A Time Capsule? Forget About It

The University of Chicago Law School is displaying a collection of letters recovered from a time capsule that was sealed in a cornerstone in 1958, reports the Chicago Tribune.

The capsule was supposed to have been unsealed on May 28, 2008 — the 50th anniversary of the school’s opening — and would have been forgotten altogether but for a discovery by an alumni-magazine reporter. The loss would have been a tremendous one; the capsule contained letters from Supreme Court justices and the physicist Edward Teller, among others.

A Chronicle article that we dug up from our archives reports that humans have been misplacing time capsules ever since they became objects of popular fascination. The vessels are sealed amid great fanfare, but their openings — assuming the capsules aren’t forgotten — rarely arouse excitement.

One time capsule described in the article, “the Crypt of Civilization,” located at Oglethorpe University, is to be opened in the year 8113. It contains, among other things, a can of Budweiser.