Frank Vester may have paved the way with his demonstration of his safety coffin but that was nothing compared to the exploits of Count Michel de Karnice-Karnicki, who described himself as a “chamberlain to the czar of Russia”. His pride and joy was a safety coffin which he called “Le Karnice”. He toured Europe and America, demonstrating the efficacy of his contraption.
A report in The Chicago Tribune in its December 20, 1899 edition gives a flavour of his style. At a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in New York City, Dr Henry Garrigues “startled” his fellow members by announcing that one person out of every 200 buried in the United States was really “in a lethargic state and is buried alive”. This astonishing and patently untrue statement paved the way for Karnicki to put “Le Karnice” through its paces.
He claimed that he had made considerable improvements on other safety coffins because in his version the slightest movement caused a series of alarms and alerts to be triggered, causing air and light to enter the coffin and, externally, a shiny ball atop a metal tube 3.5 inches in diameter to lift into the air and a bell to ring. In this way the precise location of the coffin could be identified, allowing aid to be quickly summoned, while the victim could wile away the time by speaking to anyone who would listen via a special tube.
Karnicki would then throw the floor open to any volunteers who wished to try the coffin out for themselves, some even allowing themselves to be buried inside one. In Turin, a 78-year-old man, Faroppo Lorenzo, consented on December 17, 1898 to be buried alive in “Le Karnice” and was not disinterred until nine days later, on December 26th, setting the world record for the longest voluntary live burial, a record which still stands today. When he resurfaced, Lorenzo’s only comment on his unusual Christmas vacation was that it was “damned smelly down there”.
One of Karnicki’s most ardent supporters was a Parisian lawyer, Emile Camis, whose pamphlet, Premature Burial: Its Prevention, addressed the widespread fear of being buried alive and proposed “Le Karnice” as the solution. “The most authorised professors, the most renowned physicians, the most competent hygienists”, he wrote, “who have tried the ‘Karnice,’ have been unanimous in their appreciations favourable to its immediate application.”
Despite these enthusiastic endorsements and enterprising demonstrations, there is no evidence that Karnicki’s safety coffin nor any other caught on. One major design flaw was that during the process of decomposition, a corpse can move and even flip over, involuntarily rather than because the so-called deceased had been buried prematurely, thereby triggering a false alarm.
Nevertheless, this inconvenient fact did not stop other inventors plying their creative minds to finding a solution while taking the opportunity to embrace emerging technological developments. Coffins were designed using electrical signals which triggered flags, bells, rotating lights, while others incorporated a heater. The coffin in which a Louisiana woman, Mrs Pennord, was buried in in 1908 came with a telephone connected to the cemetery keeper’s house. It was never used!
Premature burial, though, was still rife, the principal victims being those suffering from cholera or trances. In 1896 William Tebb was moved to form the London Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial and as late as 1933 the English banker, Sir Edward Stern, left specific instructions for his doctor to ensure that his coffin was not lowered into the ground until he was very clearly dead. The doctor was to take whatever precautions were necessary.
Along with the activities of grave robbers on the hunt for freshly interred bodies, the immediate aftermath of dying was a stressful time. Next time we will see what happened when premature burial and grave robbing coincided.
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