Happy Saturday everyone. Our colleague Alex Williams has a brand new podcast coming out called Ephemeral, and like its name suggests, Ephemeral is all about things that are disappearing or have disappeared, and forgotten people in places, and things that were barely saved or not saved at all. So we've chosen today Saturday Classic to go along with that theme. It is our brief history of time Capsules from May. One thing to note is that the mistakes that we make on this podcast are not ephemeral at all. They last forever. And in this episode, we made it sound like two different time capsules came out of the old State House in Boston, Massachusetts. We made it sound that way because I thought that was how it happened. It did not. The time capsule that was in a Lion's Head statue was from the old State House, and then the one associated with Paul Revere came from the current State House on Beacon Hill. And stay tuned at the end of the show for a little peak at Ephemeral. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back in October, a time capsule was removed from a lion statue that normally is on top of the Old State House in Boston, Massachusetts. The statue had been taken off of the roof for restoration, and while they were at it, restorers decided to check on rumors that there was a time capsule in its head. This is something that had been completely unknown until a couple of years before, and they wanted to see if it was really there. It was. They used to fiber optic camera to make sure that it was really there, and then they very carefully removed it and during a private opening, archivists lifted the lid and immediately realized that what was in there was just packed way too tightly to be taken out safely in the studio where the statue was being restored, So they took the time capsule to the Bostonian Society's Archives Center where they could really take their time removing the contents in a more controlled environment. Holly, do you remember this, Yes, they do, right, because when we put this story on our Facebook, people got so mad. They really did. There were some very um you know, immediate response sort of anger notes. Yeah, so this time capsule had been inside the statue for a hundred and thirteen years, but people felt like that was not nearly long enough for it to be opened. And then other people interpreted this decision to take the box somewhere more controlled to do the actual unpacking that they thought this was a sign that incompetent amateurs had been trusted with this delicate task, which was absolutely not true. It was somebody with a master of library science and archives of management like that. People also argued that they should have just had the whole statue removed somewhere safer, or that there was a lot of questions about why the time capsule needed to be removed in the first place. A lot of people wanted it and its contents to go back where it was. So then another time capsule was removed from the old State House a couple of months later, and this one dated back to and it had been put behind the corner stone by Paul Revere, then Governor of Massachusetts, Sam Adams, and Colonel William Scully. And so, based on what had happened with that first time capsule, we were really careful about what details we included when we put it up on our Facebook. We noted that it had been taken out as part of a repair to a water leak behind the cornerstone, and we specified that professional professional conservators had removed it, and that it was going to be x ray and open under controlled conditions, and that it was going to be put back after its contents had been displayed for the public for a while. Holly, do you also remember this, yes, because people were still so mad. They were there's a fascinating reaction I think that people have with time capsules and it it's I couldn't break down the psychology of it because it varies a lot, but there were definitely some angry responses. Yeah, people were still really mad this time. They were mad that the times capsule was going to be put back, which was what people had wanted to happen with the other time capsules. So at this point I kind of never wanted to mention time capsules in the context of the show again, which is one of the reasons why neither time capsule was in the unearthed in episodes. But then this April I got the chance to actually see the contents of that cornerstone time capsule while they were on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and there was literally a line all the way around the room to see it. It stretched way out into adjoining galleries. Was just to like in this little display case that was full of coins and newspapers. Uh. Part of this is because the time capsule was really small, so there was a little display case people were waiting to see into. But part of it is because people care apparently care a whole lot about time capsules. Yeah, and I feel compelled to mention that this sort of interesting um discussion that sometimes got a little heated on our Facebook page, that is not the only place that these were happening. If you looked at news sites that were posting about it, their comments sections were having very similar things play out. Yeah, there was just angriness everywhere. So we're gonna talk about time capsules today, maybe explore some of the reasons people get so excited about them. Yes, and the tradition of burying stuff really goes back almost to the beginning of human history. The most obvious example is that most of the world's cultures have at some point buried artifacts, letters, trinkets, and other objects as parts of funeral rituals. People have also been deliberately placing objects into building foundations and cornerstones for thousands of years. For example, in Mesopotamia, a common practice was to bury objects and building foundations for the purpose of sanctifying the space and protecting it, or maybe to commemorate something that was related to the building or its builders or where it was being built. This practice has continued throughout the ages and all over the world, and it has also included embedding items of religious significance in church corner stones, and the idea that these deposits might one day be discovered again has also cropped up at various times throughout history. For example, around the seventh century b c, Assyrian king as her Hadn't had relics and clay tablets put in the foundations of monuments, saying that he quote deposited them in the foundations and left them for future times. But all of these burials of stuff are a little different from the idea of a time capsule, although people of the past did sometimes think or write about how future generations might someday stumble upon their funerary deposits and their foundational deposits, which are what those things are called. Uh, that was really secondary to their purpose. They were being buried for some other reason, and the idea that somebody might come dig them up later was secondary to that. But in a time capsule, on the other hand, people intentionally gather and store objects with the specific plan that someone else is going to open them later, and usually there's a specified time frame for what later means and for the For time capsule purists, it's only a true time capsule if there's a specific end date for the thing to be opened again. This means that while a letter from a six year old to his or her future self to be opened ten years later is a time capsule according to this definition, but a giant room of artifacts to be opened at some undetermined time in the future technically isn't. Neither are time capsules that include those same sorts of things but are shot into space to be one day opened by aliens. Maybe so basically, the end date is really like the definer of what isn't isn't a time capsule. Another aspect of time capsules is that they're preserving, usually a snapshot of everyday life when they were sealed, and while there are definitely time capsules that have a much grander scope than that. They almost always also include things like coins, newspapers, photographs, letters from notable people, and everyday items that are kind of meant to give future generations a glimpse of what life used to be like. This, including of everyday life snapshots, is also why accidental preservations of everyday life, like say the ruins of Pompeii, are sometimes described as time capsules. And although there are time capsules buried all over the world, the practice is largely a tradition that came from and flourished in the United States, and there are a couple of reasons for this. A big one is that the first most famous examples of time capsules, which we're going to talk about in just a bit, we're all developed in the United States. But sociologists and psychologists also theorized that another reason that the United States has been so intent on encapsulating history to send it to the future is that as a nation, the history of the United States is pretty short. There were definitely people in North America long before the United States was a thing, but European presence in North America only goes back a few hundred years. So the theory goes that people kind of subconsciously want to instantly create something that counts as history in the eyes of future generations. And we're going to talk about some specific examples of time capsules after we have a brief forward from a sponsor. We're going to talk about the first true time capsule to start off with, and the first time we know of that people sealed things away with the specific intent that they would be brought out again at a particular date in the future was for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and that took place in eighteen seventy six. It had a century safe that was meant to be opened in nineteen seventy six. There might be earlier examples of time capsules out there that, in addition to having been buried or sealed away, also had a specified opening date, but this is the first one we actually have documentation of. And the century safe looked just like a safe, but with a purple velvet lining, which is a detail I personally love. Uh. This safe contained photographs, a book on temperance, and signatures of visitors to the Centennial Exhibition, among other things. It was stored under the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capital and opened in nineteen seventy six. As intended, a new capsule, buried in nineteen seventy six is to be opened in twenty seventy six. Even though the Century Safe was the first true time capsule, the word time capsule had not been coined yet. That did not happen until nineteen thirty eight leading up to the nineteen nine World's Fair. G Edward Pendre, who was a public relations executive for Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing, gets the credit for coming up with the term. Also, uh, for a while, because of the shape of what they were building, you thought about calling it a time bomb, and uh, I'm kind of glad that didn't take off. Um. Before the word time capsule was coined, people normally called these sorts of things safes or boxes, or similar generic terms. Westinghouse was involved with all of this because it was constructing the physical container for the World's Fair time Capsule, which was to stay underground until sixty nine, otherwise known as five thousand years from its start date. Because these capsules were supposed to stay buried for so long, the containers had to be impervious to just about any kind of damage that you could think of. The end result was a seven and a half foot long or two point two meter torpedo like tube made of a non corrosive alloy with several interior layers meant to protect the contents. These contents included cigarettes, men's and women's grooming tools, magazines, and samples of seeds and fabrics. There's also a twenties two thousand page microfilm essay, and there are letters from such figures as Albert Einstein and then m I T President Carl T. Compton. There was huge, huge fanfare around the burying of this time capsule, and there's also a total replica of it and its contents at the George Westinghouse Museum. Running concurrently with the creation of the first Westinghouse time capsule was the Crypt of Civilization, and I know a lot about this one. This is an incredibly huge and involved time capsule at Oglethorpe University, which is here in Atlanta and where I used to work. Oglethorpe President Thornwell Jacobs led this project, which is an attempt to document all of human history. The idea is that future archaeologists could just consult the material from this vault instead of having to painstakingly recreate an idea of how the world worked by piecing together information from lots of different dig sites. The Crypt of Civilization today is on a lower level of the Administration Building at Oglethorpe, And in addition to all the physical items which are inside, which are a lot things enormous, it contains more than six hundred thousand pages of microfilm which document all sorts of historical information. So this crypt was sealed on May nine, forty and it's not supposed to be opened again until the year eighty one thirteen, and this is six thousand, one hundred seventy seven years from when it was sealed up. The idea is that as of nineteen forty there were six thousand, one hundred seventy seven years of recorded history. This crypt acts as like a midpoint between the beginnings of recorded history and six thousand, one hundred seventy seven years in the future when people can just open this thing up to find out all about the past. Yeah, And it's just a big door, a big metal door that you walk by when you're in the admin building, and it has engraving on it, but it's just the door that's there that never opens. Because people were inspired by the first Westinghouse time Capsule and Oglethorpe's Crypt of Civilization, the time capsule Heyday really spanned from nineteen thirty five to nine two. Because of the Centennial Exhibition, one years became a popular time limit for time capsules to remain sealed. There are also some connections between that first Westinghouse time capsule and the Crypt that Oglethorpe so g Edward Pendre had actually called for public support of the Crypt project as it was being developed, and conversely, one of the letters inside the first Westinghouse time capsule is a letter from then Oglethorpe president Thornwell Jacobs um so that like, there was a lot of crossover between those two projects, uh, which I think is pretty cool. We're also now I can just talk about some other notable examples of time capsules, and this is not at all an exhaustive list, not even of the ones that are really big and impressive. Westinghouse created a second time capsule for the nineteen sixty eight New York World's Fair, and it's almost like an update to the first one. It's the exact same size and shape, and it's buried about ten feet away, but its contents include things that didn't exist when the previous time capsule had been put into the grounds, includes birth control pills and artificial heart valve, credit cards, information about atomic energy, and other more modern as of nineteen sixty eight stuff. Both the first Westinghouse time capsule and the second one are supposed to be opened in sixty nine thirty nine together, so that second one sort of like a supplement to the first one rather than a whole separate thing with a separate opening date. Two identical time capsules were made for expos seventy in Osaka, Japan, and one of these is to stay sealed for five thousand years, and the other is intended to be opened every one hundred years after an initial opening in the year two thousand and One reason for this plan is to check in and make sure everything's okay, but the other is to update the time capsules contents, so it kind of becomes an ongoing living archive record. And these time capsules are shaped like kettles and filled. They weigh two point one to metric tons, and although their purpose was to detail in a very broad cross section life in nineteen seventy, which means that they include lots and lots of everyday items. There's also historical information including leaflets, films, and other recordings, uh, including artifacts from the bombing of Hiroshima. And you can actually see the total contents of all these things online. They are available, and there is so much stuff jammed into them. Yeah, I really I had this moment where, Uh, I was flummoxed because I stumbled across this thing, UH that had, you know, a a comprehensive list of everything that's in there, and there are pictures of a lot of it, and I am used to when you see older pictures of things that were taken with earlier digital cameras, they look kind of terrible. And I had this moment where I just forgot that there were there were film cameras in nineteen seventy. You can you can scan pictures from nineteen seventy or film fromteen seventy, like that still exists, that didn't go away. So I had this just moment, But I feel silly confessing, but I still want to confess. Or I was like, wow, where'd they get all these pictures from? All? Right? Cameras? They were still a thing Tracy, it had been a long day. There is a one year time capsule that was created in Juno, Alaska, in and this one is huge because it was created using thousands of items that were collected from Juneau residents. It's housed in a converted lobby of a government building and you can see some of the contents through two windows that go to the outside. It's also lit with electric lights that can be changed from the outside, so it's it can be lit while still being totally sealed up. That's a pretty cool feature. Uh. There's a fortieth anniversary time castle that was buried in Disneyland in Anaheim, California, on July seventeenth of n and that is to be opened on that same date in the year. Here's hoping I'm there for that. Yeah. I was like, it's hotly gonna go. Uh. It does look like a castle, which is why it is called that. Um. Really, a hundred years is a pretty standard time for a time capsule now, and then we have these really fascinating millennial ones that go on for a thousand years and beyond. But when the Internet took off and things started changing at a super upid pace. M I t made a time capsule of the Online world sor at the Sloane School of Management, and that one was to be opened after five years because the Internet was evolving so rapidly. Aside from those that we've just mentioned, all over the world there are boxes of documents, coins, and household items just waiting to be dug up. And we'll talk about what can go wrong on that front after we have another quick word from a sponsor. So the sad truth is, as much as people like the idea of burying things for posterity, a lot of time capsules just fail. In some cases they haven't even made it to their burial or their ceiling. There was a time capsule made for the US by Centennial that went on a national tour with signatures from all over the country that we're supposed to be collected and put inside, and it made it through that whole tour, but then was dolan from the truck at the burial site before it could actually be buried. Capsules and their contents have also been lost thanks to leaks, demolitions, and people just forgetting that they were buried in the first place, or that they existed at all. So, in addition to trying to preserve all of human history up to nineteen forty in the Crypt of Civilization. Oglethorpe is also trying to keep track of all those time capsules so that nothing else gets lost, and that's via the International Time Capsule Society, which was established in nine. Yeah. One of the reasons that they really wanted to get that time capsule out of the Lion's Head statue was because they did not really know how it had been packaged and whether everything and there had already been destroyed because of water, which it hadn't, which was great. Uh, But there's also the fact that a lot of times what's inside a typical time capsule turns out to be really underwhelming once it's opened. The very nature of time capsules means that a lot of times they're full of newspapers and coins and photographs people, uh, letters from people who were famous a hundred years ago but nobody knows who they are now, and basically obsolete junk. There's even article in the Onion titled newly unearthed time Capsule just full of useless old crap, which made fun of both people's responses to what you usually find when you open a time capsule and the types of things that people select to put in there, like there's there's several layers of humor going on. Uh, this is actually kind of funny to me. How often people open a time capsule and like, no one is impressed with what was inside because it's just newspapers and coins. And yet when the time capsule was made, there were knocked down, drag out fights about what to put inside of there. Oh yeah, people are as angry about what to put in time capsules as they were within all of our Facebook posts about taking them out, because they want to make sure the exact correct picture of at time period is created with the contents. But even if people didn't find their contents boring, more often than not, the same objects placed inside time capsules are also preserved better at museums and other archives. It's very rare that someone opens a time capsule to discover something that's actually a unique find. Usually you can see a better preserved one of the exact same thing in one or many museums. However, all of that said, time capsules usually inspire and interest in history and some civic pride, at least in the short term, and that counts when they're created, and again when they're opened, and especially for the ones that are meant to stay sealed up for thousands of years, the containers themselves can involve tremendous speaks of engineering. This has especially been true for all of these ones. They're supposed to stay sealed up for many thousands of years. So while people might classify their contents into the category of war plus a junk, their creation has a different type of worth. And back to those time capsules that we talked about at the very beginning of the show, the Lion statue is back on top of the Old State House, complete with a new time capsule, and this time it's in the lions scroll, so future generations will have easier access to it. Among the contents of that capsule are an iPhone five. Apple apparently would not provide an iPhone six for this Foreign Relations of the United States nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eighty volume three to replace a copy of Foreign Relations of the United States eighteen ninety six that was in the prior box, basically to fill space, a number of letters and photos, and a Boston Marathon metal. The original items were on display at the Old State House for several weeks over December fourteen and into January. The items inside were delicate enough that after that point they were returned to the archives for preservation. Yeah, they were actually preserved incredible well, uh, considering how old the time capsule was and how it had just been in the statue out in the elements for so long. But they did want to make sure that they lasted long into the future, so they didn't stay on public display for all that long. The time capsule that was removed from the cornerstone at the Old State House is also going to go back in June, and it's going to include its original contents having been cleaned and restored, along with some new items along in the same vein basically what was in there before. We're newspapers and coins to things of that nature. Um. Its original contents were displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during March and April. The Bostonian Society and the Museum of Fine Arts also both documented what was inside those boxes and put lots of pictures and details on their websites. Yeah, so people felt like they were being hidden away from public view. They really really weren't, thank you. So much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, Since it is from the archive that might be out of date. Now, you can email us at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Back before we called it voicemail, or at least when voicemail means something different and more specific, the world had the humble Answering Machine. We're not right now, but we'll call you that if you leave name and number. If you aren't of the age to remember, the answering machine was a physical audio recorder that plugged into your phone line. You couldn't call into it remotely, You had to wait till you got home to check your messages, and they were the source for a lot of Seinfeld gaestssage. Most answering machines recorded on cassette tape. Your magnetically recorded message would be saved until you recorded over it or change the cassette. When I was a little kid, my family had a different kind of answering machine. It was actually tapeless. I think it was a Sony and it was digital. That's my dad, a man who's not apt to forget a piece of telephone technology. It was like a little tower with a big push button on top that would blink once you had a message. In addition to play and shuttle had a record button for your greeting. But on this machine, you could also record your own messages directly into it, like a voice mobile function on your phone. I think the idea was if you were the husband, wife passing, you know, running kids around and stuff, that you could leave each other messages on it if you were just standing in front of it, like you wouldn't have to call it on your non existent cell phone because none of us had cell phones back then. I don't think Mom and I ever ever used that, but you used it because you liked hearing yourself recorded him act. It sat on top of my parents bureau. So I must have had to climb on a stool or something. But I spent untold hours talking into this device. Um, my voice is going to come out all weird and stay from the spring, recorded it and play many many times. If you recorded multiple memos then hit the play button, it would run them all back to back in the order in which they were created. To a young me, this was absolute magic. By this method, and in a spirit of endless experimentation, I'd fill the tiny hard drive with recordings structured as imaginary shows. I have no idea what about I'm not sure I did then, probably just whatever came to mind. I've listened through it a hundred times and pieces as I built my episode up, and a few times over as a finished product, and wait for my parents to check their messages. I have great parents, so they listened through with at least feigned enthusiastic, but sooner or later we need the space, and with the click of a button, it was all gone. Is anyone there over? Okay? See you after it's gone. It's all by. Soon enough, i'd make another, and none of those were saved. This tape I've been playing is the closest thing I have left. It was actually recorded on microcassette, which looks just like a regular cassette tape, shrunk down to a quarter of the size. My next fascination after answering machines. Here, I'm wandering around my dad's office with his handheld voice recorders. My dad, I sound about ten round. I made lots of tapes like this, but as far as I can find, this is the last one I have left from this early in my life. Do I wish more had been saved, especially those early answering machine productions, I don't know, I guess so It's comparable to a baby picture, an old yearbook, or some other keepsake, maybe the most like a Sunday school craft project for Mother's Day. Ragged and potentially embarrassing, however sentimental. But it's ephemeral. It's a fleeting moment and it's gone. Even though I was young, I knew that at the time. It's these moments. This show fixates on lost materials, dropped threads, forgotten stories, ephemera in the way that it's intertwined in our lives, all those things tangible and intangible that you wish you could take just one more look at before they vanish into the past. America has produced like lots and lots of stuff, just piles of stuff, and it's sitting around in storage spaces and we keep making it and buying it, and then what do you do with it? And it's got to somewhere. The fact of the matter is is all day long, every day, there are warehouses full of stuff getting just pushed off a cliff, getting shoved off into the abyss and being destroyed all day every day. Betsy in Naaski, who runs the Canary Records label, a friend of mine, uh Steve Smolean, who's a record guy like me, said that what he loves is being the guy standing at the edge of the cliff waving his arms going, wait, no, let me look at those first before you throw them away. I think there might be some good stuff in there. I think there might be some stories. Well, I don't think we should throw all those away yet, because museums can't handle it, the big cultural institutions can't handle it. There's just too much stuff. You know, they're getting donated piles of stuff all the time. The fact of the matter is they don't always know or care. They're looking for specific things that relate to specific narratives, so you always need somebody who's looking for a different story. We have a season ten episodes of stories from that realm, of things that were just barely saved, and in some cases not saved at all. A bizarre tale of two infamous New Yorkers booby trapped their home and turned it into the shield fortress of a missing chapter of American music history. There hasn't been a guess culturally that they matter, so they got thrown in the garbage. A decade's worth of original television lost to the airways. It's over. You're gonna see something else the next second, and nobody's ever going to see a piece of music that's defied convention for seventy years. I had students write down the sounds they heard during it, and one girl said, I never realized there was so much to listen to and what could only be called an audio mystery. It said nothing on it and it clearly had been recorded, which intrigued me. What is this going to be? These stories and more given new life, if only for a glimpse. There's times I can't help but feeling like that little kid again talking into a machine that I'm sure won't save anything I say into it. Also, is this podcast a piece of ephemer in the making, A forgotten story about forgotten stories. Only time will tell the Ephemeral debuts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And learn more at Ephemeral dot show. End of messages.

Happy Saturday everyone. Our colleague Alex Williams has a brand new podcast coming out called Ephemeral, and like its name suggests, Ephemeral is all about things that are disappearing or have disappeared, and forgotten people in places, and things that were barely saved or not saved at all. So we've chosen today Saturday Classic to go along with that theme. It is our brief history of time Capsules from May. One thing to note is that the mistakes that we make on this podcast are not ephemeral at all. They last forever. And in this episode, we made it sound like two different time capsules came out of the old State House in Boston, Massachusetts. We made it sound that way because I thought that was how it happened. It did not. The time capsule that was in a Lion's Head statue was from the old State House, and then the one associated with Paul Revere came from the current State House on Beacon Hill. And stay tuned at the end of the show for a little peak at Ephemeral. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back in October, a time capsule was removed from a lion statue that normally is on top of the Old State House in Boston, Massachusetts. The statue had been taken off of the roof for restoration, and while they were at it, restorers decided to check on rumors that there was a time capsule in its head. This is something that had been completely unknown until a couple of years before, and they wanted to see if it was really there. It was. They used to fiber optic camera to make sure that it was really there, and then they very carefully removed it and during a private opening, archivists lifted the lid and immediately realized that what was in there was just packed way too tightly to be taken out safely in the studio where the statue was being restored, So they took the time capsule to the Bostonian Society's Archives Center where they could really take their time removing the contents in a more controlled environment. Holly, do you remember this, Yes, they do, right, because when we put this story on our Facebook, people got so mad. They really did. There were some very um you know, immediate response sort of anger notes. Yeah, so this time capsule had been inside the statue for a hundred and thirteen years, but people felt like that was not nearly long enough for it to be opened. And then other people interpreted this decision to take the box somewhere more controlled to do the actual unpacking that they thought this was a sign that incompetent amateurs had been trusted with this delicate task, which was absolutely not true. It was somebody with a master of library science and archives of management like that. People also argued that they should have just had the whole statue removed somewhere safer, or that there was a lot of questions about why the time capsule needed to be removed in the first place. A lot of people wanted it and its contents to go back where it was. So then another time capsule was removed from the old State House a couple of months later, and this one dated back to and it had been put behind the corner stone by Paul Revere, then Governor of Massachusetts, Sam Adams, and Colonel William Scully. And so, based on what had happened with that first time capsule, we were really careful about what details we included when we put it up on our Facebook. We noted that it had been taken out as part of a repair to a water leak behind the cornerstone, and we specified that professional professional conservators had removed it, and that it was going to be x ray and open under controlled conditions, and that it was going to be put back after its contents had been displayed for the public for a while. Holly, do you also remember this, yes, because people were still so mad. They were there's a fascinating reaction I think that people have with time capsules and it it's I couldn't break down the psychology of it because it varies a lot, but there were definitely some angry responses. Yeah, people were still really mad this time. They were mad that the times capsule was going to be put back, which was what people had wanted to happen with the other time capsules. So at this point I kind of never wanted to mention time capsules in the context of the show again, which is one of the reasons why neither time capsule was in the unearthed in episodes. But then this April I got the chance to actually see the contents of that cornerstone time capsule while they were on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and there was literally a line all the way around the room to see it. It stretched way out into adjoining galleries. Was just to like in this little display case that was full of coins and newspapers. Uh. Part of this is because the time capsule was really small, so there was a little display case people were waiting to see into. But part of it is because people care apparently care a whole lot about time capsules. Yeah, and I feel compelled to mention that this sort of interesting um discussion that sometimes got a little heated on our Facebook page, that is not the only place that these were happening. If you looked at news sites that were posting about it, their comments sections were having very similar things play out. Yeah, there was just angriness everywhere. So we're gonna talk about time capsules today, maybe explore some of the reasons people get so excited about them. Yes, and the tradition of burying stuff really goes back almost to the beginning of human history. The most obvious example is that most of the world's cultures have at some point buried artifacts, letters, trinkets, and other objects as parts of funeral rituals. People have also been deliberately placing objects into building foundations and cornerstones for thousands of years. For example, in Mesopotamia, a common practice was to bury objects and building foundations for the purpose of sanctifying the space and protecting it, or maybe to commemorate something that was related to the building or its builders or where it was being built. This practice has continued throughout the ages and all over the world, and it has also included embedding items of religious significance in church corner stones, and the idea that these deposits might one day be discovered again has also cropped up at various times throughout history. For example, around the seventh century b c, Assyrian king as her Hadn't had relics and clay tablets put in the foundations of monuments, saying that he quote deposited them in the foundations and left them for future times. But all of these burials of stuff are a little different from the idea of a time capsule, although people of the past did sometimes think or write about how future generations might someday stumble upon their funerary deposits and their foundational deposits, which are what those things are called. Uh, that was really secondary to their purpose. They were being buried for some other reason, and the idea that somebody might come dig them up later was secondary to that. But in a time capsule, on the other hand, people intentionally gather and store objects with the specific plan that someone else is going to open them later, and usually there's a specified time frame for what later means and for the For time capsule purists, it's only a true time capsule if there's a specific end date for the thing to be opened again. This means that while a letter from a six year old to his or her future self to be opened ten years later is a time capsule according to this definition, but a giant room of artifacts to be opened at some undetermined time in the future technically isn't. Neither are time capsules that include those same sorts of things but are shot into space to be one day opened by aliens. Maybe so basically, the end date is really like the definer of what isn't isn't a time capsule. Another aspect of time capsules is that they're preserving, usually a snapshot of everyday life when they were sealed, and while there are definitely time capsules that have a much grander scope than that. They almost always also include things like coins, newspapers, photographs, letters from notable people, and everyday items that are kind of meant to give future generations a glimpse of what life used to be like. This, including of everyday life snapshots, is also why accidental preservations of everyday life, like say the ruins of Pompeii, are sometimes described as time capsules. And although there are time capsules buried all over the world, the practice is largely a tradition that came from and flourished in the United States, and there are a couple of reasons for this. A big one is that the first most famous examples of time capsules, which we're going to talk about in just a bit, we're all developed in the United States. But sociologists and psychologists also theorized that another reason that the United States has been so intent on encapsulating history to send it to the future is that as a nation, the history of the United States is pretty short. There were definitely people in North America long before the United States was a thing, but European presence in North America only goes back a few hundred years. So the theory goes that people kind of subconsciously want to instantly create something that counts as history in the eyes of future generations. And we're going to talk about some specific examples of time capsules after we have a brief forward from a sponsor. We're going to talk about the first true time capsule to start off with, and the first time we know of that people sealed things away with the specific intent that they would be brought out again at a particular date in the future was for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and that took place in eighteen seventy six. It had a century safe that was meant to be opened in nineteen seventy six. There might be earlier examples of time capsules out there that, in addition to having been buried or sealed away, also had a specified opening date, but this is the first one we actually have documentation of. And the century safe looked just like a safe, but with a purple velvet lining, which is a detail I personally love. Uh. This safe contained photographs, a book on temperance, and signatures of visitors to the Centennial Exhibition, among other things. It was stored under the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capital and opened in nineteen seventy six. As intended, a new capsule, buried in nineteen seventy six is to be opened in twenty seventy six. Even though the Century Safe was the first true time capsule, the word time capsule had not been coined yet. That did not happen until nineteen thirty eight leading up to the nineteen nine World's Fair. G Edward Pendre, who was a public relations executive for Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing, gets the credit for coming up with the term. Also, uh, for a while, because of the shape of what they were building, you thought about calling it a time bomb, and uh, I'm kind of glad that didn't take off. Um. Before the word time capsule was coined, people normally called these sorts of things safes or boxes, or similar generic terms. Westinghouse was involved with all of this because it was constructing the physical container for the World's Fair time Capsule, which was to stay underground until sixty nine, otherwise known as five thousand years from its start date. Because these capsules were supposed to stay buried for so long, the containers had to be impervious to just about any kind of damage that you could think of. The end result was a seven and a half foot long or two point two meter torpedo like tube made of a non corrosive alloy with several interior layers meant to protect the contents. These contents included cigarettes, men's and women's grooming tools, magazines, and samples of seeds and fabrics. There's also a twenties two thousand page microfilm essay, and there are letters from such figures as Albert Einstein and then m I T President Carl T. Compton. There was huge, huge fanfare around the burying of this time capsule, and there's also a total replica of it and its contents at the George Westinghouse Museum. Running concurrently with the creation of the first Westinghouse time capsule was the Crypt of Civilization, and I know a lot about this one. This is an incredibly huge and involved time capsule at Oglethorpe University, which is here in Atlanta and where I used to work. Oglethorpe President Thornwell Jacobs led this project, which is an attempt to document all of human history. The idea is that future archaeologists could just consult the material from this vault instead of having to painstakingly recreate an idea of how the world worked by piecing together information from lots of different dig sites. The Crypt of Civilization today is on a lower level of the Administration Building at Oglethorpe, And in addition to all the physical items which are inside, which are a lot things enormous, it contains more than six hundred thousand pages of microfilm which document all sorts of historical information. So this crypt was sealed on May nine, forty and it's not supposed to be opened again until the year eighty one thirteen, and this is six thousand, one hundred seventy seven years from when it was sealed up. The idea is that as of nineteen forty there were six thousand, one hundred seventy seven years of recorded history. This crypt acts as like a midpoint between the beginnings of recorded history and six thousand, one hundred seventy seven years in the future when people can just open this thing up to find out all about the past. Yeah, And it's just a big door, a big metal door that you walk by when you're in the admin building, and it has engraving on it, but it's just the door that's there that never opens. Because people were inspired by the first Westinghouse time Capsule and Oglethorpe's Crypt of Civilization, the time capsule Heyday really spanned from nineteen thirty five to nine two. Because of the Centennial Exhibition, one years became a popular time limit for time capsules to remain sealed. There are also some connections between that first Westinghouse time capsule and the Crypt that Oglethorpe so g Edward Pendre had actually called for public support of the Crypt project as it was being developed, and conversely, one of the letters inside the first Westinghouse time capsule is a letter from then Oglethorpe president Thornwell Jacobs um so that like, there was a lot of crossover between those two projects, uh, which I think is pretty cool. We're also now I can just talk about some other notable examples of time capsules, and this is not at all an exhaustive list, not even of the ones that are really big and impressive. Westinghouse created a second time capsule for the nineteen sixty eight New York World's Fair, and it's almost like an update to the first one. It's the exact same size and shape, and it's buried about ten feet away, but its contents include things that didn't exist when the previous time capsule had been put into the grounds, includes birth control pills and artificial heart valve, credit cards, information about atomic energy, and other more modern as of nineteen sixty eight stuff. Both the first Westinghouse time capsule and the second one are supposed to be opened in sixty nine thirty nine together, so that second one sort of like a supplement to the first one rather than a whole separate thing with a separate opening date. Two identical time capsules were made for expos seventy in Osaka, Japan, and one of these is to stay sealed for five thousand years, and the other is intended to be opened every one hundred years after an initial opening in the year two thousand and One reason for this plan is to check in and make sure everything's okay, but the other is to update the time capsules contents, so it kind of becomes an ongoing living archive record. And these time capsules are shaped like kettles and filled. They weigh two point one to metric tons, and although their purpose was to detail in a very broad cross section life in nineteen seventy, which means that they include lots and lots of everyday items. There's also historical information including leaflets, films, and other recordings, uh, including artifacts from the bombing of Hiroshima. And you can actually see the total contents of all these things online. They are available, and there is so much stuff jammed into them. Yeah, I really I had this moment where, Uh, I was flummoxed because I stumbled across this thing, UH that had, you know, a a comprehensive list of everything that's in there, and there are pictures of a lot of it, and I am used to when you see older pictures of things that were taken with earlier digital cameras, they look kind of terrible. And I had this moment where I just forgot that there were there were film cameras in nineteen seventy. You can you can scan pictures from nineteen seventy or film fromteen seventy, like that still exists, that didn't go away. So I had this just moment, But I feel silly confessing, but I still want to confess. Or I was like, wow, where'd they get all these pictures from? All? Right? Cameras? They were still a thing Tracy, it had been a long day. There is a one year time capsule that was created in Juno, Alaska, in and this one is huge because it was created using thousands of items that were collected from Juneau residents. It's housed in a converted lobby of a government building and you can see some of the contents through two windows that go to the outside. It's also lit with electric lights that can be changed from the outside, so it's it can be lit while still being totally sealed up. That's a pretty cool feature. Uh. There's a fortieth anniversary time castle that was buried in Disneyland in Anaheim, California, on July seventeenth of n and that is to be opened on that same date in the year. Here's hoping I'm there for that. Yeah. I was like, it's hotly gonna go. Uh. It does look like a castle, which is why it is called that. Um. Really, a hundred years is a pretty standard time for a time capsule now, and then we have these really fascinating millennial ones that go on for a thousand years and beyond. But when the Internet took off and things started changing at a super upid pace. M I t made a time capsule of the Online world sor at the Sloane School of Management, and that one was to be opened after five years because the Internet was evolving so rapidly. Aside from those that we've just mentioned, all over the world there are boxes of documents, coins, and household items just waiting to be dug up. And we'll talk about what can go wrong on that front after we have another quick word from a sponsor. So the sad truth is, as much as people like the idea of burying things for posterity, a lot of time capsules just fail. In some cases they haven't even made it to their burial or their ceiling. There was a time capsule made for the US by Centennial that went on a national tour with signatures from all over the country that we're supposed to be collected and put inside, and it made it through that whole tour, but then was dolan from the truck at the burial site before it could actually be buried. Capsules and their contents have also been lost thanks to leaks, demolitions, and people just forgetting that they were buried in the first place, or that they existed at all. So, in addition to trying to preserve all of human history up to nineteen forty in the Crypt of Civilization. Oglethorpe is also trying to keep track of all those time capsules so that nothing else gets lost, and that's via the International Time Capsule Society, which was established in nine. Yeah. One of the reasons that they really wanted to get that time capsule out of the Lion's Head statue was because they did not really know how it had been packaged and whether everything and there had already been destroyed because of water, which it hadn't, which was great. Uh, But there's also the fact that a lot of times what's inside a typical time capsule turns out to be really underwhelming once it's opened. The very nature of time capsules means that a lot of times they're full of newspapers and coins and photographs people, uh, letters from people who were famous a hundred years ago but nobody knows who they are now, and basically obsolete junk. There's even article in the Onion titled newly unearthed time Capsule just full of useless old crap, which made fun of both people's responses to what you usually find when you open a time capsule and the types of things that people select to put in there, like there's there's several layers of humor going on. Uh, this is actually kind of funny to me. How often people open a time capsule and like, no one is impressed with what was inside because it's just newspapers and coins. And yet when the time capsule was made, there were knocked down, drag out fights about what to put inside of there. Oh yeah, people are as angry about what to put in time capsules as they were within all of our Facebook posts about taking them out, because they want to make sure the exact correct picture of at time period is created with the contents. But even if people didn't find their contents boring, more often than not, the same objects placed inside time capsules are also preserved better at museums and other archives. It's very rare that someone opens a time capsule to discover something that's actually a unique find. Usually you can see a better preserved one of the exact same thing in one or many museums. However, all of that said, time capsules usually inspire and interest in history and some civic pride, at least in the short term, and that counts when they're created, and again when they're opened, and especially for the ones that are meant to stay sealed up for thousands of years, the containers themselves can involve tremendous speaks of engineering. This has especially been true for all of these ones. They're supposed to stay sealed up for many thousands of years. So while people might classify their contents into the category of war plus a junk, their creation has a different type of worth. And back to those time capsules that we talked about at the very beginning of the show, the Lion statue is back on top of the Old State House, complete with a new time capsule, and this time it's in the lions scroll, so future generations will have easier access to it. Among the contents of that capsule are an iPhone five. Apple apparently would not provide an iPhone six for this Foreign Relations of the United States nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eighty volume three to replace a copy of Foreign Relations of the United States eighteen ninety six that was in the prior box, basically to fill space, a number of letters and photos, and a Boston Marathon metal. The original items were on display at the Old State House for several weeks over December fourteen and into January. The items inside were delicate enough that after that point they were returned to the archives for preservation. Yeah, they were actually preserved incredible well, uh, considering how old the time capsule was and how it had just been in the statue out in the elements for so long. But they did want to make sure that they lasted long into the future, so they didn't stay on public display for all that long. The time capsule that was removed from the cornerstone at the Old State House is also going to go back in June, and it's going to include its original contents having been cleaned and restored, along with some new items along in the same vein basically what was in there before. We're newspapers and coins to things of that nature. Um. Its original contents were displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during March and April. The Bostonian Society and the Museum of Fine Arts also both documented what was inside those boxes and put lots of pictures and details on their websites. Yeah, so people felt like they were being hidden away from public view. They really really weren't, thank you. So much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, Since it is from the archive that might be out of date. Now, you can email us at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Back before we called it voicemail, or at least when voicemail means something different and more specific, the world had the humble Answering Machine. We're not right now, but we'll call you that if you leave name and number. If you aren't of the age to remember, the answering machine was a physical audio recorder that plugged into your phone line. You couldn't call into it remotely, You had to wait till you got home to check your messages, and they were the source for a lot of Seinfeld gaestssage. Most answering machines recorded on cassette tape. Your magnetically recorded message would be saved until you recorded over it or change the cassette. When I was a little kid, my family had a different kind of answering machine. It was actually tapeless. I think it was a Sony and it was digital. That's my dad, a man who's not apt to forget a piece of telephone technology. It was like a little tower with a big push button on top that would blink once you had a message. In addition to play and shuttle had a record button for your greeting. But on this machine, you could also record your own messages directly into it, like a voice mobile function on your phone. I think the idea was if you were the husband, wife passing, you know, running kids around and stuff, that you could leave each other messages on it if you were just standing in front of it, like you wouldn't have to call it on your non existent cell phone because none of us had cell phones back then. I don't think Mom and I ever ever used that, but you used it because you liked hearing yourself recorded him act. It sat on top of my parents bureau. So I must have had to climb on a stool or something. But I spent untold hours talking into this device. Um, my voice is going to come out all weird and stay from the spring, recorded it and play many many times. If you recorded multiple memos then hit the play button, it would run them all back to back in the order in which they were created. To a young me, this was absolute magic. By this method, and in a spirit of endless experimentation, I'd fill the tiny hard drive with recordings structured as imaginary shows. I have no idea what about I'm not sure I did then, probably just whatever came to mind. I've listened through it a hundred times and pieces as I built my episode up, and a few times over as a finished product, and wait for my parents to check their messages. I have great parents, so they listened through with at least feigned enthusiastic, but sooner or later we need the space, and with the click of a button, it was all gone. Is anyone there over? Okay? See you after it's gone. It's all by. Soon enough, i'd make another, and none of those were saved. This tape I've been playing is the closest thing I have left. It was actually recorded on microcassette, which looks just like a regular cassette tape, shrunk down to a quarter of the size. My next fascination after answering machines. Here, I'm wandering around my dad's office with his handheld voice recorders. My dad, I sound about ten round. I made lots of tapes like this, but as far as I can find, this is the last one I have left from this early in my life. Do I wish more had been saved, especially those early answering machine productions, I don't know, I guess so It's comparable to a baby picture, an old yearbook, or some other keepsake, maybe the most like a Sunday school craft project for Mother's Day. Ragged and potentially embarrassing, however sentimental. But it's ephemeral. It's a fleeting moment and it's gone. Even though I was young, I knew that at the time. It's these moments. This show fixates on lost materials, dropped threads, forgotten stories, ephemera in the way that it's intertwined in our lives, all those things tangible and intangible that you wish you could take just one more look at before they vanish into the past. America has produced like lots and lots of stuff, just piles of stuff, and it's sitting around in storage spaces and we keep making it and buying it, and then what do you do with it? And it's got to somewhere. The fact of the matter is is all day long, every day, there are warehouses full of stuff getting just pushed off a cliff, getting shoved off into the abyss and being destroyed all day every day. Betsy in Naaski, who runs the Canary Records label, a friend of mine, uh Steve Smolean, who's a record guy like me, said that what he loves is being the guy standing at the edge of the cliff waving his arms going, wait, no, let me look at those first before you throw them away. I think there might be some good stuff in there. I think there might be some stories. Well, I don't think we should throw all those away yet, because museums can't handle it, the big cultural institutions can't handle it. There's just too much stuff. You know, they're getting donated piles of stuff all the time. The fact of the matter is they don't always know or care. They're looking for specific things that relate to specific narratives, so you always need somebody who's looking for a different story. We have a season ten episodes of stories from that realm, of things that were just barely saved, and in some cases not saved at all. A bizarre tale of two infamous New Yorkers booby trapped their home and turned it into the shield fortress of a missing chapter of American music history. There hasn't been a guess culturally that they matter, so they got thrown in the garbage. A decade's worth of original television lost to the airways. It's over. You're gonna see something else the next second, and nobody's ever going to see a piece of music that's defied convention for seventy years. I had students write down the sounds they heard during it, and one girl said, I never realized there was so much to listen to and what could only be called an audio mystery. It said nothing on it and it clearly had been recorded, which intrigued me. What is this going to be? These stories and more given new life, if only for a glimpse. There's times I can't help but feeling like that little kid again talking into a machine that I'm sure won't save anything I say into it. Also, is this podcast a piece of ephemer in the making, A forgotten story about forgotten stories. Only time will tell the Ephemeral debuts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And learn more at Ephemeral dot show. End of messages.