LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Spontaneous Combustion: Bodies
built 185 days ago
The first American case of spontaneous combustion was that of Hannah Bradshaw in New York City in 1770; ... the most heralded case has been that of Mary Reeser, a widow residing in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her body was discovered on the morning of July 2, 1951, after her landlady's hand found the doorknob too hot to grasp. She and two men called to assist an entry found Reeser's body, the chair she had been sitting in, and a side table burned, along with a six-foot circle of carpet. The remainder of the room, including a pile of newspapers just outside the circle, remained unaffected. The Reeser case illustrated the essential problem raised by human combustion cases. As those in charge of crematoriums are quite aware, it takes a very high temperature applied over a period of time to consume the human body, especially the bones.
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"Belief in the occurrence of spontaneous combustion is of respectable antiquity. More recently opinion has swung away from the quasi-supernatural views of earlier years, to regard such cases as due to unusual degrees of flammability of the human body in certain circumstances, distinguishing the condition with the name preternatural combustion."
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The SPONCOM expert system was developed by NIOSH to aid mining operators, regulatory bodies, and consultants in the assessment of the spontaneous combustion risk of an underground mining operation. To develop the program, information was gathered and correlated with NIOSH's experimental studies to form the knowledge base for the program.
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