteen sixty three, there's an English photographer who takes a photograph of an ox's eye right after the ox dies, and he uses a microscope to search for any evidence of

the images left inside. This ox is retina. The photographer claims that he could see the fleeting image of stones arranged just like the slaughterhouse road that the ox was facing just before it received a blow to the head that killed it. Okay, so this helps spur this on even further. It becomes a little bit more of a so it's sort of just like a rumor, like, oh, did you know, like the last thing you see before

you die is imprinted on your eyeball. Then it was really studied for the first time by Franz Christian Bull and in eighteen seventies six he discovered that there was a pigment hiding in the back of the eye that could bleach in light and then would recover in the dark, and he called this visual purple. Now today we call it rhodopson. I'll give you a little bit of a lesson on rhodopsin, but but he's certainly worth noting in all this that that that bull was the real deal.

Like this, This wasn't just a photographer who is making some judgments based on the photographs that he take. In this is a guy who who studied and made some real achievements. Absolutely, so we now know today that rhodopson is a pigment that contains sensory proteins and that converts light into an electrical signal. This is a common pigment. It's in a lot of organisms, from vertebrates to bacteria. In fact, I was seeing all kinds of academic papers yesterday.

You're doing this research on how there's there's some potential animals, like some octopi that may have rhodopsin in their skin that allows them to quote see through their skin in some ways. It's common, but it's also required for vision in dim light, and it's located in the tightly packed disks that make up the outer segment of the retina's photo receptive rod cells. Basically, the way it works is it sends an electrical signal along the optic nerve to

the visual cortex in the brain. The eye sensitivity is dependent on how much rhodopsin is present, and part of the visual process involves it being destroyed in this bleaching process that I mentioned when it's exposed to light. Now here's a weird thing. Mutations in the rhodopsin gene can actually lead to night blindness. So this is where the eye fails to adapt to darkness. So radoption is really important for us being too in D and D terms like low light vision right um. And it can be

affected by environmental factors, especially vitamin A deficiency. So if your vitamin A is low, this can mess with your adoption and how well you see at night. Now I love despite Bowl's scientific pedigree. I love how his experiments sounds so much like alchemy. I ran across a bit from his writings as quoted in Optagrams and Criminology, Science News Reporting and Fanciful Novels by Douglas J. Lanska, and

here's what both said. I simultaneously decapitated a dozen dark adapted frogs and kept their heads dark in order to examine their eyes consecutively at stated intervals. Yeah, man, that is a common thing with optography, cutting animals heads off and just keeping them around in the dark. Get ready for it, because everybody does this, and they even do it to a couple of people. Yeah, and it's the same, it's it's it's lines up so well with accounts you

read about how to make a homunculous right exactly. So. Actually, before bowl there's this report that in eighteen sixty eight, a doctor in the German town of Vosquez presented pictures that he made of the images from to murder victims eyes, and a medical expert named August Gabriel Maxim Vernois was asked to examine this concept and tested empirically. So he's basically the outsider scientist comes to this town, he takes a look. Was he do experiments on sixteen dogs and cats,

presumably cutting up their eyeballs in their heads. He finds no pictures. He finds that this isn't true. This but something's wrong here, right, Yeah. I think one of the interesting things though, particularly about bowls experiments um, is that that he was excited by the chemical process that seemed to be taking place there because it was it was rather like the silver nitrate in photograph plates. It was like this chemical process that was a part of this

exciting technology. So again we can't help but see the comparisons between the technology and the human experience. Yeah, and I think that's the difference here, right, is that bull was actually like working with the chemistry and biology, whereas like whatever went on in this town of Vosquez, like it was really just somebody taking pictures of murder victims eyes and thinking they saw something there. Right, But this all changes and in Germany. Germany seems to be the

center point for a lot of this. I wonder if there's something specific to German culture that revolves around the idea of being able to see an image on a dead person's eyeball. Oh, I don't know, I mean to I mean to a certain extent. I think just sort of necromatic ideas about communicating with the dead or or

perhaps universal. Now on the chemistry side, though, of course, you can look to the the huge achievements in chemistry that were made in Germany, you know, around this time and into the they Well, German listeners, if you've got some insights into this, we'd love to hear from you. But here comes Wilhelm Friederic Kuhn now Kun, was a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg and he

studied rhodopson. He devised a process to fix the chemical in the eyeball and then develop an image from it. And these experiments grew out of his accidental observation of the shape of a gas flame from his laboratory on the retina of a frog. So Kun performs this famous experiment. This is the one. Like any time you look at optography articles or anything, this always comes up. This is the most famous experiment. He takes an albino rabbit in seven and he fastens this rabbit's head so that it's

forced to look at a barred window. Then he covers its head for several minutes I think with like a bag or something, uh, and this lets the rhodopson accumulate in the rabbit's eyeballs. Then takes the bag or whatever off of the rabbit's head, lets the eyeball be exposed to light for three minutes, and then decapitates the rabbit. He removes the rabbit's eyeball, cuts the eyeball open, and takes the retina and lays it in a solution of alum.

Then he would bathe the eyeball afterward in sulfuric acid and this would cement these images. The next day, the image would then become printed and it would show a clear pattern of this window that the rabbit was looking at with its bars right before it died. So Kun is actually the one who coins the term optography, and he calls these images optographs. So we're looking at the beginning of what is maybe going to be a science

but really doesn't end up panning out. And the reason why is con himself really felt like this wasn't you know, something that was reliable enough that you could use it over and over again, right, So his experiments ultimately showed that only simple, high contrast surroundings were able to produce interpretable optograms, and that the retina, whatever it was, whether it was from a frog or a human being or rabbit,

needs to be removed very quickly from the deceased. He determined for rabbits the limitation you need to get it out of their head between sixty and ninety minutes of death. In oxen it was useless after one hour. Yeah, and then one of the problems with it with human eyes that I've seen pointed out is that human eyes are arguably more like bird's eyes than mammalian eyed. This according to author Simon Ings, author of A Natural History of Seeing,

the Art and Science of Vision. Um. Yeah, Coon's history with this technology is rather interesting because on one side there is just sort of the grizzly and very specific nature of of the research. For instance, when he was trying to figure out in a better way of fixing the images, which again is akin to fixing bath in the chemical the process of photo development. Uh, he eventually realized that a retinal image would fade and vanish, you know, due to just metabolic processes in the eye even a

short time after death. So in one experiment with with a dog that had essentially been put under and then put on artificial respiration respiration, and that dog he had previously hooked up it's corona artery with an injection apparatus so as to quote drive a rapid stream of warm alumn solution into the head and into the eye. Okay, so it sounds like here what he's looking to do then is is basically limit the after effect right by having the animals still living while he's injecting the chemical

fluid for the processing. Yeah, poor dog. Well yeah, I mean, hey, but those rabbits, those rabbits didn't have it easy. Those rabbits. Yeah. No, I wouldn't want to be those rabbits either, But at least, I mean, I'm assuming the decapitation was quick. I hope. Well, he's in a hurry. I mean, he has to see. This dog is like, you know, thankfully put under, But it's got all the stuff running directly into its eyeball.

But but it does boil down. Just how difficult it would be to use this uh in any way, for especially for forensic purposes, because in order to pull it off, he realized, you need a a a very simple, high contrast target to look at anyway, so you know, like

window beams, et cetera, these things we've talked about. You need a paralyzing agent or some other means of locking the eyes on the target, and then the eye would have to be rapidly removed and opened in darkness the retina hardened and fixed, and even then the method often failed because the pigment regenerated and obscured the image. Now, while others out there in the world speculated on the

potential forensic applications here. Coon initially dismissed these possibilities. He wanted no part of the quote various popular accounts to which my name has been in the most unusual manner attached still um. When presented with the opportunity, he gave it a shot. Yeah, he couldn't pass it up. So he actually retrieved the eyeball from a human being named Earhard Gustav Reef. And this was a man who was sentenced to death for drowning his two children. This is

eight we're talking about here. And this guy was killed by guillotine, so his head was decapitated. Kon creates an optagram in ten minutes, he like grabs his head the minute falls off, scoops the eyeball out, and just immediately begins his chemical process. Now, when the image came out, Coon and other people who saw it, they were all like, oh, wait, I see this, I see that. They but then nobody could really agree what it was, and ultimately it was

decided this is too ambiguous. It didn't really so there might have been an impression, but was it a useful impression in any way shape or form. Wasn't an identifiable pre impression doesn't seem to be especially in any way that could be used to like, for instance, identify a murder victims killer now. Coon later worked with American physician Dr. W. C. Ayers, who have conducted a long series of experiments. We're talking a thousand plus experiments, and he concluded that optography would

never have a place in forensics. Uh. This is a quote here from that Douglas J. Lanscope piece I cited earlier, And this is and the sources this into an anonymous source that he quotes. He meaning airs believes it utterly idle to look for the picture of a man's face or of the surroundings on the retina of a person who has met with sudden death, even amid the most favorable circumstances. And you know it would it would remain

this way. There's no evidence of a human optography experiment ever producing as as as clear an image as we saw with those rabbit experiments. And and even then those rabbit experiments, again, it just looks very abstract. It's like three beams. If you're told that it's a window, then you can say, okay, I can see where that would be a window. Yeah, we actually have the photo here in our notes if if you want to look it up, I'm sure you could find it if you just google optography.

But yeah, I mean it really it's a very simple, basic, high contrast image. I doubt that you would be able to even with a rabbit, uh, discern a person's face, right, And that is the vast consensus from people who dealt with the science. It was just refuted again and again all the way up into the twentieth century. And yet the idea didn't quite die out. Yeah, it's it still hasn't panned out, and yet for some reason it's like stuck in our cultural memory. Maybe it's because of the

pop cultural implications. But people just forged ahead and kept trying and trying and trying. And at the same time you had various individuals and pop culture writers or or celebrities that were either playing with this idea or they just outright talking about how photography had this link with the supernatural. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes Stories and uh self self experiment or of poisons, as we know from our recent Poisons episode.

Yet in nine three he gave a talk on spiritualism in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Uh. And he made use of photography to make his point. Um. And this was eight years after the attempted forensic use of optography that we're discussing here. Uh. He he showed off spirit photography as proof of the afterlife and it

was well received. And he's talking about photography as this means of communicating with the dead, and in the spiritualist enthusiasm of the day, people were still buying into it. And this gets back into what we were talking about in that Poisons episode. How Like most people associate those Sherlock Home stories and Arthur Conan Doyle with being like pretty firmly grounded in reality, right, But there's always this like lingering kind of whiff of the occult in them.

And that was something that I think both you and I were always attracted to by those stories. Right. And it turns out it's because he like had one foot in the occult a little bit. Yeah. And you know what, at the same time, it's Um, it is important to note that he wasn't being completely illogical in all of this. He was applying a logic to it, like he's saying, yeah, there's there's a there's an afterlife, there's there's a spirit world, there's more to us than what we see, and here's

the evidence. Now, there's some some fallacies involved there, but it wasn't like a blind illogical um exercise for sa and Doyle. Well, I think we are all owed an episode of Benedict Cumber patches uh Sherlock Holmes where he's hunting down ghosts. Yeah, yeah, I get into it. I believe there was some sort of a TV series, and I don't recall the name of it. I think it maybe it had something like The Great Detective in the in the title, but it was it was a fictionalized

account of Sacon and Doyle's interest in the super natural. Okay, I've never heard of that. Yeah, it was a British series. I don't I don't know that it went more than a single series. Okay, cool, Well, now that we've got the biggest fictional example out of the way, why don't we take a break and the when we get back, we're going to look at the forensic history of people

trying to use optagrams in actual criminal investigations. So all right, we discussed that Coon showed optography wasn't feasible, even he himself came to this conclusion, but the idea still took hold, and it still leapt into fiction. People continued to claim that they were using the technique. There was a hope that the technique would be allowed to determine a murder

victims assailant. And you see this across the century. You've got a Jules Verne wrote a story about it there, They've used it in Doctor Who a couple of times, and there's an episode of that TV show Fringe that they used optography and as well. It seems like a

missed opportunity for the TV series Hannibal. Uh not, because I can clearly imagine a scenario where the killer tries to, uh to, to put his own image on the retina of a murder victim and then he like makes a specific meal with that eyeball like on the top of it, like a child. Well, I would hope the episode ends we have with Hannibal eating the killer's eyes. Yeah, well that maybe if they get a fourth season, we'll see

that episode. By the way, if anyone out there wants to check out the Kipling story, its title is at the end of the passage and the Jewels Verne story from nine two is the Kip Brothers. That's interesting. I wonder if he named it after Kipling. I don't know. I haven't read it, but perhaps some of you have, and you can you can give us your thoughts. So here's an example of where this was first starting to be used by actual police. They in eighteen seventy seven

April police photographed the eye of a murdered man. They were only partly aware of what optography involved, so they had clearly heard about Coon's experiments, but they they were just taking pictures of somebody's of a corpse's eyes. Uh. And in fact, the investigators on the Jack the Ripper case may have also considered the technique. There's a rumor, uh, it's never been confirmed, but that the technique of optography was carried out on Ripper victim Mary Jane Kelly in

eight Yeah. Apparently this comes from a memoir by Scotland yard inspector Walter do And even in his account he claimed he basically says that they took the photos but they had no real hope that anything would come of it. But you know, like you said, they kind of heard that this was a thing, so why not get in there and take some get the best camera over here, take some shots of the eyes in case the boys

in the bat can do something with it. So they were just they were desperate at that point because it was I mean, they've never experienced anything like a serial killer at all that point. So but but you see the same scenario time and time again, where where the inspectors don't really have any intimate knowledge of the science

that's an evolved here. They just have this general idea that technology can make use of the image of an individual's eye to see what they saw before death, and therefore go ahead and take the photos justin case, just to be on the safe side. Well, the next example that I found of this came from a German newspaper article that reports an optography attempt in the nine trial of Fritz A. Gerstein. And this is for the murder of his wife and seven other people. So again we've

got like pretty you know, elaborate case of murder here. Uh. The corner in this case claimed that he saw images of the killer holding a hatchet axe in the eyes of not one but two of the victims. So Angerstein was convicted and executed partly due to this optographic evidence. It wasn't even and I'm saying evidence with quotes surround it, like, they didn't take pictures, they didn't do the whole coon thing where they cut the eyeball up and they soaked

it and fluid, none of that. This guy just went, yeah, I saw an ax in those people's eyes, and that

was admitted as evidence. Yeah, Lanska talked a little bit about this in his his ride up and Yeah, essentially it was just a case of the police rolling up a suspect by telling him, look, we grabbed the image of you, you know, wielding the murder weapon from the dead gardener's eyes, and and there probably wasn't even a photo, but the police only needed the threat of it to force a confession out of a man who was willing

to believe that such things were possible. So this totally renewed the interest and the supposed credibility and using it for forensic investigation. Now on the other side of the Atlantic, in nineteen fourteen, a headline from the Washington Times reports that an image was taken from a murder victims retina that might show who her killer was, and that this

victim was twenty year old Teresa Hollander in Illinois. Now, the police had hoped that the face of her murderer was imprinted like a photo negative on her retina's but the technique never revealed anything in the case, and it was used to accuse Hollander's former boyfriend, Anthony Petris of the crime. However, he was tried twice for this crime and he was never found guilty, so it was not

successfully used there. And again, I just want to reiterate this, like we're talking about these examples and we're saying, oh,

this is so ridiculous, can you believe it? It sounds silly and unbelievable to us today, But in the nineteenth century and obviously early twenty century here people were fascinated by the developments between biology and photography and the fact that they just they could not get out of their heads that they thought, oh, the human eye and a camera the same thing essentially, right, So surely we can just do what we do with a camera to the

human eye and figure out who these killers are. So that brings us to the nineteen seven murder case of police officer George William Gutteridge. And this is in the UK. The perpetrators who killed Officer Gutteridge believed in optagrams, and so they shot him through the eyes after killing him to destroy the evidence. Ah, so this is just the kind of the reverse of the whole take photos of the eyes just in case, shoot out the eyes just in case, exactly. So this goes all the way up

until nine we've got We're back in Heidelberg, Germany. This is where Coon did his research, and the Heidelberg police department in town are like, you know what, we might want to revisit this. Let's one more crack at. It's been a century, but let's take a look. So they invite physiologists Evangelos Alexandridas to reevaluate Coon's experiments. So he

comes up there, he performs similar rabbit experiments. He places them in front of paintings and images, he cuts their heads off or takes their eyeballs out, all of this stuff. This seems like it's the last serious optography research that has has been performed, or at least reported to be performed. But he again found owned nothing particularly valuable there. And that should be enough, because the whole history of optography

entailed experts refuting it time and time again. So you know, someone would get it in their mind that hey, we should we can look at the eyes of this murder victim, right and see what happened, And then the experts would say, no, actually you can't. There's even even if we had the most pristine environment, you had total control over it, like even before the individual's death, which is totally unrealistic. Even

if if conditions were perfect, it would probably be useless. Yeah, I'm trying to be sympathetic and imagine not a science fiction possibility, but something that seems within the realm of the empirical where clearly raddoption does have the ability to

retain an image for a certain amount of time. Yeah, there's no doubting that that there is an image there that that that that that for instance, the crossbars and lines that we have from the rabbit's eyes, those are the effects of the the eyeball looking at the window and taking in this this contrast. Yeah. So I'm just trying to like, potentially somebody's gonna come along another ten years, twenty years and say, well, I don't know, like, let's

let's try that thing. Where we pump a fluids directly into the eyeball of a dog again or something, or or maybe they'll they'll take a corpse and they'll try to like uh, reverse engineer the re adopts in process on it, and it seems like something that might work. It seems like they're onto something right, but it's just not quite there. Well, the interesting thing about all this is that, you know I mentioned earlier that book in Natural History of Seeing, the Art and Science of Vision

by Simon Inings. Yeah, well I ran across an interview with him for PRX Media, and and in it um he he suspects that modern brain scanning technology could wind some of us up in some of us up in very similar territory years from now, when we've learned more about what the evidence actually is compared to all the things we're taking away from it right now. And he specifically suspects that this will be the case with the first time a suspect is placed in a brain scanner

to see if they remember a crime. So I think that is probably that's probably the best way to try and put ourselves in the heads of people who are studying this and even advocating it. And entertaining the idea of its usefulness you know on up into basically modern modern day is that you know, we're we're likely doing some of the same missteps today with with some of our brain scanning technology. You know, we we have this amazing ability to look inside the brain and see what's happening.

And you know, there's not a day goes by that there's not some cool study that's talking about what this may reveal about cognition and UH and memory. But are are all of those connections legitimate and uh and where do we start uh misapply rying the technology to forensics.

So it sounds here like rather than looking at the rhodoption, rather than looking at the chemical itself interacting with light and turning it into electricity, that maybe the idea here is that if we can look at that electrical signal somehow, if we can get ahold of that somehow from the brain, then that might be a possible way to make optography

come to life. Unintended, I mean, I guess optography comes to life in the future if you have a sort of black mirror scenario where you have some sort of computer brain interface. Right then, as is often the case with with with technology, it makes the magic possible. Something that was previously pure necromancy or or or you know, scientific reality that could not really be inflated to equal

the magic. Suddenly it's possible because of some sort of you know, technological grain that's been implanted in the in the in the head. Well, listeners, what do you think do you think that there's some value to of, you know, continuing experiments like this on the eyeball, whether it's with human beings or other animals, or do you think that maybe we're onto something here talking about potential brain computer interfaces.

Will we ever be able to see what the last image was on a dead person's by right us on social media if you've got an answer. We're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, we're on tumbler, and we're on Instagram, and hey, maybe even send us pictures of what your eyeballs are seeing. That's right, Uh yeah, don't forget to

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