Jack the Ripper Tech

[RivkahChaya]

No, Illinois doesn't have the death penalty but you can still be executed for an offense you commit here if it's a Federal or military capital crime.

Does Illinois have a federal execution chamber? Indiana has one, and it's where Timothy McVeigh was executed. The federal prison that has the death row also has a special high security area for prisoners who are deemed a security threat for reasons of sedition, rather than violence. John Walker Lindh is there (the American teenager who joined the Taliban military forces, and was arrested as an enemy combatant shortly after 9/11). He is in the news right now because he is suing the federal prison system for not letting him join Muslim group prayers. Apparently he was caught using prayer time to try to foment some sort of mutiny.

There's nothing special about Indiana, other than its being at the geographical center of the country, and somewhat at the population center as well, so no area of the country is unduly burdened with travel, theoretically, for federal prison business. The city where the prison is, happens to be a fairly large, and new city (good roads), surrounded by a big rural area, which means it has a pretty large police force, but there are not very many ways to get out of the city quickly, so if there were ever a prison escape, it would be fairly easy, compared to other similar cities, to block exit routes, and, between the city and state police, net someone in. There are a lot of billboards around the area that say something like "federal prison area-- DO NOT pick up hitchhikers."

[sdreid]

To my knowledge, Illinois does not have a Federal execution chamber. If true then if you commit a Federal or military capital crime in Illinois you would have to be exported to a place like Indiana to be put down.

[Ginger]

I'd like to see an example of a picture taken with that device.

I can't oblige you there, but here are people's photos taken with the Kodak Model #1 camera, introduced in 1888. The lens is very good, and the speed seems to be pretty fast in daylight.

http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/11/10/kodak-no-1-circular-snapshots/

The second picture appears to be Holmes and Watson, possibly on the Ripper's trail!

People were unlikely to have been using these in the East End, more's the pity. They cost $25 in 1888 (about $600 in 2012 money), and so were for the middle class and the wealthy to play with.

[RivkahChaya]

People were unlikely to have been using these in the East End, more's the pity. They cost $25 in 1888 (about $600 in 2012 money), and so were for the middle class and the wealthy to play with.

Wow, the ones with the children and elephant look good, and I'm presuming you couldn't just tell them to hold still, so that must have been some pretty fast film.

Not sure about your definition of "middle class." I grew up in a solidly middle class family, and my parents didn't have $600 to toss around on a purely luxury item. I mean, I'm sure they had more than that in the bank, and if the transmission in the car went out, they'd fix it, but I remember new technologies coming out during my life, like VCRs, and car phones, and those being initially in the $600-1200 range. It would be years before those were things people in the "middle class" would get, who couldn't justify them in some way, and get a tax write-off. The one kid I knew with a VCR in 1979 had a father who was a film studies professor.

[Ginger]

Wow, the ones with the children and elephant look good, and I'm presuming you couldn't just tell them to hold still, so that must have been some pretty fast film.

If you look just above the central girl in the one of the three children at the beach, you can see a bird frozen in flight.

[Ginger]

The one kid I knew with a VCR in 1979 had a father who was a film studies professor.

Now that you mention it, if you look closely, the third picture (a woman looking at a large book - a photo album?) appears to be set in a photographer's studio. There's a tripod plainly visible, a big heavy sliding curtain like a backdrop, and she appears to be lit by skylight. Whoever did that understood how to light her face with reflected light from the book, too, so I'm guessing using a camera wasn't new to them.

That fellow posing jauntily by his cart seems to be a portrait photographer, set up at the beach. He's got a curtainy darkroom sort of thing attached to the cart, and pictures all over the front. If he's not a relative or friend of the photographer, then at the very least, he's doing the whole 'professional courtesy' thing, and posing for another photographer, whether professional or amateur.

[RivkahChaya]

Anecdote is not the singular of data, and all, but my grandmother remembers getting a family portrait taken in 1920, and it was a huge deal. They took a taxi to the studio, to keep their good clothes nice, and it was the first time she ever rode in one. There are only two such portraits of the family, because it was expensive, and took an entire afternoon. There are no snapshots of my grandmother taken before she was about 20, which would be 1937. I realize that Kodak had been making the Brownie since about 1900, and it cost $1 then, which is about $25, now, but the cost of film for the camera, and the cost of developing it was where it got you-- probably professionals who sold the camera considered it something of a loss leader.

My point is, that despite photography being around for a while, I think it took time to catch on, so "Hey, get a photograph of this!" just didn't leap into people's minds.

Also, as far as forensic photography, at least for a while, taking flash photography in low light meant using flash powder, and you could burn yourself if you didn't have some experience with it, so it was probably a specialty.

[sdreid]

Yes, my grandfather, who was a farmer, used to develop his own photos in the 1920s.

[sdreid]

He was born in 1887.

[MajorParts]

The picture of the man with a parcel camera...didn't witnesses to the WCM's report seeing a man with something similar? I wonder if Jack had one and took photos of his victims!

and that diagram of a baby girl with her insides showing...very similar pose to that of MJK

[Ginger]

The picture of the man with a parcel camera...didn't witnesses to the WCM's report seeing a man with something similar? I wonder if Jack had one and took photos of his victims!

Does that look like a camera to you as well? I pointed that out to some of my friends, and get very mixed reactions about whether they thought it was a camera or not. I think it is, myself.

If Jack *did* carry a camera (which I'd consider extremely unlikely - you needed a goodly amount of light to use one, and I just can't picture him in the back yard of 29 Hanbury St. popping off flashpowder, however amusing that idea might be to me), then he was by no means poor, and he must have had a private place to develop and print his pictures.

At the risk of being a troublemaker, I do have to note that Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), sometimes considered a suspect, was an accomplished photographer, and by no means poor...

[MajorParts]

But, could he have photographed them during the day, then killed them at night? There is this description of Detective Cameras in the same post..."an instrument which should always be ready for use, that the photographer could take up at a moment's notice charged with its complement of plates, and go forth ready for any subject he might encounter, be it a yacht race, a dark glen, or an interior."
The whole idea of those cameras is so they are not recognised as such, so relying on hods full of gunpowder (or whatever it is) for light is somehow not necessary.
The picture I refer to obviously doesn't look like a camera and that is the point of the camera looking like it does. A parcel with string or a strap around it.

George Hutchinson reckons of a man seen with MJK "He also had a kind of a small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap round it."
PC Smith said of a man seen with Liz Stride "The man was also holding a newspaper parcel, about 18in in length and 6 or 8in wide."

It's all very speculative and what not, but interesting

[RivkahChaya]

The idea that JTR photographed his victims in situ is just silly. It's completely at odds with a quick getaway, for one thing, and for another, the photographs we do have of the victims are under ideal lighting conditions, and you see what they look like. Photographs then used glass plates, and the cameras were very bulky. The glass plates were delicate, and a camera in a case would have been something someone surely would have noticed.

[Bridewell]

The idea that JTR photographed his victims in situ is just silly. It's completely at odds with a quick getaway, for one thing, and for another, the photographs we do have of the victims are under ideal lighting conditions, and you see what they look like. Photographs then used glass plates, and the cameras were very bulky. The glass plates were delicate, and a camera in a case would have been something someone surely would have noticed.

My thoughts exactly Rivkah.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Ginger]

The idea that JTR photographed his victims in situ is just silly.

It's no less likely, surely, than the idea of a flashily turned out coach and four pulling up un-noticed in the slums of Whitechapel to offload murder victims. People have speculated on that for years.