Remember the "talking rings" from the 1960 movie The Time Machine? If only we had information technology that required no power or additional technology to decipher it. But that's not the case. In our own homes, we have trouble accessing home movies if they were recorded on VHS or even DVDs. How many time capsules contain those formats instead of printed photographs that anyone can access? Nick Yablon, author of the book Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule, began researching time capsules when he found a reference to them from 1911. They go back at least as far as 1876, although the term wasn't coined until later. He addressed the problem of time capsule packers who assumed the future would be somewhat consistent with the present.
Sometimes the diversity of media materials that time capsule contributors thought would be useful for future historians hindered Yablon’s understanding rather than aided it—such as when Yablon came across phonography cylinders from 1901. “Researchers couldn’t directly use those wax cylinders,” he told Perspectives. “They were quite fragile.” Archivists had to carefully extract the music for anyone who wished to hear them. Wax cylinders weren’t the only unusual items Yablon came across in his research. San Francisco-based dentist Henry D. Cogswell’s 1879 time capsule—which Cogswell called a “great Antiquarian Postoffice [sic]”—included “a box of breath sweeteners, a mechanical pencil, a souvenir pen and bud vase from the Centennial Exposition, a silk bookmark, a wooden puzzle, a paperweight . . . and, presumably Cogswell’s own contribution, some false teeth.” In an interview with Perspectives, Yablon said that, while researching the book, he also came across a piece of “corn on the cob in an Oklahoma time capsule [from] 1913.” (“It was in fairly good condition,” Yablon added.)
On the other hand, those physical objects could be things you'd find in any antique store -except maybe the corn. It could be that 100 years isn't long enough to bury a time capsule, as long as there's no soon-to-be-obsolete information format inside. Read about the history of the time capsule, including the philosophies behind the different kinds of them, at Perspectives on History. -via Damn Interesting