optography
Sign in to saveAlso known as optogram
thumb|One of Wilhelm Kühne's rabbit optograms from 1878. The window the rabbit was facing appears to be discernible in the image. Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, an image on the retina of the eye. A belief that the eye "recorded" the last image seen before death was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was a frequent plot device in fiction of the time, to the extent that police photographed the victims' eyes in several real-life murder investigations, in case the theory was true. The concept has been repeatedly debunked as a forensic method.
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~11 min read
Article
5 sectionsContents
- Scientific basis
- Optography in the human eye
- Forensic optography
- Optography in fiction
- References
thumb|One of Wilhelm Kühne's rabbit optograms from 1878. The window the rabbit was facing appears to be discernible in the image. Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, an image on the retina of the eye. A belief that the eye "recorded" the last image seen before death was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was a frequent plot device in fiction of the time, to the extent that police photographed the victims' eyes in several real-life murder investigations, in case the theory was true. The concept has been repeatedly debunked as a forensic method.
==Scientific basis== Much of the scientific work on optography was performed by the German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne. Inspired by Franz Christian Boll's discovery of rhodopsin (or "visual purple")—a photosensitive pigment present in the rods of the retina—Kühne discovered that, under ideal circumstances, the rhodopsin could be "fixed" like a photographic negative.