The notion of deep-freezing humans to preserve them for possible future resuscitation goes back centuries. Interest in cryonics grew in the early 1960s with the publication of Robert Ettinger’s “The Prospect of Immortality.” Ettinger, a pioneer in the field, had both his wives cryopreserved after their deaths, and plans to have his body cryopreserved as well. He’ll have his hands full if they are all resuscitated at the same time. One of my colleagues, Roadguy, suggests that Utah would be a good place for such a reunion.

Which brings us to this 1883 story in the Daily Minnesota Tribune. A German professor named Gruselbach put out a call for live volunteers who would agree to be frozen and brought back to life in a few years. Alas, no takers. Herr Gruselbach appealed to the Swedish government to provide condemned prisoners for his experimental apparatus. No word on how that request was received.

The wits at the Tribune — or was this a wire piece? — marveled at the possibilities of a “congealing machine”:

People on Ice.

There are probably few who have not heard the story of the traveler in the Arctic regions who, just as he was about to succumb to the intense frost, uttered the words, “It’s terri—.” Many years afterwards the frozen corpse was found and was carried to a warm room where it was thawed out. So soon as the vocal organs resumed workable condition, the by-standers were startled by a completion of the sentence, “—bly cold.”

This grim joke has done service for a great many years, but it now seems that it is considered possible to accomplish something very similar to the experience of the mythical traveler. A German servant named Gruselbach, professor of chemical science in the University of Upsala, has been devoting much time, attention and ingenuity to the preparing of an apparatus to freeze living people and keep them in a torpid condition for a year or two.

He announces that he will undertake to freeze any gentleman willing to submit to the experiment; to benumb him, deprive him of all appearance of vitality – in fact to freeze him as solid and as dead as if he was a member of an Arctic exploration party – pledging his word as a German and a professor to bring the frozen gentleman around, at the expiration of a few years, with no prejudicial effect to mind or body. This is exceedingly handsome on the part of the German professor, and it is marvelous that no gentleman has rushed forward to be experimented upon.

The professor, failing to find a voluntary subject, has submitted his invention to the Swedish government, with the request that a criminal condemned to death shall be provided to enable him to demonstrate the efficacy of his discovery.

The result of the experiment will be awaited with interest. Look at the possibilities, in case it be successful. Each circus side show would have its frozen man on exhibition, “at the exceedingly small price of 10 cents or one dime;” the person who finds himself rather hard pressed during a business depressure could have himself frozen up until the advent of better times; the unmarried young lady of 29 could resort to the congealing machine to keep herself permanently within the thirty limit; and some specimens of our Democratic politicians could be iced and kept for a few centuries and then thawed out to astonish the adults and frighten the children of the twenty-fifth century. Professor Gruselbach is not a mere inventor; he is a revolutionist.

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August Anderson, a Chicago tailor who died while visiting his brother-in-law in Lac qui Parle County, passed long before cryonics could have preserved his fine form. Nor was there much ice in that part of Minnesota in July, even back in 1900. (Photo courtesy mnhs.org)

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