Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark (2012)

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110 pointsDoreenMichele15 comments

Luminescent bacteria are fairly common and their glow was well known in the 19th century before massive amounts of artificial light made their rather faint light less noticeable. Another example can be found in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" where Marley's glowing ghost is compared to "a bad lobster in a dark cellar" as one way to know that food had gone off was to look for the telltale glow.

Anyone have a link that reports on this "Angel's Glow" before this article about the 2001 Sci fair project?

I find nothing.

Are we sure they didn't make it up that "Angel's Glow" ever existed?

I can't find any reference, everything seems to loop.

Clever if true, make up a legend to fit some loose facts.

The whole idea is a bit crazy, glowing soldiers living longer. But once you accept that as 'fact' a convoluted idea around hypothermia, worms and glowing seems less crazy.

[edit] Searching old newspapers and academia "fake", nothing before 2000.

Shiloh National Military Park agrees - https://www.facebook.com/ShilohNMP/posts/567566540000003:0

It's a bit of a no brainer, but their hack is what's interesting, make up a legend to "solve", love it.

And it's interest how people blindly believe it, even though it's so so convoluted. Then the loop starts and it becomes fact.

Well, maybe not completely made up? The post from the Park points you to this article from The Naked Scientists, describing the phenomenon occurring during World War I.

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/features/photorh...

Granted, that article doesn't point to any particular primary sources and also was written in 2011...

I can't find "Angel's Glow" in any post/pre war newspapers / academia.

I'm guessing it's a mutation of the original 2000 legend spreading.

It's hard to search on, but glowing wounds comes up blank pre-2000 AFAICS.

It'd be interesting to interview the original kids, pretty sure it's a clever hack.

It's possible having mum in glowing bacteria means they might hear things differently and accidently caused the legend, but still, I'd like to think they were crafty.

It's also a great example how people just don't fact check stuff no matter how out there it is. Science has a long way to go.

I’ve found only this paper from 2000 mentioning the “glowing wounds”, and the next year the boys write about that phenomenon:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-4269-4_...

But when I search for the “phosphorescence of wounds” I get one text from 1821(!)

https://books.google.at/books?id=ryxGAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA180&dq=“P...

There’s a lot about the Civil War that can only be found in books or newspapers that aren’t searchable online. Many of the newspapers of the time are long gone with no searachle archive.

Source from USDA: https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2001...

A google search for "Bill Martin 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair" returns multiple sources

excellent, thank you!

The first comment on this article is asking the same questions you are: https://dalejyoung.com/the-ghostly-wounds-of-shiloh/

While I share your concern that this may be a hoax, I think that unfortunately internet searches won't be too fruitful for pre-2000 urban legend material. I would remain highly skeptical, but I'd ask a civil war historian first before ruling this out entirely.

The oldest thing I found on google (by setting a custom date range Between January 1st 1985 and January 1st 2001) even remotely mentioning glowing wounds is this http://www.maria-rosa-mystica.de/en/newpage14 which appears to be from May 1, 1998 and while it mentions glowing wounds has nothing to do with the civil war and everything to do with Christianity.

I looked for queries such as "glowing wounds" - "Angel's Glow" - "Angel's glow" "civil war" - "angel's glow" "war of aggression" - "bio-luminescent wounds" etc and as you noticed, nothing prior to the 'science experiment' that I suspect was done entirely by the mother given what this page says http://www.americancivilwarstory.com/angels-glow-shiloh.html

>The kids were 17 year old William Martin and 18 year old Jonathan Curtis. Granted, they got some assistance from Martin's microbiologist mother, but she insists that the idea was theirs and that they performed the experiments themselves

SciShow even references that SHE was working with bio-luminescent bacteria at some point. https://nerdfighteria.info/v/7IpWJGlSSlg/

> his mother's research on glowing bacteria for the US Department of Agriculture. Phyllis Martin was studying a type if bioluminescent bacteria known as Photorhabdus luminescens, which is found in soil and glows a pale blue.

It looks like she's been retired since 2013 but she was a research microbiologist from 1981-2013 at USDA-ARS. Seems a bit lacking on evidence and just some "hey mom has this glowing thing, let's make a plausible story about how soldiers wounds glowed!"

They even try to explain the fact that they wouldn't have been able to survive on a human body (due to temperature) by claiming it's because the wounded soldiers were laying out in cold weather.

You're about 150 years too soon to use a lack of evidence on the Internet to call into question a phenomenon that happened over 100 years ago.

One day, sure... we can consider the human story to be largely Internet-documented and accessible. We're not there yet, and many older sources must still be found the old-fashioned way- by visiting a library and pulling their undigitized, un-internet-searchable works.

Were they CIA?

No, terry, the CIA didn’t exist yet.

You just take your car and run them right over. That's what you do.

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