The day in 1900 that George Poe, Jr, knocked at my grandfa-ther’s door in South Norfolk and said, “I understand you have a room for rent,” everything changed. He moved in immedi-

ately and stayed until his death on February 3, 1914.

George Poe was a very successful chemist and inventor. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute, he had fought in the Civil War (on the Con-federate side) and afterwards founded the Poe Chemical Works in Tren-ton, NJ which included the first plant in the country to mass produce nitrous oxide, also known as “laughing gas,” mostly for dental anesthesia.

A cousin of horror writer Edgar Allen Poe, Professor Poe also experi-mented with other gases and found that he could resuscitate animals that he had suffocated. He reasoned that his apparatus could also rescue hu-mans who had drowned or been poisoned by gas lamps, one of the main sources of lighting at that time.

However, years of breathing noxious gases and handling poisonous chemicals had left Professor Poe very ill. He had severe palsy – shaking hands – was partially paralyzed and was going blind.

To further complicate his life, his wife Margaret, a DC socialite was se-verely addicted to laudanum, a drug that was commonly prescribed for many common ailments. Today we call the drug heroin.

Poe made arrangements for the financial care of his wife and three daugh-ters and, on the advice of his physician, moved south. Which brought him to my grandfather’s door.

At that time my father was five years old and already was working his way quickly through school. By the time he was 10 he had completed high school and needed something to do. Noticing that my father was clever with his hands and bright, Professor Poe offered him a job. Since my grandmother was already working with Poe and his medical associates, she agreed and my father, Arthur, became Professor Poe’s eyes and hands as he and two local doctors, J.P. Jackson and Francis Morgan, worked to

My father and Professor Poe

My father was by far the youngest and best-known scientist assistant of the time.

test and perfect their “Machine for Inducing Artificial Respiration” for which they received a patent on July 9, 1907. At least one other patent for a similar machine was issued only months later in Germany.

Turning their new patent into a commercial success proved far more elusive. They needed to take their invention on the road to show it to the medical community. So with my 10-year-old

father and his pet rabbit, Socrates, Professor Poe traveled to places such as Baltimore and Philadelphia to show what his machine could do. Since Poe was crippled and legally blind, it fell to my father to ac-tually perform the experiment.

It usually went like this: My father, standing on a box at the operating table in the center of the surgical theater would produce Socrates for the medical people seated around him. The rabbit would be placed un-der a glass bell lid and the air sucked out with a vacuum pump. Socrates quickly expired. For good measure my father would sometimes tie a brick around Socrates’ neck and drop him in a nearby barrel of water.

While all of this was good theater, timing was important, they didn’t want Socrates to really die. Pulling his dripping pet out of the water, my father inserted the two tubes from the machine, one into each of the animal’s nostrils and pumped the handle up and down. Socrates quickly came back to life and nibbled some nearby lettuce. The onlookers were dumb-founded. The experiment was widely reported in the press and my father became one of the best-known scientist assistants of the time.

In time they suffocated and revived larger animals. The machine, along with Professor Poe and my father, gained even more publicity in 1909 when Moses Goodman was revived using the respirator.

Legend has it that my father saved Professor Poe’s life with an adaptation of the machine. Following lunch during one of their demonstrations in New York City, I believe, Poe became acutely

ill and had to be assisted back to his hotel. There my father had the hotel deliver several sheets which he used to make a makeshift tent over his mentor. Pumping oxygen into the tent, he revived Poe and by the time my grandmother arrived on the boat from Norfolk the fol-lowing day, he had recovered.

Of course, this was the first instance of the use of an oxygen tent.

In addition to saving lives my nephew, Greg, has another theory as to how

Above: Professor Poe and my father, Arthur, about 1907.

Left: The patent art for the machine. It operated much like a double bicycle pump with the left cylinder attached to an oxygen source. The two other tubes were inserted into the patient’s nostrils. Lifting the handle drew up pistons in each brass cylinder filling the left cylinder with oxygen and the right cylinder drawing gases from the patient’s lungs.

Pushing the handle down pumped oxygen from the left cylinder into the patient’s lungs while the gases from the right cylinder were expelled into the surrounding air. Repeating the action caused the patient’s lungs to be re-peatedly flooded with oxygen.

While Poe was not a medical doctor, he was often addressed as “Doctor.” He never discouraged people from calling him that.

Bringing back Socrates.

Daddy had a pet rabbit, Socrates, who lived under the house. Socrates was the star of Daddy’s public demonstrations of bringing the dead back to life. All orchestrated by Professor Poe with his wondrous machine.

They put Socrates under a big glass dome and turned on the Bunsen burner and he “died.” Gassed. Walter Reed Hospital was the centre of the medicine in the United States in 1905. So they went up there and Daddy said they were in the auditorium and in the center was the slate table where they operated. That way people could watch to surgeons at work.

Now they’d “killed” and revived Socrates in Professor Poe’s lab at home. But this was the first time outside of the lab.

Daddy has Socrates here and a bag full of lettuce over here. He hadn’t fed Socrates for a while. He looks up and the audito-rium is full. I mean full. The press, physicians and the religious people are there because they are against this 100 percent.

They gave Daddy a milk crate to stand on and he “kills” Socrates. Somebody comes down and says, “Yeah, he’s dead.”

Then Daddy ties a rope with a weight around the rabbit’s neck and, for good measure, “drowns” him in a barrel of water. Daddy watches the clock and is putting the lettuce out, and the audience are saying, “Son, get him outta there.”

So he takes the rabbit out of the barrel and says a dead rabbit is a dead rabbit, but a wet dead rabbit is really dead. He puts the two little tubes from the machine up Socrates’ nose and starts pumping. When Socrates, comes to life, apparently his front feet would come to before his back feet. He’s hungry, and he sees the lettuce and crawls over to it on his side and starts eating the lettuce and my Daddy gets a standing ovation.

So that was it, and it was big time. It was in newspapers all over the world.

the machine was intended to be used – to test whether people were actu-ally dead so as to lower the incidents of people being buried alive.

Death, at that time, was not well understood. People believed that if breathing and heartbeat had apparently stopped, you had passed away. Apparently Poe’s niece, Lucretia (Edgar Allen’s sister), had been declared dead and placed in her coffin or buried alive.

There were even elaborate inventions that the “dead” could use from their coffins to signal their return to the living along with crypt doors that could be opened from the inside in case the corpse wanted to escape.

Greg also has a theory that Christian ethics had something to do with the failure of the machine to became a commercial success.

At death, Christians believed, the soul left the body. If the per-son was brought “back to life” with the assistance of Professor Poe’s machine, they would then be people without a soul. And

that was unacceptable.

In an ironic twist, my grandmother “died” in 1947 and about three hours later suddenly sat up and asked for a glass of water. She lived for another few hours and then died for real.

Professor Poe died on February 3, 1914 in my grandparents home. Only eight months later my grandfather would follow him.

Poe’s obituary noted that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize.

His legacy included a number of concoctions such as Dr. Poe’s Votillized Balsam that claimed to cure coughs, colds, catarrh, grippe, asthma, bron-chitis, hay fever, throat and lung troubles as well as restore the senses of smell, taste and hearing.

He held several patents including one for efficiently carbonating soft drinks. My information is that it was last cited in a patent application by Coca-Cola in 2002.

According to Greg Ostrander, Professor Poe kept a series of journals, however they have never been found.

I don’t think my grandparents or parents ever cleaned out Professor Poe’s laboratory after he died. I lived in that house until I was four, but I was never allowed into Poe’s lab because of the chemicals and dangerous ap-paratus that were there.