Optography

[1] The original image from Reif's eye no longer exists, apart from a simple line drawing of the shape in Kühne's 1881 paper "Observations for Anatomy and Physiology of the Retina".

One of the earliest known attempts at forensic optography occurred in 1877, when Berlin police photographed the eyes of murder victim Frau von Sabatzky, on the chance that the image would assist in solving the crime.

[4] W.C. Ayres, an American physician who assisted Kühne in his laboratory and translated his papers into English, dismissed the theory that optography on a human eye could yield a usable image for forensic purposes.

In an 1881 article in the New York Medical Journal, Ayres stated that his own repeated experiments in the field had produced some optogram images, but they were not distinct enough to be useful, and he declared it "utterly idle to look for the picture of a man's face, or of the surroundings, on the retina of a person who has met with a sudden death, even in the most favorable circumstances".

[5] A rare case of forensic optography being admitted as evidence occurred in late 1924, after German merchant Fritz Angerstein had been charged with killing eight members of his family and household staff.

Doehne, a professor at the University of Cologne photographed the retinas of two of the victims, yielding what he claimed were images of Angerstein's face and an axe used to kill the gardener.

Like Kühne, Alexandridis successfully produced a number of distinct high-contrast images from the eyes of rabbits, but conclusively negatively assessed the technique as a forensic tool.

[10] Verne explained the scientific basis of the conclusion in the book's final chapter: For some time now it has been known—as a result of various interesting ophthalmological experiments done by certain ingenious scientists, authoritative observers that they are—that the image of exterior objects imprinted upon the retina of the eye are conserved there indefinitely.

The 1936 Universal film The Invisible Ray features a scene in which Dr. Felix Benet (Bela Lugosi) uses an ultra-violet camera to photograph the dead eyes of Sir Francis Stevens (Walter Kingsford), who was murdered by Dr. Janos Rukh (Boris Karloff).

In the 1972 film Horror Express, various unearthly murders aboard a trans-Siberian train are investigated with a couple of autopsies, during which it is discovered that images are retained in a liquid found inside the eyeball of the corpse, which reveal a prehistoric Earth and a view of the planet seen from space and it is deduced that the threat is somehow a formless extraterrestrial that inhabited the body of the creature and now resides within a police inspector—the intelligence can "jump" from victim to victim via the eye—leaving the eyeball white and opaque (like that of a boiled fish.)

In the 2008 series Fringe ("The Same Old Story", season 1 episode 2), Walter uses an optographic image taken from the optic nerve of a woman killed whilst under the effect of a paralytic toxin to track down and arrest her murderer.