Die
Eiserne Hand

1.
In 1504, the German knight Götz
von Berlichningen lost his right arm at the wrist during the siege of
the city of Landshut. Through the thirty years following his
incident, he got two iron hands built for him. The second one was an
intricate prosthesis with articulated joints and bending wrist which
needed to be activated with his good hand. This complex handicraft
was a reference in early modern medicine in the 19th century.

2.
The first wearable contact lenses were developed in 1888 by a German
ophthalmologist. Made of glass, they could only be worn for a few
hours at a time. The technology evolved through the 20th century
finding its breakthrough in the invention of soft lenses in 1959.
Improper wearing and lack of hygiene can lead to various cornea
infections.

3.
In the 1940’s,
doctors discovered that contact lenses could be used to reshape the
cornea to temporarily reduce myopia. Orthokeratology is the technique
in which the user wears a special lens which lightly presses the
cornea in the correct shape for focused vision, the corrective effect
lasting up to 72 hours. It became accessible in the 1990s.

4.
An early pregnancy test protocol was invented in 1927: it consisted
in injecting a woman’s
urine into an immature rat so see if the animal had a resulting
hormonal reaction. It’s
forty years later that the first home pregnancy test was created by
Margaret Crane and commercialized under the name Predictor. Looking
like a miniature chemistry test, it required two hours of waiting for
results with a 20% chance of false negative.

5.
Final Destination is series of movies where the characters are the
victims of a death curse and die one by one in various coincidental
accidents where some neutral actions pile up and lead to disaster. In
the third opus, two young women get trapped in overheating tanning
beds and burn alive inside them.

6.
In 1836, Caroline Eichler, a German inventor, upgraded the iron hand
from Götz
von Berlichningen to make the first hand prothesis that could be
moved without the help of the other hand. She got murdered six years
later by her ex-husband at the age of 34.

7. Margaret
Crane never got money for her invention, and it’s
only in 2012 that she got recognition.

8.
The ‘tanning
salon death’
is
a trope which appeared as well as in early urban legend as in
previous low budget horror movies. It’s
used as a morality tale directly aimed at women about beauty and
vanity.

9.
Every night before going to bed, I wash my hands and carefully put on
a red lens on my right eye and a blue one on the left. On the morning
I take them out with a little sucking tool and spend the day having
my eyeballs returning to their myopic, oblong shape. During the night
I see more clearly than during the day.

Annabelle
Agbo Godeau