In August 1868, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Franz Vester of Newark, New Jersey a patent for a coffin outfitted with a rope, a ladder, and a bell. The bell, situated atop a square tube extending aboveground from an opening at the coffin’s head, was connected to a rope that dangled down the tube into the coffin. The ladder similarly extended down the tube. If the corpse chose to rejoin the living, it could climb up the ladder. Should that prove too much of a strain, it could instead ring the bell to halloo for assistance.
Go ahead and laugh at Vester’s contraption (inspired perhaps by publication of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1844 story, “The Premature Burial”). But something very much like it has been erected over the past half-century by government at the state and federal levels in the United States. The chief difference is that instead of helping to resurrect the deceased’s body, these ingenious new inventions help to resurrect the deceased’s money, granting it virtual and in some cases literal immortality. Never in our lifetimes has it been such an attractive prospect to be fabulously rich and dead.
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