The Little-Known Dark History of Time Capsules

Today, time capsules have a fairly benign use. Countless individuals, schools, and businesses have placed current artifacts in sealed boxes in the hopes that they will provide useful information about a particular era once opened by future generations. But back when time capsules first became popular in the early 20th century, their purposes were often much more sinister.

A time bomb of trouble

The term time capsule was coined by public relations consultant George E. Pendray, who used the phrase to describe a box provided by the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Although the time capsule wouldn't be opened until the year 6939, the contents were no mystery: It was filled with everyday items—including an alarm clock, an electric razor, money, and seeds—along with documents on microfilm and a newsreel to further explain how people lived in the 1930s.

Pendray's first suggestion to name the object was actually the Time Bomb. The moniker was appropriate given the ship's distinctive torpedo-like shape, but was rejected because of its association with war. A similar, room-sized project by Thornwell Jacobs, president of Oglethorpe University, was called the "Tomb of Civilization," but that name was apparently never accepted.

In fact, time capsules have been assembled for hundreds of years—just without the catchy names. In 2023, a bronze box was discovered atop the tower of St. Stanislaus Church in Wschowa, Poland, containing documents, newspapers, coins, and medals dating back to 1726. In 1795, Samuel Adams and Paul Revere buried a similar time capsule in the corner stone of the Massachusetts Capitol in Boston. Boxes containing items like newspapers, coins, colonial records, and a medallion of George Washington were unearthed (and then reburied) in 1855 and 2014.

But later prototype time capsules were often filled with darker material. In 1876, Charles Mosher created a commemorative safe for the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. Mosher was an early proponent of eugenics, and, as Nick Yablon, a history professor at the University of Iowa, explained to Australia's ABC News, he "feared the contamination of Anglo-Saxon Protestant bloodlines." His time capsule contained some 10,000 portraits of people he considered to be of suitable bloodline, along with information about schools that taught proper child rearing and laws that restricted who could have children. Yablon writes in his book Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule that the time capsule "gave concrete form to his racial vision, making his eugenic ideal world a reality through the box."

Other eugenicists soon followed in Mosher's footsteps, using time capsules as a way to preserve their racist ideas about genetic improvement. Yablon reports that a reference to eugenics—often in the form of pamphlets—appears in nearly every time capsule he encounters from the early 1900s.

Excavating a better future

Thankfully, the time capsules being created today have left eugenics in the past. 'Time capsules have expanded the idea of ​​how we communicate through time,' says Yablon, and as such, they could help encourage people to make the world a better place for those who eventually open them.

Jessica Tanner

Update 29 October 2024