http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/coffin-torpedos
Victorian ‘Coffin Torpedoes’ Blasted Would-Be Body Snatchers
Grave robbing got more hazardous in the 1880s.
On the night of January 17, 1881, a
would-be body snatcher by the name of Dipper was killed by a blast in a
Mount Vernon, Ohio cemetery. The attempted grave-robbery was a three-man
operation, according to the Stark County Democrat.
The explosion broke the leg of the second thief. The third—tasked with
keeping watch—was allegedly left unscathed and hoisted his wounded
friend into a sleigh.
Another win for the coffin torpedo.
Keeping the dead buried was a matter of
grave concern in 19th-century America. As medical schools proliferated
after the Civil War, the field grew increasingly tied to the study of anatomy and practice of dissection.
Professors needed bodies for young doctors to carve into and the pool
of legally available corpses—executed criminals and body donors—was
miniscule. Enter freelance body snatchers, dispatched to do the digging.
By the late 1800s, the illicit body trade was flourishing, and
salacious accounts of grave robberies peppered local papers across the country, historian Michael Sappol, Ph.D., chronicles in A Traffic of Dead Bodies.
At least 12 body-snatching scandals were reported in 1878, including that of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison,
the son of ninth United States president William Henry Harrison.
(Harrison’s body was found at the University of Cincinnati and his
remains were ultimately returned to the family tomb.)
Capitalizing on the public’s funereal anxiety, inventors got to work. Their solution? Explosives.
Philip. K Clover, a Columbus, Ohio artist, patented
an early coffin torpedo in 1878. Clover’s instrument functioned like a
small shotgun secured inside the coffin lid in order to “prevent the
unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies,” as the inventor put it. If
someone tried to remove a buried body, the torpedo would fire out a lethal blast of lead balls when the lid was pried open.
Another Ohioan, former Circleville probate judge Thomas N. Howell, patented a grave torpedo of his own on December 20, 1881. Unlike the Clover torpedo, Howell’s gadget was a shell buried above the coffin and wired to it. This worked like a landmine and would detonate when thieves ran into the wiring.
“Sleep well sweet angel, let no fears of
ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo,
ready to make minced meat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the
pickling vat,” read an advertisement for the Howell torpedo.
“It’s a period in which people devoted a
considerable portion of their savings to funerals, and the development
of a funeral industry around that,” Sappol says. “For many working
people, if you saved any money at all, it might be for funeral expenses
for you and your family. People felt that it was desperately important
to have a ‘decent burial.’”
Lore of coffin torpedoes and graves loaded with them spread in patent catalogs and newsprint.
A particularly gossipy 1899 issue of the Topeka State Journal
claimed the late Mrs. W.C. Whitney’s grave was “sown with powerful
torpedoes” and fiercely guarded by watchmen at all hours. The report
referenced the case of A.T. Stewart, a gilded-age tycoon whose body was
taken from its grave in 1878 and held for ransom. “There is no secret about the torpedoes,” the Journal claimed. “All the village talks of them.”
Despite all the yellow rag chatter about
graveyard artillery, there is little to suggest coffin torpedoes were
widely manufactured or commercially successful.
“For the most part, these devices seem to
have been used very little,” says anthropologist Dr. Kate Meyers Emery.
“They were definitely oddities designed to make money off of the
widespread fear about body snatching. The truth is, most of the time you
really just needed someone to watch over your grave for a few days or
weeks to make sure that the body had time to decay and wouldn’t be of
use.”
Doctoral candidate Megan Springate, who authored the book Coffin Hardware in Nineteenth-century America
is similarly unconvinced that coffin torpedoes made it out of patent
catalogs. According to Springate, these news clippings probably
reference “general explosives” placed around graves rather than
inventions specific to the funeral industry.
“Other aspects of the mortuary industry
in the U.S. would have also deterred body snatching, including burial in
sealed shipping crates as makeshift vaults, the use of hidden locking
mechanisms on casket lids, and the use of cast iron coffins,” she says.
“All of these have been recovered archaeologically.”
By the early 20th century, the
controversy around resurrection men and the body trade had died down
considerably—though not due to “grave ghouls” going out with a bang.
Anatomy laws gave medical schools access to bodies of the poor in most
states by 1913, curbing the black market for cadavers. Improved
refrigeration technology also allowed corpses to be stored and preserved
in medical institutions, so there was less of a premium on the newly
deceased. Microbiology, advances in the surgical field, and early X-Rays
relegated anatomical dissection to the sidelines of medical innovation.
Anatomy continued to be taught in medical schools, but it primarily
served as an introductory course, rather than the central focus of the
medical curriculum.
Though there is little archaeological
evidence of grave torpedo use, these inventions provide a peculiar
window into the curiosity, horror, and unease anatomical practice
inspired among 19th-century society.
“It’s a lost world, and part of it is the
politics of death, the importance people attached to having a decent
burial and the strong meanings they attached to narratives of death,”
says Sappol. The industry that arose in service of that incorporated
“casket and mausoleum manufacture, but also funerary clothes and
trinkets, hearses, gravestones, post-mortem photography, and embalming
post-Civil War.”
“Then there’s the tinkerers culture, people making goofy devices for perceived need or non-need,” Sappol says.
Addressing a coffin torpedo patent, Scientific American
boasted: “In consequence of the increasing number of graveyard
desecrations, the genius of the inventor has been incited to devise
means of their defeat.” This clipping was reprinted in various local publications during the late 1870s and early 1880s.
Some accounts of coffin torpedoes and the tinkerers who thought them up take note of their impracticality. The Pittsburg Dispatch dedicated
part of an 1890 round-up of “Rattle Brain Ideas” to cemetery
explosives, locating them within the larger culture of invention and its
esoteric, ill-conceived byproducts.
“There’s a premium on novelty and
ingenuity,” Sappol says. “People in their barns have their tools, and
they’re making stuff. Sometimes they make brilliant inventions and make
fortunes, and sometimes they just make stupid things.”
Occasionally, they also made good punchlines.
The joke column
of an 1882 Montana paper described the detonation of “one of the patent
Ohio grave torpedoes.”. The device was being tested on a mule. At the
point of explosion, the animal picked up a single hoof and continued
grazing.
I'm so glad you liked my piece! xx Lucy
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