thumb|upright=1.2|Time capsule plaque in [[Ypsilanti, Michigan, with instructions for the capsule to be recovered and opened upon the city's bicentennial, on July 4, 2023]]
thumb|Typewritten documents recovered in 2021 from a capsule buried in the 1940s
A time capsule is a historic cache of goods or information, usually intended as a deliberate method of communication with future people, and to help future archaeologists, anthropologists, or historians. The preservation of holy relics dates back for millennia, but the practice of preparing and preserving a collection of everyday artifacts and messages to the future appears to be a more recent practice. Time capsules are sometimes created and buried during celebrations such as world's fairs or cornerstone layings for buildings or at other ceremonies.
History
Early examples
It is widely debated when time capsules were first used, but the concept is fairly simple, and the idea and first use of time capsules could be much older than is currently documented. The term "time capsule" appears to be a relatively recent coinage dating from 1938. In Poland a time capsule dating to 1726 has been found.
Around 1761, some dated artifacts were placed inside the hollow copper grasshopper weathervane, itself dating from 1742, atop historic Faneuil Hall in Boston.
A time capsule dating to 1777 was discovered within a religious statue in Sotillo de la Ribera.
A time capsule was discovered on November 30, 2017, in Burgos, Spain. A wooden statue of Jesus had hidden inside it a document with economic, political and cultural information, written by Joaquín Mínguez, chaplain of the Cathedral of Burgo de Osma in 1777.
A time capsule from the era of the American Revolution, dating to 1795 and credited to Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, was temporarily removed in 2014 from the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. The contents were displayed there briefly, and then reinstalled in their original location. It is the oldest known time capsule in the United States.
20th century
thumb|upright|The [[Don Harrington Discovery Center|Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument located in Amarillo, Texas, holds four time capsules in stainless steel intended to be opened after durations of 25, 50, 100, and 1,000 years after they were locked in 1968.]]
thumb|right|Herrick Tower time capsule, [[Adrian College, Michigan, 2009–2059]]
In 1901, a time capsule was placed inside the head of the copper lion ornamenting the Old State House in Boston. It was opened in 2014, during repairs to the sculpture and building, with plans to add new artifacts and reinstall it in its original location.
The Detroit Century Box, a brainchild of Detroit mayor William C. Maybury, was created on December 31, 1900, and scheduled to be opened 100 years later. It was filled with photographs and letters from 56 prominent residents describing life in 1900 and making predictions for the future, and included a letter by Maybury
to the mayor of Detroit in 2000. The capsule was opened by city officials on December 31, 2000, in a ceremony presided over by Mayor Dennis Archer.
A time capsule labelled "Kan aabnes i 2012" ("Can open in 2012" in Norwegian) was sealed in 1912 in Otta, Norway. The capsule was opened as part of a ceremony 100 years later in 2012. Despite the large excitement over the capsule's opening and a preceding ceremony, its contents (which included notebooks, newspaper clippings, and community council papers) were met with disappointment.
The Crypt of Civilization (1940) at Oglethorpe University, intended to be opened in 8113, is claimed to be the first "modern" time capsule, although it was not called one at the time. During the socialist period in the USSR, many time capsules were buried with messages to a future communist society.
The 1939 New York World's Fair time capsule was created by Westinghouse as part of their exhibit. It was long, with an interior diameter of , and weighed . Westinghouse named the copper, chromium, and silver alloy "cupaloy", claiming it had the same strength as mild steel. It contained everyday items such as a spool of thread and a doll, a book of record (description of the capsule and its creators), a vial of staple food crop seeds, a microscope, and a 15-minute RKO Pathé Pictures newsreel. Microfilm spools condensed the contents of a Sears Roebuck catalog, dictionary, almanac, and other texts.
The 1939 time capsule was followed in 1965 by a second capsule at the same site, but to the north of the original. Both capsules are buried below Flushing Meadows Park, site of the Fair. Both the 1939 and 1965 Westinghouse Time Capsules are meant to be opened in 6939.
There is documentation of at least three physical time capsules at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a "virtual" or digital time capsule. However, it has been delayed several times and an actual launch date has not been given. After launch, it will carry individual messages from Earth's inhabitants addressed to earthlings around the year 52,000, when it is due to return to Earth. , the satellite had not been launched.
The International Time Capsule Society was created in 1990 to maintain a global database of all known time capsules. The Not Forgotten Digital Preservation Library maintains a current map and register of domestic and commercial time capsules.
21st century
In 2005, Forbes magazine administered an email time capsule project in which people composed emails to themselves, and Forbes promised to send them back in one, three, five, ten or twenty years.
"Earth's Black Box"—a city bus-sized structure with steel walls, battery storage and solar panels located at a remote site in Tasmania—will accumulate and electronically store comprehensive climate research and related data, including land and sea temperature changes, ocean acidification, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, human population, energy consumption, military spending, and policy changes.
On February 22, 2024, the Arch Mission Foundation landed the Lunar Library on the Moon, containing the English Wikipedia and other content, with the GLL Lunaprise mission, on the Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission.
Criticism
thumb|Miscellaneous objects prepared for the [[Westinghouse Time Capsule, created for the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair, intended to be opened in 5000 years]]
According to time capsule historian William Jarvis, most intentional time capsules usually do not provide much useful historical information: they are typically filled with "useless junk", new and pristine in condition, that tells little about the people of the time. Many time capsules today contain only artifacts of limited value to future historians. Historians suggest that items which describe the daily lives of the people who created them, such as personal notes, pictures, videos and documents, would greatly increase the value of the time capsule to future historians.
If time capsules have a museum-like goal of preserving the culture of a particular time and place for study, they fulfill this goal very poorly in that they, by definition, are kept sealed for a particular length of time. Subsequent generations between the launch date and the target date will have no direct access to the artifacts and therefore these generations are prevented from learning from the contents directly. Therefore, time capsules can be seen, in respect to their usefulness to historians, as dormant museums, their releases timed for some date so far in the future that the building in question is no longer intact.
The 2009 dramatic film Knowing involves a time capsule being placed in the ground by an elementary school in 1959.
Artists such as Andy Warhol, Christian Boltanski, and Louise Bourgeois are known for compiling collections of everyday artifacts that they associate with memories of the past, which are preserved in museums and archives.
The 1955 Warner Bros. cartoon One Froggy Evening involves a singing and dancing frog extricated from (and eventually replaced within) a time capsule. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg, in the PBS Chuck Jones biographical documentary Extremes & Inbetweens: A Life in Animation, called One Froggy Evening "the Citizen Kane of animated shorts". In 1994, it was voted of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation profession.
Personal and domestic time capsules
Commercially manufactured sealable containers are sold for the protection of personal time capsules; some of the more durable waterproof containers used for geocaching may also be suitable. Many underground time capsules are destroyed by groundwater infiltration after short periods of time; caches stored within the wall cavities of buildings can survive as long as the building is used and maintained.
In 2016, the art collective Ant Farm displayed a show, The Present Is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST, at the art center Pioneer Works, in Brooklyn, New York. The artists had previous experiences with failed time capsules, and were now exploring "digital time capsules" as a more durable form of preservation. They have said, "We’ve come to understand that the best way to preserve digital media is to distribute it." Researchers have started to study methods of preserving digital data in forms that will still be usable in the distant future.
See also
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- List of time capsules
Footnotes
Further reading
- William Jarvis (2002). Time Capsules: A Cultural History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2003,
- Janet Reinhold (1993, 2000). A Sampling of Time Capsule Contents. Covina, Ca.: Future Packaging & Preservation, 2000,
- Larry Richard Clark (2010). "Time Capsules: the Why, the How, the Where".
- M. Guzman, A.M. Hein, C. Welch, "Eternal Memory: Long-Duration Storage Concepts for Space", 66th International Astronautical Congress, Jerusalem, Israel
- Nick Yablon (2019). Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
External links
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- Notforgotten Digital Preservation Library Time Capsule registration
- Smithsonian article on Time Capsules, guidelines
- Heritage Time Capsule's Congressional Time Capsule 2009
- Tips for building a time capsule from the International Time Capsule Society