The Morthouse

This is George Mallory. Alive, in 1912.

Usually when I do my “This is So and So” posts, I show you a picture of them dead. That’s not the case here (though Dead George is a sight to behold): I like Alive George much, much better.

Mallory disappeared in 1924, on his third expedition to Mount Everest, along with his climbing partner, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine. It wasn’t until 75 years later, however, that Mallory’s body was discovered. On May 1, 1999, mountaineer Conrad Anker found Mallory’s frozen (and pretty much perfectly preserved) body on Everest. Here’s a video about it. It’s re-enact-y and overly dramatic, but it gives you an idea of how he was found.

From Wikipedia:

Within hours of beginning the search on 1 May, a frozen body was found by Conrad Anker at 26,760 feet (8,160 m) on the north face of the mountain. As the body was below where Irvine’s axe was found in 1933, the team expected the body to be Irvine’s, and were hoping to recover the camera that he had reportedly carried with him. They were surprised to find that name tags on the body’s clothing bore the name of “G. Mallory.” The body was remarkably well preserved, due to the mountain’s climate. The team could not locate the camera. Experts from Kodak have said that if a camera is ever found, there is some chance that its film could be developed to produce printable images, if extraordinary measures are taken.

Anker’s team held an Anglican service for Mallory and covered his body with a cairn. 

Image: George Mallory photographed at 38 Brunswick Square, London, age 25 or 26. Via Front Free Endpaper, whose post on Mallory is super, though NSFW (if you consider a very attractive man’s full back-al nudity NSFW).

my-ear-trumpet:

Mort de Harris (1824), from the Tissandier Collection at the Library of Congress.

Guild of Scientific Troubadours:

The Death of Harris, who jumped from a hydrogen balloon in 1824.

It was not a “perfectly good balloon,” as the sky divers put it – it was leaking, and he’d run out of ballast to eject in order to slow the balloon’s descent. So, to save his young fiancee’s life, he ejected himself.

Thomas Harris is primarily known for his spectacular death, but he’s also remembered as the guy who invented the gas-discharge valve, which is a device that gets gas out of balloons quickly so they don’t drag on the ground.

And yes, it was a stuck valve that the hydrogen was leaking out of. The perils of invention.

From a sheet of collecting cards with pictures of events in ballooning history from 1795 to 1846, part of the Library of Congress’ Tissandier Collection.

(Source: front-font, via drtuesdaygjohnson)

From J.W. Buel’s 1889 book Sea and Land, via io9.

Note: My favorite from the set was “CRAB LIFTING A GOAT,” but since it didn’t involve a human, I didn’t post it.

Storage by Incognita Nom de Plume on Flickr.

Cast taken from the vacancy left by a decayed body in compacted volcanic ash. It is stored on site at Pompeii, with many other archeological finds, in a dusty open shed closed only by a chainlink fence. Pompeii, Italy

Today’s Links

Here you go. The first one is really important:

• Morbid Anatomy Library needs your help after severe water sprinkler damage following a fire in their Brooklyn building. They are accepting donations of money, time, talent, books, and artifacts.
• “Titanic vs. Lusitania: Who Survived and Why?”: Smithsonian takes a look at the two maritime disasters (from 1912 and 1915, respectively). Interesting: “The passengers of the Lusitania had less than 20 minutes before their ship sank, and in such a life-and-death situation, social scientists say, ‘self-interested reactions predominate.’ It didn’t matter what the captain ordered. […] The Titanic, though, sank slowly enough for social norms to hold sway.”
• This is very sad: “Taiwan Woman Commits Suicide While on Facebook” (via Order of the Good Death on, well, Facebook): “Lin’s last Facebook entries show her chatting with nine friends, alerting them to her gradual asphyxiation. One picture uploaded from her mobile phone depicts a charcoal barbecue burning next to two stuffed animals.”
• Related: “On the Challenges of Studying Suicide” (via Maria Popova/Brain Picker on Twitter)
• Fascinating post over on Life and Six Months about handling the preserved, tattooed skin of a long-dead person: “What appears here as ‘goose-flesh’—a skin sensation associated with both surface feelings of cold and visceral fear or horror —is frozen in the moment of death through the speedy preservation of the excised fragment. What I am actually seeing and feeling as I examine this skin is the presence of a very familiar living skin-sensation—except in this case it is caused by rigor mortis of the arrector pili muscles in the dermis. My own skin prickles at the thought. This specimen was likely removed in haste, soon after death and under rudimentary surgical conditions.”

Today’s Links

Thought I’d start doing link-roundup posts somewhere on the spectrum between occasional and frequent. This is the kind of stuff I already post on Facebook and Twitter, so if you like this sort of thing, consider liking and/or following me over theres.

Here you go:

• Summer was the most dangerous time for Tudors (BBC News): Fun ways to die in Tudor England! Best sentence: “Dr Gunn’s previous study highlighted a number of strange ways that people died, in accidents involving archery, dancing bears and early handguns.”
• Police plea on macabre book find (BBC News): A 300-year-old ledger bound in human skin, found in the middle of a road in Leeds. “In the 18th and 19th Centuries it was common to bind accounts of murder trials in the killer’s skin —known as anthropodermic bibliopegy.”
• NPR did a story on what can happen to our Facebook and Flickr accounts when we go to the Big Cloud in the Sky.
• If you aren’t already following Caitlin Doughty on Twitter or Facebook, you should be.

Retronaut: “A Ride of Death.”

malformalady:

Casket unearthed by Katrina flood waters.

Correction: I got the child’s correct name confused, as abject-reptile points out in a reblog (below). Sorry about that!

abject-reptile:

In fact, the body was that of Sidney Leslie Goodwin, as the BBC article indicates.  Sadly, Eino Panula’s whereabouts remains unknown.

theossuary:

You can read more about Finnish toddler Eino Panula here.

glassseyes:

The baby boy was found floating, but frozen to death, with his face towards the sky in the freezing water, he was neatly dressed: Coat with fur collar, flannel dress, vest of wool and brown leather shoes. His unfortunate mother had dressed him as warmly as possible because she knew it would be very cold.

At Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, thousands of visitors gather around a gravestone with the words “Unknown Child.” There rests the 13-month-old flaxen-haired boy who was the youngest of the 1,500 victims who perished when the Titanic sank. Around his neck he wears a copper medallion with the words “Our Baby”. It was a gift from the Mackay-Bemers crewmen to the little baby they found after the Titanic sank. The crew who had searched for bodies wanted to pay for the burial despite the fact that the White Star Line wanted to pay the burial expenses. The baby was placed on a bed of roses in a little white casket.

in 2002 he was indentified by DNA testing as Eino Viljami Panula, he went down with the Titanic along with his mother Maria and his Brothers Ernest 17, Jaakko 15, Juho 7 and Urho 2

Father Juho travelled on a different ship, for the rest of his life he missed his family and never found peace.

cheatsheet:

Manila, Philippines: Navy personnel carried an empty coffin that will be transported to flood-stricken cities, along with other relief goods like drinking water and clothes. Nearly a thousand people died in massive flash floods when a tropical storm hit the country last week.

Aaron Favila / AP Photo

More Photos of the Day