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FOR THE LAST half-century, time capsules have been ubiquitous—the 20th century's answer to ribbon-cutting ceremonies, our way of commemorating new malls, golden anniversaries, and grade school graduations. Literally tens of thousands of them lie secreted or buried, filled mostly with the unimaginative stuff of everyday life: newspapers, magazines, letters, coins, and knickknacks. They offer us a way to send a message to the future, a kind of letter-in-a-bottle on the seas of time. While many are lost and forgotten, for the most part that doesn't seem to matter: The planting of a time capsule, regardless of its contents, seems more important than whether it's ever dug up.
The history of burying stuff for the future is ancient, and time capsule-like things can be found throughout history and in many cultures. The Sumerians buried messages to their descendants in the foundations of temples; Chinese and Tibetan Buddhists secreted away tablets inscribed with sutras specifically for discovery in the distant future; and the Freemasons have long made the laying of new building foundations a ceremonial highlight by putting objects into cornerstones. (Conspiracy buffs take note: Not only is the back of our $1 bill fraught with Masonic symbolism, but virtually every government building in Washington, DC, built before the early 1960s has a cornerstone filled and blessed by the Masons. Holy Illuminati!)
But what distinguishes these from modern time capsules? Well if you ask the experts, like Washington State University librarian William Jarvis, who has written some of the most scholarly explorations of the history of time capsules, the idea that such caches are assigned a specific opening date is a very modern idea. In other words, what defines a time capsule is not that it may be opened one day, but that it is intended to be opened on a particular date set by its creator. Thus, the pyramids, Titanic, Al Capone's safe, and the Voyager spacecraft are not, strictly speaking, time capsules.
THE FIRST EXAMPLE of a true time capsule is, Jarvis says, the so-called Century Safe, sealed at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia with the intention that it be opened in the US Capitol during the 1976 Bicentennial celebration. Remarkably, despite being lost for some years, it was.
But time capsules, as Jarvis defines them, are really much newer. The word itself was coined and popularized by G. Edward Pendray, a science fiction-writing publicist who was looking for a great stunt to kick off the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, the theme of which was "The World of Tomorrow." After rejecting the name "time bomb," which seemed a bit off considering World War II was starting, he settled on "capsule." Westinghouse engineers built a sleek, torpedo-shaped object out of a new copper alloy the company was trying to promote ("cupaloy"). The idea was to cram as many modern-day artifacts and as much information about our civilization as possible into a tube, bury it in the ground, and invite people 5,000 years in the future to rediscover us.
Pendray's execution was brilliant, but his idea was not original. He actually stole it from a man who was planning an even more ambitious project: the Crypt of Civilization, a kind of Tut's tomb of Western culture. It was conceived by Thornwell Jacobs, president of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. A big-picture visionary who taught a course in millennial thinking and seemed uncomfortable regarding anything in increments smaller than a century or two, Jacobs wanted to prefabricate the perfect archaeological site. Civilizations rise and fall, he reasoned, so why not build a record—an ark—to send ourselves into the future, thus preserving our culture for the benefit of earth's future inhabitants, whoever they may be (he specifically considered that they might be aliens). He printed and distributed special metal tickets to the opening ceremony, to be held in the year 8113 AD.
These think-big projects from what has been called time capsules' Golden Age generated extensive publicity, fed a public fascination with the future, and launched countless imitators, though many folks scaled back the time line and chose 25, 50, or 100 years for their time capsules. Americans buried everything from Chevy Vegas to asbestos to Barbie dolls, all destined for another time or our older selves. But while thousands bloomed, the ambitious time capsule—the kind meant to be catapulted into the far millennia as a definitive record of civilization today—has petered out.
You thought the Y2K bug was a bust? For years leading up to it, the International Time Capsule Society (of which I am a founder) sought to interest potential sponsors in a large-scale, millennial project. But despite the PR opportunities the year 2000 presented, none stepped forward. The main Y2K time capsule projects were more like AOL's, which promised to archive messages to the future from members, or the suggestion from Kellogg's that kids use their cereal boxes to create personal, though perhaps milk-sodden, capsules.
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY there haven't been important time capsule projects since the 1930s: In 1965, Westinghouse did a second capsule, buried next to the first, filling in the historical record for the intervening 27 years, including info on nuclear power, computers, World War II, and the Beatles. And in 1970, on the occasion of Expo '70 in Osaka, the electronics giant Matsushita (you know them as Panasonic) cosponsored the first Japanese millennial time capsule project. Instead of a tube, they chose a container that looks like a giant stewpot. Layered inside of it, like a bento box, are compartments containing a complete record of Japanese life—including at least one weird, powerful relic of the atomic bomb: the blackened fingernail of a survivor.
