Need a quick way to generate excitement at your next college event? Bury a time capsule.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has nine of them. Maybe.
“There might actually be a 10th one, for all I know,” says Deborah G. Douglas, who, as curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum, is the nearest thing to an expert on the university’s capsules.
The first one was placed on the campus in 1916 to commemorate MIT’s move from Boston to Cambridge, but Ms. Douglas has no idea whether it’s still in place.
Most people who make time capsules approach them like parents who want the excitement of having a baby but not the responsibility of raising a child. The vessels are conceived, assembled, and sealed with great fanfare. Then they are quietly forgotten. Many are lost altogether.
“That’s one of the of the interesting things, how strangely ephemeral they are,” says William E. Jarvis, author of Time Capsules: A Cultural History.
Mr. Jarvis is a founder of the International Time Capsule Society, a four-man organization that maintains a registry of time capsules on a Web site hosted by Oglethorpe University, in Atlanta. Although only about 20 college-based capsules are registered, the society estimates that they number in the thousands.
The group also maintains a list of “most wanted time capsules.” They are generally classified as lost or stolen, but the location of the second-most-wanted vessel is no mystery. It’s at MIT, trapped under an 18-ton magnet in the institute’s now-defunct cyclotron, a particle accelerator. The time capsule, which one news report suggested could be radioactive, was supposed to have been exhumed in 1989, on its 50th anniversary.
Mr. Jarvis, an emeritus associate professor and librarian at Washington State University, points out that because the capsules are messages sent across time to an unknowable audience, “intended or unintended humor may result.”
When the University of Washington cracked open a 1927 capsule during a halftime ceremony at a March 6, 1999, basketball game against Washington State, The Seattle Times reported, “the disappointment was palpable.” Inside were a couple of newspapers, a student handbook, an envelope that the announcer speculated might contain a building permit, and a 1927 dime.
“That’s it,” said the announcer. The crowd booed.
The opening of another time capsule at the same university last year aroused more excitement and a good deal of confusion. The graying members of the Class of 1957 were puzzled to find — in addition to the yearbook and student newspaper they had placed in the vessel — pornography from the 1980s, a condom, and soiled panties. Suspicion fell on long-gone staffers of the student newspaper; the capsule had been located in an interior wall of the Communications Building.
A capsule sealed last month at Stephens College, in Columbia, Mo., should raise fewer eyebrows when it’s opened in 25 years, at the institution’s bicentennial celebration. Participants at a midnight-breakfast ceremony at the women’s college locked photos, letters, and the president’s inauguration necklace inside a gun safe.
Then again, some students submitted sealed envelopes, says Lindsey A. Weber, student-government president. “So I don’t know what’s in there.”
One famous proponent of time capsules was Harold Edgerton, the MIT professor of electrical engineering known for his strobe-light photography. In 1957 he helped seal and bury a time capsule near MIT’s Compton Laboratories. A true millennial vessel, it is to be opened in 2957.
“That presumes that MIT will be around in a thousand years, and that anyone in that time will care,” says Ms. Douglas. “To me that’s an incredible act of hubris.”
Edgerton filled the capsule with argon gas to help preserve the contents, which include a mug, an empty tonic bottle, and 91 cents in change.
One can almost hear the boos echoing across the millennium.
The granddaddy of all time capsules is at Oglethorpe, built into bedrock granite in the basement of Phoebe Hearst Hall.
Known as the Crypt of Civilization, the vessel is 20 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 10 feet high. It is a former swimming pool — essentially “a glorified bathtub,” says Mr. Jarvis.
Paul S. Hudson says the crypt is more like one of the Pyramids of antiquity. He discovered it as a curious undergraduate at Oglethorpe in 1971. The basement of Hearst was under repair, and he stole inside with a flashlight to explore the darkened hallway. When the beam landed on a stainless-steel door bearing a plaque crusted in cobwebs, Mr. Hudson recalls, “my mind floated out of my body.”
The plaque read: “Do not open until May 28, 8113.”
The chamber, he later learned, had been proposed with P.T. Barnum flourish in the November 1936 issue of Scientific American by Thornwell Jacobs, Oglethorpe’s maverick president, as a way for 20th-century America to describe itself to a distant future civilization. He observed that since the establishment of the Egyptian calendar, in 4241 BC, 6,177 years had passed — a figure that, projected forward from 1936, reached the year 8113.
Four years after announcing his plan, Jacobs watched as the crypt door was sealed amid great solemnity. Inside the vessel are scores of items, including books, seeds, various utensils, glass-encased mannequins, a specially sealed quart of beer, and a device called a “language integrator” — a sort of hand-cranked Rosetta stone designed to teach people in the 82nd century the rudiments of 20th-century English.
Today Mr. Hudson is chairman of the department of business and social sciences at Georgia Perimeter College at Clarkston and one of the founders of the International Time Capsule Society. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Jacobs, which led to his unpaid job as keeper of the Crypt of Civilization. He fields a dozen calls a week from the news media, civic groups, funeral directors (“they’re interested in preservation”), and the plain curious.
At academic conferences, Mr. Hudson is keenly aware, some scholars see him as a crackpot.
“When you hear ‘the year 8113,’ the usual reaction is an embarrassed laugh,” he says.
Mr. Hudson laughs, too, when he thinks about that distant date and that bottle of beer, a gift of Anheuser-Busch. “Whoever opens the crypt in 8113 AD,” he says, “that Bud’s for them.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Short Subjects Volume 54, Issue 39, Page A1
