It was claimed that in some cases results could actually be achieved. For example, in one case, it was recorded that a man killed his own wife, and it was understood from the image of the axe on his wife’s retina. They even considered optography in the Jack the Ripper case.
If you are ready, let’s take a look at how optography emerged, what cases it helps solve, and what its status is today.
How did optography come about?
Scientists have long been; He was wondering if it was possible to capture the image the eye last saw before it died. The idea was first proposed in the 17th century by Christopher Schiener, who claimed to have seen a faint image on the retina of a frog he was examining. However, until the invention of photography in the 1840s, optography was not a scientific pursuit.
Scientists reasoned that for the retina to function like a camera, it must contain some light-sensitive chemicals, similar to the silver nitrate film that coats images on it. In 1876, a German physiologist named Franz Christian Boll discovered rhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein found in the rod cells of the retina that acts just like a camera nitrate. It bleached when exposed to light.
Physiologist Boll died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty years old.
At the time of Boll’s death, he had not yet fully advanced his optography studies. After this unfortunate death, another of Boll’s followers, German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne, wanted to improve the work of his idol.
Kühne, who conducted experiments on many animals, removed their eyes after they died and exposed them to various chemicals to fix the image on the retina. He suggested that the alum compound gave the best results.
In one experiment, an albino rabbit was fixed so that it could see clouds in the sky. The poor rabbit was exposed to light for 3 minutes and then its head was cut off and its eyes were removed.
The posterior half of the eyeball containing the retina was placed in an alum solution for fixation. The next day, a window image appeared on the retina.
Kühne was determined to demonstrate this technique on a human.
On November 16, 1880, a murderer named Erhard Gustav Reif was executed by guillotine. The man’s eyes were removed ten minutes after his death and sent to Kühne’s laboratory.
The optograms obtained from Reif’s eyes have not survived to the present day, but a sketch is available in Kühne’s Observations on Retinal Anatomy and Physiology, published in 1881. Kühn says the image in the sketch could be a guillotine blade or steps leading to the gallows.
Despite being dubious “science”, Kühne’s experiments spread rapidly. Law enforcement agencies in the UK and the US have attempted to apply optography in criminal investigations. Although not scientifically reliable, it did not prevent forensic optograms from being used in famous criminal cases and appearing in actual trial transcripts.
Research into the use of optograms in criminal cases continued.
French Forensic Medicine Association, Dr. He asked Maxime Vernois to conduct a study to examine the possibility of optographs being admitted as evidence in murder cases. The doctor killed at least seventeen animals and ripped out their eyes, but to no avail.
He wrote: “It is impossible to find on the retina of a victim the portrait of his murderer or the representation of any object or physical feature encountered at the time of death.”
Of course, the insistence on using optography did not end here.
Optography was also taken very seriously in cases such as the double murder of Laura Shearman and Cynthia Davis, the Villisca ax murders in 1912, and the murder of Tracy Hollander in 1914. Detectives investigating the Jack the Ripper murders even wanted the technique to be tested on the Ripper’s victims.
In 1924, a striking series of murders took place in Germany.
Fritz Heinrich Angerstein had committed a series of murders, including those of his family and his household staff. By the time the massacre was over, eight people had died among Angerstein’s victims, including his sister-in-law, his accountant, his clerk, his gardener, and his assistant.
Angerstein initially claimed that he was attacked by thugs, who killed everyone in the house and left him for dead. However, as the investigation progressed, doubts began to emerge regarding Angerstein’s account. There were many contradictions in his statements.
The suspect was arrested and charged with murder but continued to deny it. Until one of the police officers arrives with compelling evidence. A professor managed to photograph the retinas of two of the victims. It was claimed that this photo showed Angerstein with his arms raised and holding an ax in his hand. The case was recorded as the best example ever achieved by an optogram, but it was not conclusive.
The idea of optography was also widespread among murderers.
Some murderers who heard about optography went to great lengths to destroy their victims’ eyes. For example, in 1927, unarmed police officer George Gutteridge was brutally shot in both eyes. In another case, a woman in Alsace killed her mother-in-law and then gouged out her eyes to destroy the evidence.
By the early 20th century, researchers had given up all hope that optography could be turned into a useful forensic technique.
Although the work of physiologists such as Kühn succeeded in creating many high-contrast images from the eyes of rabbits and increased public interest in optography as a potential tool in forensic investigations, they realized that this method would never be sufficient for forensic purposes.
Optography; It appears frequently in literature, art and media.
Popular science fiction writer Jules Verne proposed the idea that optography might have forensic potential in his 1902 novel “Les Frères Kip.” The 1936 movie “Invisible Ray” also featured a scene in which he uses an ultraviolet camera to photograph a victim’s dead eyes.
Optography was also incorporated into the plot of the 1971 Italian film “Four Flies on Gray Velvet” and a 1975 “Doctor Who” episode.
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