Safety Coffins: The Ultimate Protection Against Premature Burial

Safety Coffins: The Ultimate Protection Against Premature Burial

By Mr Ghaz, June 22, 2010

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Safety Coffins: The Ultimate Protection Against Premature Burial

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In 1906 Frederick J. Harvey, the 20-year-old son of a millionaire Kansas restaurateur, died suddenly after a short illness. When his fiancée, Lily Godfrey, visited the family tomb, she became convinced that Frederick was only sleeping and arranged for the body to be taken home. Four months later Fredrick emerged from his trance. He married the faithful Lily soon afterward.

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Premature burial was a serious danger in the days when doctors did not fully understand such conditions as comas and catalepsy, because it was not always possible to declare with certainty whether a person was truly dead or merely unconscious.

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Because top medical authorities considered the only sure sign of death to be “putrefactive decomposition,” clauses in wills frequently stated that bodies should not be buried until a week after apparent death. “Waiting mortuaries” were once widely advocated; some were even built. Cremation was promoted as a certain way of ensuring that no one risked waking up in a coffin, and in Ireland it was once customary to slit a corpse’s jugular vein. The 19th century writer Harriet Martineau went one step further: her will left her will left her doctor a sum of money if he would ensure her death by cutting her head off.

Grave Concern

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Short of such drastic methods, other means were sought to guard against the risk of premature burial. One of the most popular was the safety coffin. Built to allow periodic examination of a body, it provided either a means of escape from the coffin or ways to summon attention. In the second half of the 19th century, when premature burial had become a major concern and numerous pamphlets and books had been published, there was a flurry of patents for such devices.

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Franz Tester’s patented coffin of 1862 had an air tube and a bell, with a ladder to facilitate exit from the grave. In 1882 Albert Fear naught designed a coffin in which the slightest hand movement would make a flag wave.

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Perhaps the most sophisticated safety coffin was designed by Count Karnice-Karnicki, chamberlain to the emperor of Russia. The apparatus consisted of a pipe from the coffin that extended four feet above the ground. Below ground the pipes was fixed to a glass ball that rested on the chest of the deceased. With the slightest movement, the ball activated a spring, and an iron box at the top of the pipe flew open; a lamp would be lit, a flag raised, and a bell would ring. The same pipe could also be used to communicate with the revived corpse.

Signs of Life

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Various other ways of sounding alarms have also been suggested. In 1903 Emily Josephine Jepson of Cambridge, England, applied for a patent on her invention, announcing: “Jephson’s improved Coffin for indicating the burial alive of a person in a trance or suffering from a comatose state so that same may be released or rescued, has means for admitting air to the coffin and for giving an audible signal by means of an electric bell, which may be placed either on the grave or in the cemetery house.

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“There is a glass plate in the lid, and a small shelf attached to one side of the coffin which may hold a hammer, matches, and candle so that, when the person wakes, he can light the candle and with a hammer break the glass, thus assisting to liberate himself when the earth…is removed.”

J.J Toolen’s coffin of 1906 combined a sprung lid with a battery that would power a light for 150 hours. E.V. Blacker design offered two novel features. The body was chained to the spring-loaded lid and the coffin buried only in shallow earth. Any movement would raise the lid and the occupant could free himself. A tube extending from the coffin contained litmus paper: when it changed color, indicating that decomposition was taking place, the grave was filled in.

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The latter was one of the last safety coffins to be patented. With the outbreak of World War I, the real horrors of sudden death put an end to any interest in the somewhat remote possibility of premature burial, and improved medical techniques increasingly made the certification of death a more precise science. The era of the safety coffin had ended.