A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes

Summary

Joseph Karwowski, “Method of Preserving the Dead” (Washington, D.C.: United States Patent Office, 1903) (courtesy Corning Museum of Glass)Through embalming and sealed caskets advertised for “eternal rest,” the American funeral industry caters to our anxiety over bodily decay. In 1903, a Russian-born inventor in Herkimer, New York, named Joseph Karwowski proposed a radical way of preserving corpses: suspending them in glass cubes. Patented as a “Method of Preserving the Dead,” Karwowski provided diagrams and directions “whereby a corpse may be hermetically incased within a block of transparent glass” and thus “maintained for an indefinite period in a perfect and lifelike condition.” First the corpse would be drenched with “sodium silicate or water-glass,” and then, once dried, covered with “molten glass.”Karwowski’s patent is on view in Curious and Curiouser: Surprising Finds from the Rakow Library now at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. In a blog post for Corning called “Glass and Death,” glass artist Caitlin Hyde writes:There are some interesting bits of logic to Karwowski’s plan. Water glass is used as a desiccant and to seal eggshells to extend freshness, but it’s hard to imagine that, even if perfectly sealed, the clothed body would look at all natural after being coated in the wet sodium silicate and then dried out, much less after being exposed to the elevated temperatures required to cast glass around it. Karwowski did not produce any samples of his proposed invention and, though the idea may have seemed brilliant enough to need patenting at the time, it has never caught on in practice.A 1910 issue of Scientific American 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.”Image from a glass casket catalog (American Glass Casket Company, Ada, Ok...