What did the casket look like?

Answer 1

In the United States, an 1800s wooden casket looked either like a rectangular box or like a hexagonal shaped British coffin (narrow at the foot end, wide at the shoulders and medium wide at the head end). In the middle of the 19th century, luxury wooden caskets were more and more replaced by the Fisk cast iron casket, which was invented by Almond Dunbar Fisk in 1848 and patented in 1853. This hermetically sealed casket had the mummy like shape of an Egyptian Sarcophagus and was equipped with a glass window. In spite of the fact that the price of the Fisk casket was about twenty times higher than that of a wooden coffin, there was a big demand for it because the casket seemed to offer some protection against grave robbers. Former US Vice President John C. Calhoun was buried in a Fisk coffin, the first metal casket to receive a widespread acceptance and use in the US. Then, in 1855, Martin Crane (one of the founders of the famous Crane and Breed casket company of Cincinnati, Ohio) invented a more simple and lower priced cast iron casket with a slight hexagonal shape, a black cloth over the metal and silver finished handles. This casket, which also was used for the burial of President Lincoln, gradually replaced the Fisk casket. Finally, at the end of the 1860s, Martin Crane invented a casket welded from sheets of wrought steel, the first mass produced metal casket in the US. These reasonably priced metal caskets usually had a rectangular shape.

a coffin has six sides, forming an oblong hexagon that conforms more closely to the shape of a human body, which is widest at the shoulders. Funeral director Norayne L. McCreery notes that in the United States, you will chiefly see them in old movies. Caskets, which are standard in modern-day American funerals, are rectangular.

Answer 2

In 1848, a New York inventor named Almond Dunbar Fisk designed and patented "an air-tight coffin of cast or raised metal". It had the shape of the human body and resembled an Egyptian sarcophagus. Since the mid 1860s Martin H. Crane, one of the founders of the famous Crane & Breed casket company of Cincinnati, had been experimenting with rolled sheet iron as a less-expensive alternative to cast iron. By the end of the decade he had created the first sheet metal casket for industrial production.

Answer 3

Whitney Houstons casket was black