Inventions in Everything: Glass-Encased Corpses

At this time of year, as we get closer to Halloween, there’s nothing quite like a good scare. That’s true for at least for some members of the Inventions in Everything team, who wait until this month to drop the patent they’ve found that they think is most likely to give regular people the heebie-jeebies on the rest of the IIE team.

Some, as in the case of self-carving pumpkins and Halloween holograms, aren’t so scary. Meanwhile, others are unsettling, while some qualify as good old-fashioned pure nightmare fuel.

The innovation represented by U.S. Patent 748,284 somewhere in between. You know those glass blocks that contain engraved three-dimensional pictures of your family? Well, what if you had one of those, but with your deceased relatives, as a means to preserve them?

We’re not making this up. Here’s the abstract of the 1903 patent, in which inventor Joseph Karwowski describes what it’s all about:

This invention relates to certain new and useful improvements in methods of preserving the dead; and it has for its object the provision of a means whereby a corpse may be hermetically incased within a block of transparent glass, whereby being effectually excluded form the air the corpse will be maintained for an indefinite period in a perfect and life-like condition, so that it will be prevented from decay and will at all times present a life-like appearance.

The patent illustrations confirm Karwowski’s intended application:

Having been patented in 1903, we can safely say this invention failed in marketplace. If it had been successful, after 120 years, the accumulation of 12 decades worth of corpses displayed in large glass blocks would be hard to miss, despite some odd stories to the contrary.

In fact, about the closest you can come to a commercial product based on the idea of encasing a body in a case to display is to buy a replica of Han Solo encased in carbonite. Frankly, the fact that you can easily find these things for sale on the Internet more than four decades after The Empire Strikes Back was released in movie theaters is maybe scarier than the idea of dead bodies displayed in glass blocks.