Death in the mid-1800s was fast, messy, and uncontainable. Wooden coffins leaked and splintered, ground gave way above them, and illness dripped out into the world of the living. In an era of cholera panics and premature burial, one man decided the solution wasn’t a more attractive box, but a brand new machine for the dead. His name was Almond Dunbar Fisk. Fisk didn’t make a box. He made a shell. A coffin that fit the body, crafted entirely of cast iron, with a glass window over the face and an airtight seal. The lid locked down, the body within was insulated from insects, air, and moisture. Decay would slow. Internal gases would build. The body itself became a sealed specimen, neither corpse nor artifact, but a maddening, beautiful limbo in between. Affluent families, politicians, and senior officers clamored for them. Especially when travel was involved, when a body had to reach its final resting place over thousands of miles. Zachary Taylor was laid to rest inside one. Dolley Madison as well. Horror is partly clinical detachment, the detail and exactness of the unnatural. Metal screws biting into iron rim. Rubber gaskets swelling the seal. A glass plate framing a face that could be studied one final time as if under museum glass. Memorial, medical study, and private obsession with outrunning death all at once. You can view it as a matter of public health, of status, or as the ultimate way people wanted to believe they could manage death, with the right engineering. It’s why we see the Fisk coffin in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Perfect set dressing for a century struggling between veneration and revival. It was a container, sure. But it was also a 19th-century attempt to hack time, chemistry, and mortality with human hands. So few remain today. Some rest in museums. Others are still out there, buried under cemeteries, iron ribs still intact, lids unbroken, rooms of stale air preserved around bodies that may be far better off than anyone treading on top of them suspects.