A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes
7 comments
·May 2, 2025xattt
The success of this initiative… remains to be seen.
dcminter
If we were suddenly taken with the urge to do this now I wonder how good a job we could do? Maybe a high gamma sterilization to kill off any bacteria in or around the body, then cast it in resin; presumably there would still be mere chemical decay paths for the corpses' components though. I suppose embalming would still be the best way...?
adzm
Highly recommend everyone check out the Corning museum of glass, it is so incredibly interesting and there is a real depth to the deeper parts of the museum.
HPsquared
I wonder if there was a rush to patent anything and everything back then. Perhaps like the dotcom rush for domain names, patenting hundreds of random ideas in a similar way to domain squatting.
yummypaint
This is still a common practice, the difference is ordinary people have mostly been cut out between the switch to first-to-file and routine abuse of the patent and trademark system. This is how apple got Samsung's phones forcibly pulled from markets for rounding the corners using the same curves highway engineers had been using for half a century before. Whether or not one believes the patent system is fully corrupted yet, it's undeniably coin operated.
cess11
One person has been somewhat successful in this area, Gunther von Hagens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_von_Hagens
He has a method of plastination that he has used for decades to preserve corpses, notably as the exhibition Body Worlds.
Reminds me of the account of the macrobians by Herodotus:
> and after this [the Persian spies] saw last of all their receptacles of dead bodies, which are said to be made of crystal in the following manner:—when they have dried the corpse, whether it be after the Egyptian fashion or in some other way, they cover it over completely with plaster 21 and then adorn it with painting, making the figure as far as possible like the living man. After this they put about it a block of crystal hollowed out; for this they dig up in great quantity and it is very easy to work: and the dead body being in the middle of the block is visible through it, but produces no unpleasant smell nor any other effect which is unseemly, and it has all its parts visible like the dead body itself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrobians