Actually I’m not sure if I’ve read Premature Burial. Other Poe stories come to mind that I do recall — Telltale Heart particularly, and the Cask of Amontillado — but I don’t remember Premature Burial specifically. I should check it out, especially if it mentions some of escape coffin devices.

Last fall I posted about Poe’s mysterious death at the Death Reference Desk. Interesting stuff, with a great podcast from the Memory Palace:

http://deathreferencedesk.org/2009/11/03/vote-or-die-or-and/

I am intrigued by your website. I linked to it through the Death Reference Desk which was mentioned on the Morbid Anatomy email list.

This is probably a stupid question on my part but have you read Poe’s the “Premature Burial ?” It refers to a number of the devices you describe. I have been fascinated with this morbid topic since I read this work when I was a kid !

Glad you liked my post, and thanks again for filling me in and directing me to Intellogist — it’s a great resource. Keep up the good work!

Great post. I work in patent information and I’m also in library school. I’m the senior editor for an online resource called Intellogist, where we post in-depth reviews of patent search systems (and a whole lot more). I can completely relate to your frustration with Google patent – here’s the deal. The USPTO only offers electronic full text of US patents back to 1976. Of course, a lot of people would like to have it go back further. In the mid-nineties a company called Corporate Intelligence (which then became MicroPatent, which then was purchased by Thomson Reuters) digitized the collection back to 1836 via OCR. Unfortunately reconstructing metadata for these documents was not easy (including classification codes). In 2006, Google tried again, re-scanning everything to create the collection they offer now. As you found, their metadata isn’t great either. But there are now at least two independently created collections of scanned US patent documents back to 1836. Of course, LexisNexis offers a collection as well, and they also purchased a company called Univentio, which was a big producer of scanned patent data back in the day. I don’t happen to know whether Univentio produced a third independently scanned collection, but since that has got to be a major undertaking, maybe not (as you know there are over 7 million US patent documents right about now).

So forgive this informal history off the top of my head – but that’s what’s going on with the bad metadata in the US collection. We’re quite lucky to have the Google collection for free, as badly scanned as some of it is (as you might guess, you have to pay for Thomson Reuters’ or LexisNexis’ collections). My company’s website, Intellogist, offers a review of Google Patents with some additional inforamation on this topic: http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Report:Google_Patent_Search/Data_Coverage/Patent_Coverage/Full_Text_Coverage

I hope you’ll stop by Intellogist if you ever need to do another patent search – we have a lot of information up there, including info on other classification systems (like the International Patent Classification or IPC, for example: http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/IPC_Classification_System) and we have a discussion board for any difficulties you might encounter!

Awesome post, I loved reading the step-by-step re-creation of your strategy!