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Time in a Box
Humans like to seal collections of ephemera in containers that they then hide in soon-to-be-forgotten places. Whither the time capsule?
He points out that the contents often “duplicat[ed] documents that remain available in libraries.” So, the intent wasn’t to save or preserve items that wouldn’t otherwise survive. In 1976, when President Ford was about to open an 1879 capsule with unknown contents, he hedged his bets, claiming that “there is no safe big enough, to contain the hopes, the energies, the abilities of our people,” regardless of what was in the box. “The prosaic contents—an inkstand, a scroll, an autograph and photograph album, and various miscellanea—proved ‘rather a disappointment for those present,’” writes Yablon, quoting contemporaneous news accounts.
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