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A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes


In 1903, an inventor patented a method of preserving corpses in glass, one of a number of radical inventions that has sought to resist death's decay.

Joseph Karwowski, “Method of Preserving the Dead” (Washington, D.C.: United States Patent Office, 1903) (courtesy Corning Museum of Glass) A quipped that the intact bodies preserved in Karwowski’s method “could be utilized as a lawn statue” while the “bodiless head could be placed on the mantle in the stead of a jar of ashes, or could be used as a heavy-weight paper weight or as a door stop.” Although Karwowski’s people paperweights never achieved reality, or even a B-movie treatment à la House of Wax, others have experimented with using glass to hold the deceased.

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