Short answer: L’Inconnue de la Seine, aka the Unknown Woman of the Seine.
I know this is a woman instead of a man, but this is an interesting story nonetheless, so stick with me for a minute or two.
In the 1880s, a woman’s body was found dead, floating in the Seine River. Estimated age 16. Her body showed no signs of foul play and, because of this, it was assumed her death was a suicide.
Her body was taken to the coroner’s office. The coroner must have thought she was pretty and spent hours crafting a death mask of the girl’s face. Legend has him quoted, saying:
Her beauty was breathtaking, and showed few signs of distress at the time of passing. So bewitching that I knew beauty as such must be preserved.
(Death mask: A wax or plaster cast of a dead person’s face, most often taken from the corpse. These masks were used as either mementos or for portraits)
Now, you should know that death masks were sort of a thing, especially of famous people, and people, in general, were kind of morbid back then (now we’re nice and civilized).
So, somehow, people saw the death mask of this unknown drowned lady and they wanted their own death mask of her face. Well, as you can imagine, when you’re a guy who makes molds of dead people’s faces and you suddenly have a face that everyone wants, you sell that shit.
The woman’s death mask soon became mass produced and, by 1900, everyone who was anyone in Germany and France owned one.
Fast forward nearly 100 years to Norway. It’s 1958 and you’re a toy maker by trade and have just created the world’s first CPR dummy. And you need to put a face on it. What face do you choose? You guessed it, the unknown woman of the Seine.
Why, you may ask?
Maybe he didn’t know what to make the dummy look like. Maybe, like that coroner back in Paris, he had a thing for dead girls (I didn’t really mean that the way it sounded). Maybe the death mask his great grandfather had purchased from a coroner while visiting France was hanging on the wall in his workshop.
Now, nearly 60 years later, this same face graces CPR dummies around the world. And still, nobody knows who the hell she is.
Although this woman obviously had a turn of bad luck, after all, it’s not good luck that ends up with you floating in a river, she, postmortem, has become rather popular.
Just imagine the number of people who have laid their lips on hers.