Time Travel. A History

The craze has become a business, the “future packaging” industry. Companies offer time capsules in a range of styles, colors, materials, and price points, just as mortuaries market coffins. There are extra charges for engraving and welding. Future Packaging and Preservation promotes Personal Sally, Personal Arnold, Mr. Future, and Mrs. Future cylinders. “Are you on a tight budget? Our Cylindrical Time Capsule style may be the most practical choice. Always in stock, these capsules are made of stainless steel, are pre-polished, pre-marked on the bottom with the phrase ‘Time Capsule.’ ” The Smithsonian Institution offers a list of manufacturers and gives professional tips: argon gas and silica gel are good, PVC and soft solder are bad, and as for electronics, “electronics are a problem.” Of course, the Smithsonian has a related business model. Museums conserve and preserve our valuables and our knickknacks for the future. With a difference, of course: museums are alive in the culture. They don’t hide the best stuff away underground.

Far more time capsules are buried than are ever recovered. Hermetic as these efforts are, “official” records do not exist, but in 1990 a group of time-capsule aficionados organized a so-called International Time Capsule Society, in hopes of creating a registry. The mailing address and website are at Oglethorpe University. In 1999 they estimated that ten thousand capsules had been buried worldwide and nine thousand of those were already “lost”—but lost to whom? Inevitably the information is anecdotal. The society lists a foundation deposit believed to lie under the Blackpool Tower in Lancashire, England, and says that both “remote sensing equipment” and “a clairvoyant” have failed to find it. The town of Lyndon, Vermont, is supposed to have buried an iron box during its centennial celebration in 1891. A hundred years later, Lyndon officials searched the town vault and other sites, in vain. When the television show M*A*S*H ended, its cast members tried to bury some props and costumes in a “time capsule” at the 20th Century Fox parking lot in Hollywood. A construction worker found it almost immediately and tried to give it back to Alan Alda. The time capsulists are trying to use the earth, its basements and graveyards and fens, as a great disorganized filing cabinet, but they have not learned the first law of filing: Most of what is filed never again sees the light of day.

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A RESIDENT OF New York City transported a thousand years into the past would not understand a word spoken by the people he encountered. Nor, for that matter, would a resident of London. How can we expect to make ourselves understood to people of the year 6939? Time-capsule creators tend not to worry about linguistic change any more than the science-fiction writers do. But, to their credit, the Westinghouse team did worry about making their time capsule intelligible to the scarcely imaginable recipients of their message. It would be an overstatement to say they solved the problem, but at least they thought about it. They knew that archeologists continued to struggle with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs a century after the lucky breakthrough provided by the Rosetta Stone. Clay tablets and carved stones still surface bearing scripts from lost languages that defy translation—“proto-Elamite” and “Rongorongo” and others that have not even been named.

So the authors of the Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy tucked in “A Key to the English Language,” by Dr. John P. Harrington, ethnologist, Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. It comprised a mouth map (or “Mauth Maep”) to help with pronunciation of the “33 sounds of 1938 English,” a list of the thousand most common English words, and diagrams to convey elements of grammar.

Also enclosed was an enigmatic one-paragraph story, “The Fable of the Northwind and the Sun,” repeated in twenty-five different languages—a little Rosetta Stone to help the archeologists of 6939. An explanatory drawing titled “Tenses” showed a steamship labeled present heading from the leftward city (past) to the rightward city (future).

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Any effort of this kind confronts a bootstrap problem. The “Key to the English Language” is written, perforce, in English. It uses printed words to explain pronunciation. It specifies sounds in terms of human anatomy. What will our hypothetical future folk make of this: “English has eight vowels (or sounds whose hemming amounts to mere cavity-shape resonance)”? Or this: “The vowel with highest raised back of the tongue, that is, nearest to the k consonant position, is u; the vowel with the highest raised middle of the tongue, that is, nearest to the y consonant position, is i”? Who knows where their glottises will be, anyway, or whether those will have gone the way of gills?

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