10 Machines and Everyday Objects Given Surprisingly Formal Farewells

Most things get thrown away when they stop working. A few get something much more elaborate: pallbearers, dirges, eulogies, and even a proper burial. Some were beloved pieces of local infrastructure; others were machines people had relied on for years. And one was a software tool whose greatest legacy may have been helping people download its replacements.

From a town’s funeral for its last stoplight to NASA engineers listening one last time for a rover on Mars, these ten farewells prove that people can get attached to just about anything.

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10 The Penny’s Last Rites

In November 2025, the U.S. Mint stopped producing pennies for circulation. A month later, hundreds of mourners gathered near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to mark the end of an era. This was no spontaneous moment of silence. The event had a brass trio playing “Amazing Grace,” Victorian-inspired mourning clothes, and a white casket carried by six men in top hats and long black coats.

The funeral took place at 1:01 p.m., a time chosen to honor the one-cent coin. The penny’s host, a corporate expense-management company, leaned into the joke: each coin cost nearly four cents to make. Lincoln impersonators offered eulogies, attendees dropped pennies into a bowl of water to make wishes, and the crowd mourned a coin that will likely remain in circulation for years. Some things are hard to let go of, especially when you have jars of them in every drawer.^[1]

9 CrowdTangle Gets a Funeral

When Meta shut down CrowdTangle in August 2024, researchers and advocates lost a tool they had used to study public posts and track how information spread online. So they held a funeral. The gathering was organized by the Knight-Georgetown Institute, the Center for Independent Technology Research, and the Mozilla Foundation.

The ceremony included collective mourning, a panel discussion, and a eulogy from technology journalist Julia Angwin. The funeral host admitted that holding one for software was “a little weird,” which is fair. CrowdTangle had no body to bury and no family to comfort. But its users had relied on it to follow misinformation, human rights issues, and political campaigns. For them, the loss felt real enough to deserve a service.^[2]

8 Opportunity’s Final Farewell

NASA’s Opportunity rover was designed to work on Mars for 90 days. It lasted nearly 15 years, traveling more than 28 miles (45 kilometers) before a planet-wide dust storm cut off its solar power and ended communication. After months of trying to reach it, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made one final attempt on February 12, 2019. Colleagues gathered nearby to listen for a signal that never came.

The rover’s supposed final words—”My battery is low, and it’s getting dark”—were not literally transmitted from Mars. A journalist poetically paraphrased the technical data Opportunity sent before it fell silent. NASA’s announcement of the mission’s end still felt like a farewell to a longtime explorer. Opportunity had outlasted nearly every expectation, and it had become hard not to think of the little machine as a colleague who had finally gone quiet.^[3]

7 Internet Explorer Gets a Headstone

When Microsoft retired Internet Explorer in 2022, South Korean software engineer Jung Ki-young commemorated the browser with a granite headstone. He spent about 430,000 won—roughly $330 at the time—on the monument, which featured Internet Explorer’s familiar blue “e” logo and a pointed epitaph: “He was a good tool to download other browsers.”

Jung put the headstone on the roof of his brother’s café in Gyeongju, where it quickly attracted attention online. The inscription was a joke, but the sentiment behind it was sincere. Internet Explorer had been a frustrating part of Jung’s work for years, yet customers kept asking him to make sure their websites still worked with it. When the browser finally reached retirement age, he gave it the sort of send-off usually reserved for a more cooperative colleague.^[4]

6 A New York Funeral for a Payphone

By 2016, New York City’s payphones were disappearing as cell phones took over the job. Filmmaker Nicholas Smatt decided one of them deserved a proper goodbye. His short film, Payphone Funeral, shows him delivering a eulogy to a group of mourners, praising the payphone as a reminder of human connection and simpler communication.

The tribute was knowingly sentimental. Payphones were convenient, occasionally sheltering, and sometimes the only way to call someone when your mobile phone was dead—or when you had forgotten it at home. Smatt called the service a way to celebrate what the technology had done before it disappeared from daily life. It may be the only funeral where mourners could still use the deceased to call a cab afterward.^[5]

5 Bluey’s New Orleans-Style Funeral

Harry Ettling’s 1982 Honda Civic had survived 30 years and about 170,000 miles on the streets of New York. The car, nicknamed Bluey back when it was still blue, had become a neighborhood fixture. But rust was eating through the body, and Ettling worried that one day he might fall through the floor. It was time to let the old Honda go.

Ettling was a musician who loved New Orleans-style music, so he sent Bluey off with a funeral procession through Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood. A police escort and jazz band accompanied the car, which wore a floral arrangement on its hood. After a few words at the end of the procession, a tow truck carried Bluey away. Ettling said he needed time before buying another car. Understandable: not every vehicle gives you three decades of service and its own wake at the local bar.^[6]

4 Old Man Detour’s River Burial

In 1923, a crowd gathered on the Interstate Bridge between Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, to attend the funeral of Old Man Detour. The deceased was a smiling mannequin dressed in a hat, goggles, duster, and boots. He represented the road detours that motorists had endured while the new Pacific Highway was being built.

A band played a funeral dirge as the mannequin was raised over the bridge railing and dropped into the Columbia River. The mourners then drove to Portland’s Hotel Multnomah for a wake. Old Man Detour had been weighted down with road signs and broken automobile springs, but the Columbia carried him away anyway. He later washed ashore near San Diego, proving that even a mock funeral can have an unexpectedly long afterlife.^[7]

3 Tacoma Cremates Its Last Streetcar

On June 11, 1938, Tacoma, Washington, threw a citywide party for its streetcar system’s final day. More than 10,000 people celebrated, and revelers stripped 21 cars for souvenirs, taking everything from brass whistles to light bulbs. The night also featured a barbershop chorus singing “The Old Streetcar Ain’t What She Used to Be.”

The last car to reach the barn was ceremonially burned at 1 a.m. Mayor John C. Siegle’s proclamation declared it should be “suitably cremated with public ceremony.” The streetcars had served Tacoma for half a century, but buses were taking over. If the city was going to lose its trolleys, it was at least going to give them a dramatic send-off—and salvage a few seats first.^[8]

2 St. Paul’s High Bridge Gets a Funeral

When St. Paul’s High Bridge closed in 1984 after 95 years, residents who had walked and driven across it did not simply watch it shut down. They held a mock funeral. A hearse led a procession, mourners carried flowers, and a dirge marked the closing of a bridge that had been part of their daily lives.

The ceremony was a community goodbye to a structure that had connected neighborhoods for generations. The bridge was demolished the following year, but its residents’ affection for it was still apparent in the funeral they organized. A bridge may be made of steel and concrete, but if it has carried you to work for decades, apparently it can earn flowers and a hearse.^[9]

1 Wallace Buries the Last Stoplight on I-90

For years, Wallace, Idaho, had the last stoplight on Interstate 90 between Seattle and Boston. The signal forced cross-country drivers off the highway and through town. That changed in 1991, when the Wallace Viaduct opened and carried I-90 above the historic mining community.

The town marked the end of its famous traffic light with a formal funeral. Idaho Transportation Department representatives joined local dignitaries as the signal was laid to rest in a grave near Wallace. It was a fitting send-off for a piece of road equipment that had become a local celebrity. Most towns celebrate a new bypass by cutting a ribbon. Wallace celebrated by burying its last red light.^[10]