Edison's Last Breath

The fortunate visitor to the Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence will encounter, among its many treasures and curiosities, the somewhat macabre spectacle of the outstretched middle finger of a man's right hand, preserved in a glass vessel. On its alabaster base is this inscription:

Do not look down upon the relic of a finger, by means of which a right hand measured paths in the heavens and revealed to mortals celestial bodies never seen. By preparing a small piece of fragile glass it first dared a feat which long ago was beyond the powers of young Titans, who piled mountains high in a vain attempt to ascend to lofty citadels.

The words are those of the Italian astronomer Tommaso Perelli. The finger is Galileo Galilei's, severed from his hand when his body was moved from its original burial site to a monumental tomb in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1737.

Macabre? Doubtless, from one point of view, but even a moment's reflection brings to mind more than a few such grisly artifacts on exhibit in the museums of the world. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has displayed a victim of the 1798 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia whose body was mummified thanks to the soil conditions where he was originally buried. For generations the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., has exhibited the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln—along with fragments of his skull. The same museum displays the severed leg bone of Civil War major general Daniel E. Sickles, along with a 12-pound cannonball like the one that originally shattered the bone. For years Sickles visited the museum on the anniversary of his leg's amputation.

If such things seem a little ghoulish—as well as fascinating—to the modern museum-goer, in large part that is because of the way we look at and think of death, and the dead. Of course, we were not always thus. In nineteenth-century America it was common to have professional photographs taken of deceased family members, especially children, which the survivors would then treasure for years. It was also common to clip strands of hair from the deceased and incorporate that hair into pieces of jewelry, commonly called mourning jewelry. Plaster casts were made of the hands and faces of prominent individuals both living and recently deceased. These and other mourning rituals, which now seem somewhat peculiar, were followed well into the twentieth century.

Which brings us to the glass test tube on display at the Henry Ford Museum marked "Edison's Last Breath?"

Thomas Edison was Henry Ford's hero, as well as his friend. Perhaps to eyes trained in the same nineteenth-century milieu as Ford's that test tube would seem unremarkable, but to contemporary visitors it frequently looks like one of the more bizarre items among the millions Ford acquired for his museum. Did his respect for Edison provoke the eccentric old man to seek to capture the great inventor's last exhalation? Was there something even more offbeat involved? The web site roadsideamerica.com speculates that "Henry Ford believed that the human soul exited the body with its last breath. Ford somehow convinced Thomas Edison's son to sit by the dying inventor's bedside, clap a test tube over his mouth, then plug it with a cork. Maybe Ford's intentions were noble, and he expected future scientists to reconstitute Edison from the aether."

Sad to say, the real story is at once more mundane, more poignant, and more pregnant with meaning. The first evidence in the museum's files of the test tube comes in an object file card typed in May 1951. Listed among hundreds of personal and historical items transferred from the Fords' Fair Lane residence after Clara's death in September 1950 is a "Glass case containing Mr. Thomas Edison's black hat, tan shoes, and sealed test tube containing (?)". No more was heard about the test tube until 1978, when it was discovered in its cardboard mailer along...