Invention Of Life Signals

Every living person has an appointment with death, making the subject fertile ground for inventors, and patents have been granted covering everything from the disposal of bodies to preservation of the dead for the afterlife.

For centuries most Western cultures buried their dead, but even this seemingly simple procedure presented problems. Nineteenth-century England was notorious for the activities of so-called resurrectionists, who would dig up bodies from cemeteries and sell them to medical school. The problem was so widespread that in 1818 Edward Lillie Bridgman (England) invented a supposedly impregnable cast-iron coffin to deter grave robbers, although in practice Bridgman's coffins proved vulnerable to sledgehammers.

By the mid-19th century people were apparently more worried about being buried alive than about grave robbers, prompting the US Patent Office  to establish an entirely new classification of patents called "Life Signals". Frank Vester (USA) was granted the first patent in this category in 1868 and a further 23 examples were patented before 1900, most of them being variations on of theme of enabling a person buried alive to contact those on the surface. Most devices were triggered either by unconscious movements or by a deliberate signal from a buried person, but one particularly pointless version was patent by George Willems (USA) in 1908: his invention incorporated a periscope at the foot of the coffin, but if the occupant did regain consciousness, he or she would have to wait for someone to switch on the electric light provided and look into the periscope before any alarm could be raised.

In 1869, the year after the Life Signals category was established, Dr L. Brunetti (Italy) invented the first incinerator to be specifically designed for cremation - an invention that certainly helped to reduce the number of people buried alive. Then in 1903, Joseph Karwowski (Russia living in USA) went to the other extreme and invented the method of preserving the dead. Karwowski's patent described : "A means whereby a corpse may be hermatically sealed within a block of transparent glass...so that it will be prevented from decay and will at all times present a life-like appearance."

Source - The Book Of Inventions by Ian Harrison