Can eyes work as a camera: Optography, a myth or a fact.

When I look up at the sky, I wish my eyes were a camera to capture the scene in my mind forever. But what if that can be true, not in a science-fiction movie but in real life?

Erhard Gustav Reif, who murdered his two children in 1880, was condemned to die by guillotine. A German professor, Wilhelm Kühne, obtained his eye after his death to answer our question. Can the last image a person sees before his death be affixed to his retina?

He was not the first to ask that question, as in the seventeenth century, Christopher Scheiner obtained the last image a frog saw and called it an optogram.

Kühne's optogram

Kühne's optogram was the first human optogram, although it was not meaningful, but maybe might be interpreted as the steps leading to the guillotine.

But how can we get the optogram?

The rod cells in the retina of the eye contain rhodopsin, a pigmented molecule that transforms from reddish-purple color to pale and colorless upon exposure to light. And by "bleaching" the retina, you can get your optogram.

The idea of optogram spread among scientists and criminals themselves. Arthur B. Evans, the professor of modern languages at DePauw University, says, "Murderers, in their turn, sometimes destroyed the eyes of their victims for fear that their image might be recorded therein."

In 1888, a woman called Annie Chapman was killed, and the press suggested that to use an optogram be used to identify the killer as it wasn't the first murder for him. But it's unclear if the procedure was carried out or yielded any results.

Anyway, the idea of using optograms to solve murders soon vanished as the amount of effort an optogram needs doesn't equal the result; it needs long exposure time and high light intensity and however the image rendered was always low-detailed. as a result, investigators had abandoned hope that optography could be developed into a useful forensic technique. and optogram remains only in works of fiction like (Campion-Vincent, 1999, Chipperfield, 2009, Goulet, 2006, Jay, 1991, Ogbourne, 2008, Stiles, 2012).

But what if experiments on optogram got back, would the results be different in the 21st century?

Resources

1. https://daily.jstor.org/finding-a-murderer-in-a-victims-eye/

2. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-14002-0_60

3. http://www.museumofoptography.net/www.museumofoptography.net/The_Human_optogram.html

4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780444632739000046?via%3Dihub

5. https://www.labxchange.org/library/items/lb:LabXchange:0dd1326c:html:1

   
   

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