How Death Masks Work

toy ish version of it. Oh cool? And uh there's something like clay wet clay in your hands is really a neat feeling. Hey, just tell them any more of that? Yeah you know, Yeah, I made for one sexy scene. Male nipples made an appearance in that scene. Swayzy shirtless. Yeah, okay, I believe so he was always shirtless? Yeah I think he was. He was shirtless for most of his career.

Have you ever seen that Dirty Dancing You know at the end of that movie when like they do the whole dance showdown things that somebody put iron Man in over Patrick No, over, um, Jennifer Gray, So like it's the whole scene, but it's Iron Man dancing with Patrick so ezy and it's really neat and hilarious. For the song, iron Man is used instead of Nope, iron Man the cartoon superhero, the comic book hero is dancing with Patrick's wazy at the for some reason. At the end of this,

I gotta see that now. You know what that looks like. You should check it out. I cannot visualize it well, visualize this pal. July twenty Chicago's hot, real hot. Thirty something people, thirty two people, maybe thirty three died from the heat that day. That's how hot it was in Chicago. We should we should say Chuck and I. Um. Because of our work schedules. Um, we are frequently sequestered away from everybody else while they do fun things like hilarious

book exchanges is a good current example. Yeah, if you hear people laughing in the deep background, which is something you've never heard before on our show, that that's because our departments having a party without us. It's really sad, all right, So back to it, back to July twenty, there was a heat. Yeah, there was a movie, a Clark Gable movie that a guy named John Dillinger wanted to go see. Famous gangster John Dillinger. He was a

famous bank robber. He uh. He was an Indiana man and over the course of a year he robbed a ton of banks. He apparently robbed a police station or two, killed at least one cop. And on his birthday, a couple of months prior, I think it may he had been made Public Enemy number one by Jager Hoover's FBI. On this night July, he would be betrayed by a woman in Red Madam as a matter of fact, and a sage and a sage that's right. Uh. And he went with his girlfriend and Anna's age, who was his

girlfriend's landlady, to see this movie. And after they came out, the FBI was waiting for him. He takes off running, pulls out his gun, really does, and they just kill him with a hail of bullets. One of them gets him in the back of the neck and it goes out his eye. And that did it for John Dillinger, a k public Enemy number one and sold out by Anna's age as it turns out, who was then deported back to Romania, I think for her troubles. Yeah, thanks for the help. Now here's your one way ticket on

this disease. Ridden ship exactly. Uh so he uh, he dies, but that's not the end of the story. He was basically put on public display. Either he was put on public display or the public said, uh, we're gonna need to see this guy. Yeah, that was sort of a thing though, Like I remember when I remember when Jesse James was killed, same deal though. Uh, Like these notorious UM criminals sometimes when they were caught, it would be like a big thing, like in like back back in

the old day. They would put him like out in the town squear, like in the pine box, come by and look at him. This was I mean Chicago in the thirties was not that far removed from that. You know, wild West, I get your picture taken next to the body of Jesse James. So that's kind of what they do with Dillinger UM. And at least two different groups actually three, but only one was authorized made casts of his face after he was dead, and we call those

death masks. What those guys were doing was carrying on a centuries old tradition, millennia old. Really, if you want to get technical of basically making a negative image of a dead person and his face so you can make um, I guess masks from it later on, yeah, or you know, a full statute head um bust if you will, or bust or full statue if you really want to go all the way. But um, curiously, and I find this

to be one of the facts of the show. They did make a positive of Dillinger's face, and j Edgar Hoover had one in his office as I guess, uh, sort of a trophy of swords he did. I thought that was pretty cool. I never knew that, Yeah, that would be cool. And not only have a death mask of John Dillinger, but the one that was in Jedger Hoover's office, that's just specific. Um. So I said that this is a very old thing and it goes back

at least to the Egyptians. But they're the first ones who we know made some sort of funerary mask of the deceased. They had a very good reason, and there's was that if the soul, if you didn't make a mask of the deceased, the soul couldn't find the body any longer. It wouldn't have a face in the afterlife. Yeah, because as you learned in our mummification cast, you the face is wrapped up right, so there is no face

any longer. So there you have it. You got like a King Tut and it's not like the regular death mass. It didn't look like them, right or Nate. Uh, Yeah, I think King Tuts was actually like that's his face. Yeah, that they went to that level of trouble. I mean, I knew they tried to make it look like him, but was it actually a mold of it? Yeah. The Egyptians weren't the only ancient group to uh to do this either, Chuck. The Mycenaeans, who were whose civilization was

discovered by Heinrich Schliemer. Yeah. Um, he found some death masks and they're really rough and weird looking, but they are. They took gold sheets that were pliable enough so that they laid over a people's faces and they made like a again, a funerary mask. Yeah. So if you didn't have, um, if you weren't super famous or nobleman or um have a lot of money, you could still get the old death mask. It was probably made of linen and painted gold or papyrus maybe, um, but you you could still

get your death mask even if you weren't king died. Sure. Um. The Romans did a lot of this too, and the Romans actually had I thought I knew everything about ancient Rome but um, it turns out that they made death masks, and there at the funeral, a person who kind of looked like the deceased would wear their death mask, and then other people would wear that person's ancestors their dead relatives death masks, and basically you just have like a

dead family reunion at the person's funeral. Then after the funeral that that recently deceased person's death mask was put together with all of his relatives or her relatives just wait for the next person that and then he would come out with everybody else to bring the new person into the circle, which is kind of neat. I didn't realize that they did that. It's very odd, but and I wonder if they would do impressions of them like, oh, I'm uncle Slaviast, look at me, I love wine, Come

here and sit on my lap. Yeah. Uh so, um, you mentioned the ancient Romans. Um Caesar Julius Caesar actually had a full wax cast of his entire body after his death, stab wounds and everything. And Mark Anthony was I guess dumb enough to go show it off to a crowd, and they rioted and burned down the Senate building. So I don't know what reaction he was looking for. That probably wasn't it. And they're like, we love your records, not that Mark Anthony. So um, I guess with the

Romans too, with the Gypsians. Basically throughout history, if you weren't wealthy, you, um probably weren't going to have a death mask made of you. If you weren't wealthier, you weren't like the king. Yeah. And one reason is because a lot of times these were artists before photography, artists and painters and sculptors. As soon as someone died of note, they would get their death mask made so they could then paint them and sculpt them and have a reference

for what they look like. Yeah, and the same thing. I mean, artists didn't paint nobody's you know what I'm saying, So you didn't need to have a death mask made of you. Um. And this is this is pretty much the way it was for Europe, in Europe for most of history except in Italy. Italy pretty early on said if you if you, if you achieve something notable, probably make a death mask of you. So if you see yeah, early inventors and artists and those kind of like poets.

If you're in Italy, you probably have a death mask made. If you're a notable personality like Da Vinci, sure he's probably a death mask. Um. But elsewhere England, France, all that, it wasn't until late modern history that um, he started to see death masks of non noble people coming out. And as a matter of fact, it was Madame Tussoed, the lady behind the wax museums, who who kind of brought um death masks to the masses during the French Revolution.

She and her uncle, uh Philippe Courteous, They were just masters of wax and they worked a lot. Um. There was one of Louis the sixteenth Mistresses, was went underwent the guillotine, and um, she apparently had a terrible grimace on her face when she died. People could have seen

you also curled up your hand for some reason. Yeah, I don't think she didn't too, um and uh so her Philippe Curtis, uh he basically pinched her face back into pinch the decapitated heads face back into a nice position and then rolled her in some whacks that he laid out next to the grave. Wow, yeah, that's that's they They were operating on this higher death mask level like no one ever has. But the Madam two sold Wax museum that you enjoyed today grew out of a

death mask operation. Interesting and it seems like a very macab thing to do. But um, if you it's different now these days we like to remember our deceased ones as living and look at photographs of them doing things where they're alive and lively and go die over there where we don't have to think about the close casket funeral.

But um, it wasn't the same back then. They would have they would royal and wealthy families would display these death mask of their relatives in like you know, the parlor room or the drawing room or here in the main hallway, and it was you know, it was the point of pride. It wasn't like macawbre weird or And then eventually it became pseudo scientific with the advent of phrenology. Phrenology, we I wish we had a good article on that. We don't. I haven't seen one. It's pretty interesting, like

the early days of that stuff. Maybe we'll pulling together. It's like when people were just starting to figure out the brain and not really having any idea what they were doing, really missing the mark a lot of times. Yeah. Yeah. So phrenology basically was the idea that you could predict a person's personality behavior, whether someone was a criminal or not, um, how intelligent they would grow up to be by like the shape of their face, the shape of their skull,

the bumps on their skull, um. And so phrenologists, as as this field grew in the nineteenth century, kind of increased the demand for um death masks because they wanted to compare people side by side. So you've gotten some pretty cool death masks of say like um, John Joseph Merrick, Oh really yeah, um or uh, he's I think there's like full body asks of him, um or you know, a criminal or a genius or whatever, and these phrenologist would keep him side by side and try to compare

and figure out. It's God, there's got to be a key there somewhere, and they have themselves convinced, but they were all wrong. Was there something There had to be something to some of that research, right, I think there was a lot of consensus among scientists, and they're all wrong. Let's disappointing. Um. One cool thing is that later on, in today's world, you can look back at some of these death masks and gain a little bit of insight diagnostically,

speaking on how someone might have died. UM. In this article they mentioned Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. They think now he died of a stroke because his death mask he has the telltale signs of, like the droopy face on one side. And Abraham Lincoln they think might have had a wasting disease because he had life masks made, which is the same thing except alive. Before he died, had a couple of them made, and that they look at these now and say, you know what Abraham Lincoln

might have been dying of, like tuberculosis or something? Maybe? Right? Is that what they just said, a wasting disease. I didn't even know what. I think that's a disease. Yeah, that makes sense, consumption. But then, of course Booth took care of that in a more hasty manner. Yes, I don't want to give a spoiler away for the movie, but I'm pretty surely can get shot. Um. There was a speaking of Booth. His brother Edwin had a UM.

He was like one of the most famous actors at least in the country, if not the world when he was working, and he had a death mask made and it was collected by a man named Lawrence of Arabia. No, his name was Lawrence Hutton, and Lawrence Hutton was a literary um editor for Harper's Magazine, which is still around today. Very good UM. And he was in a junk store in New York one time and ran across the death mask and it just was immediately smitten with the idea

of collecting these things. So he spent the rest of his life traveling the world finding death masks, buying him having am made of people. In some cases he had one of Edwin Booth. And he amassed this incredibly large collection, the world's largest individual collection of death masks UM. And when he died, he bequeathed it to Yale. No, Princeton, I'm sorry. So Princeton has this museum of death masks now and see that. Well, lucky for you, buddy, they

digitized it. Yep. They have like this really nice website, UM, the Lawrence Hutton death Mask Museum website and it's got all of them on there. It's really really interesting. Some are very very old and like poorly done. There's one of Lincoln that it's just like looking at Lincoln's face because he's so recognizable, but to see the details. Daniel dey lewis right there all right, and you can't hear his weird voice, but you can almost you can almost

hear it's just looking at it. But the it's it's the details. That's the thing about death masks that are so I think um alluring to some people is it's it's not only the detail of like you know, they're the age and face and what life did to them, but it's also the detail of the absence of life, like that it's a death mask, you know, like the hollow eyes or in the case of Dillinger, the bullet hole. Um.

Apparently that his death mask was so detailed. They did such a good job with it that you could see the abrasions on his face from where he hit the pavement when he fell down dead. You're looking at some of these up close, like the details remarkable, it's pretty eerie. Um. So if you can't make it the Princeton, you can check out the Lawrence Hutton. Just type in Lawrence Hutton Princeton and we'll bring that up. It's pretty cool little website you can spend some time on. Yeah, and if

you do go to Princeton. They got a great little brup pub. You should go to see the death mask, go have some beer. What a pub? Yeah, I mean I can't remember. I mean I assume it's still there. It opened new when I was living there in the mid nineties. Um, I bet it's still there, but it was kind of a new at the time. It was like with brew pub. Yeah, this is crazy. It's crazy, alright, So let's talk about how you do this, shall we Yes, you need to do it really soon after the person dies,

because you don't want the bloat to set in. Um, you can distort the face and they want like the death face after right, exactly, So they would apply grease to the face, especially on facial hair because, uh, it made it easier to take the bandages off and they didn't want to like rip out your eyebrows. Yeah, because you still had a funeral of the hold exactly. Uh, do you want to look like Sergeant Mauser from police Academy? Do you remember? Yeah, he got his eyebrows blowing off.

That is. Have you ever seen anyone with no eyebrows? I saw Mouser. It's just weird because sometimes you can't pinpoint why they look so freaky. I remember guy in high school shaved his eyebrows. One of the you know, one of the bad kids, came in one day with this. That's how he was rebelling. I don't know, he was just one of those bad kids. Like I didn't associate with him because I was a good boy. But he came in one day in my industrial large class. He

has eyebrows shaved, and it freaked me out. Oh yeah, Like I definitely didn't have anything to do it after that. It was really strange looking he saved his eyebrows. Yeah, I think it was probably a pink floid thing. So, um, then you applied the plaster bandages. Um you. It's interesting is the first layers where you get all your detail, that's really what the death mask is, and then all

the other layers just reinforced that first layer. Right. It telegraphs that anybody who's ever hung dry wall knows that if you don't get that thing smooth when you tape it, it just it's broadcast throughout the whole the whole wall. It's that it's just ruined. Yeah, I just set the high I was just putting the house down. My guest bedroom. Yeah,

that's just very bad job in there. Uh. And it's funny when contractors have come by since then, they've gone in that room and I've been like, yeah, boy, I don't know who did this. It sucks. Um. All right, So the plaster sets Back in the day, it took about an hour. These days, um, it'll set in just a few minutes, and then you carefully remove the mold. You've got your negative, and then it's up to you. You can do a wax positive, you can do bronze,

um what else. However, but you want to charge people, Yeah, I guess so marble. There's one in Napoleon that they made out of marble. Really Yeah. Yeah, he's not very intimidating when you see his death mask, but I mean they broke his spirit pretty good. Yeah. Sure, exile to an island. It's just you and some other jerks. It might have been nice. Yeah, I don't think he liked it.

He was too bent on taking over the world. The stick came on an island was like the greatest insult is what you control now, Napoleon and this little tiny space. Um you said that, Uh that these days plaster drives in a few minutes. Um. And actually there were death masks. I'm sure somebody somewhere still making a death mask here there, but um, George Bernard Shaw had one made when he died in the nineteen fifties, so it's still some something of a modern event. Um, I'm totally gonna get one made,

are you Yeah? Why not? All right? Uh? Nicola Tesla had one made. Yeah, his is Have you ever seen his? Is interesting because I've only seen the one picture that one. Yeah, as a younger man, so he got older. He's just I don't know, you know, the ears are huge, and his nose was really large. It doesn't look that large in this picture, and I guess I've never seen it

at profile. But yeah, he looks sort of like David Bowie. No, it was a guy, the old old guy who took all the drugs Walter Math, not Burrows, but Timothy Learry sort of looked like a Timothy Larry before he died, like just old virt Timothy Leary died on webcam, right, didn't he like live stream his death? Like even before anyone knew how to live stream, he figured it out somewhere. I had no idea. I believe you did. That's sad.

I'm sure it's up on the web all right. Shall we tell her awesome kind of fact of the podcast story of the Unknown Woman of the Scene a k a. The Lincoln You list scene, nineteenth century Paris, Josh, here's the story. An anonymous woman, UH moved to Paris from the country, falls in love with a young man and gets her heart broke in two by this French jerk. She is distraught. She cast herself into the river and

uh the river scene? Is it scene? I believe and sin and nobody claimed the body ever, and the mortician was was taken her beauty and the he said, oh, this dead lady is so hot. Maybe, but um he was taken with her beauty and her calm, almost peaceful expression on her face. No one ever claimed her. He did a death mask and said, now she is known as the unknown Women of the Scene or the sink the Lincoln. And they a lot of people ended up having uh copies of this death mask in their house

as I guess art or something. Yeah, this is kind of weird. Yeah, but I mean this is this is before collector's plates had come along, maybe and it was like spoons from St. Louis or this lady's death mask. Right. Um, so the the author of this article poke some holes in that story. Yeah. The truth is that the this death mask was in wide circulation, right, but the it probably wasn't from a woman who drowned, because her features would have become bloated and distorted by the time she

started to float to the surface. Um. And she also looks kind of peaceful. Yeah, so they think that's probably a life mask posed for by a live model, but they never recorded who it was. But the mystery around it, I think probably helped sell some of the death masks, so they kept it going. And then that's the end of the story. You think, here's where it gets really good me. Yeah. Uh. Nineteen sixty Peter Safar, an Austrian doctor, is developing this really radical new thing called trying to

save someone who's having a heart attack. Rather than just being like, oh well yeah, which is something I could do? There is something you could do. It's called CPR, and he championed it and got in touch with a Norwegian toymaker named asmund uh Laird. All that sounds so made up, it does and arm intens arian and um said, you know what, I need a way to teach this. I need some sort of like plastic dummy to teach people how to do this new thing old CPR. And I

got this. I got just the thing. This will use this face of this woman of the scene and throw it on a dummy bust. And that is who recessa Annie was. And as I was reading this the whole time, I was like, no way, is that recessa Annie? Is that recessa Annie? And it was on the following page was the sentence that became recessa Annie. And I literally felt like, I don't know, it felt like exalted. Yeah, man, I used to like put my mouth on that thing

on the nineteenth century death mask. Yeah yeah, every summer for lifeguarding. My mom used to teach CPR classes and she had a recessa Annie and the kid too, who had like that snappy little track suit, like dark blue tracks, like you had these in your house. Yeah, it was a little off, but yeah, eventually I was like it's neat. Yeah, I can't believe. I'm still a little blown away that

that's who they ended up using. Yeah, very neat. And when you looked and I looked up the death mask, and then I looked up Pricessa Annie, and I was like, Yeah, that's her. That's cool, Except she's got nostrils in a mouth hole, right, which is very important if you're going to practice CPR, right, or if you're gonna make a life mask, you want to make sure that the person has a way to breathe, and that's usually threw straws into the nostrils. Josh, if you live in Michigan Midland

County Historical Museum, there they have Jesse James and Butch Cassidy. Sweet. You can go by and check that out. You know. If you go to the Maker's Mark Distillery there little tour, they have Frank James Gunn. One of the owner's grandfathers was the guy who Frank James surrendered to and he handed his pistol over. It's pretty neat. Have you ever been there? Did you dip your own bottle? They let you do that, they do, Yeah, I know, why didn't you do that? Man? How can you go to the

maker's mark and not dip your own bottle. If you dip your own bottle, then it becomes a memento and it seems like a waste of bourbon. Oh you wouldn't drink it all right? Uh where else? There's this very cool thing and uh called the Black Museum. I look this up in Scotland Yard. Oh yeah, I want to go there. Well you can't. I know. I want to meet Scotland Yard detective who can get me in? Well

you can't, you're not at Scotland Yard Detective yourself. I will then go to Scotland Yard Detective School so I can get into this thing. This thing has been around since eighteen seventy four and then moved and refurbished in the nineteen eighties to New Scotland Yard. And it was originally called the Black Museum. Now it's called the Crime Museum. And do they have like letters from Jack the Ripper

in there? They have nooses that hung famous people, They have weapons from famous murder cases and a bunch of death masks. Apparently, why would you not let the public in that? I think any British police officer can go if they like, make a reservation like you don't have to be a Scotland yard dick, but uh yeah, pretty cool at the Ripper Letters, that's awesome. Yeah, there's gotta be some movie plot based around the Black Museum that you could come up with that seems like a just

the name itself, like everything comes alive maybe at night. Yeah, there you go. There's your movie and poor Ben Stiller gets in trouble and that's where it goes self. Um, if you want to learn more about death masks and you want to see some cool pictures of death masks, you can type the words death masks into the search bar how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bar, it's time for what, well, a couple of

quick pieces of business and then listen to mail. Okay, so what's the first order of business, Chuck, Well, we got a TV show coming out on Science Channel January nineteenth, which is right around the corner, uh ten pm, aaring two episodes on the first night, premiere night after Idiot Abroad's premiere, which is a very good leading for us. We're super excited about that. And what more do you need to know? Nothing? You need to know that you

should be there watching. Yeah, such a little DVR and uh, you know, give us some love, make some noise at the Science channel Facebook page that will help us out. And Twitter, Yeah, we appreciate it. What about listening now? Okay, Josh, I'm gonna call this Martha. Martha's got a few corrections for us on our and we haven't done corrections in a while. But on our topic of peak oil. She's in the business. Uh, she knows a lot about it. Uh.

First of all, she affirms me, which I like. Chuckle's right. Guys, dinosaurs, in no way, shape or form make up oil or gas deposits. Most of the source material comes from things like algae and phytoplankton that has died and sunk to the bottom of its lake, ocean or seat um number two. The things you said about proved reserves being unreliable, it's partially true, guys. In some countries, like the U S and Canada, UK the members of the Eurozone, proved reserves

are actually audited by regulatory bodies. In the US it's the sec U. This is because an investor would most likely consider the amount of proved reserves a company has access to, since that tends to be a good indicator of the health of the firm, whether or not it's a sound investment. If you misrepresent your reserves to the public, sec will come after you and the penalties can be severe. So in some countries the proved reserves is very conservative,

actually heavily audited and is probably pretty reliable. But she did point out that other countries, um where they might not want to be as forthcoming. You can get some hinky numbers, right, So I feel like we said that I can't remember. Uh. And then number three she takes its t task a little bit. On fracking. She said, I know it's a contentious subject and we just should do a podcast on this. It's in the in my ideas. Cute is it? Um? You guys refer to fracking as

causing an environmental disaster every time someone does it. You may call me a shill, but even Lisa Jackson of the e p A, who was not a friend of the oil industry, has said that there are no proven cases of wracking resulting in underground freshwater contamination, and fracking has been conducted in the U s. It's some id forties. It's far more likely that poor, well designed and bad

cement jobs would be the culprit. However, there is a big study being conducted right now by the e p A, so all this may change if they find something, but as of now, the science doesn't support the position of most anti fracking groups. So I definitely want to do a podcast on this now. I feel like she's challenged. I feel like she's using psychology on us right now. She is. I love your show. I find it fascinating, but I'm weird like that, keep up the great work.

Can't wait to your TV show in January. And that is from Martha. Martha. That was a perfect letter from an expert, somebody in the field, taking us the task, being nice about it, yeah, and letting us tell everybody else that maybe we got it wrong, maybe didn't you know, and then mentioning our TV show exactly. So thank you for the perfect letter. Yes. Uh. If you want to send us a perfect tweet, you can tweet to us

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