Updated March 01, 2020 09:30:40

There's more to time capsules than fond childhood memories of burying hand-written notes.

University of Iowa history expert Nick Yablon has traced the origins of time capsules back to the late 1870s, and uncovered a murky history.

He says they were used in the early promotion of eugenics the idea of improving the human race through "scientific breeding".

In his observations of the early 1900s, he says, the link to eugenics "comes up in almost every time capsule I found".

The conception of the modern time capsule seemed innocent enough.

The term was first officially coined by George E Pendray, a PR consultant for Westinghouse Electric Company, to describe the company's exhibit for the New York World's Fair in 1939.

"He was going to call it the 'time bomb'," Dr Yablon tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.

"But in 1939 that probably wouldn't have gone down too well."

The Westinghouse capsule is bequeathed to Earth's inhabitants in 6939AD, so it will be a long time before anyone knows what's inside.

But a plaque on the capsule lists some of its contents: 22,000 pages of microfilm, 15 minutes of newsreel, an alarm clock, bifocals and believe it or not carrots.

Like the Westinghouse effort, time capsules were often created by people of influence, who had the money and means to construct and commission them.

Many seemed to be more about commemorating an individuals' own achievements than sending a meaningful message to the future.

And museums were just a little bit miffed about them.

"The time capsule was definitely a kind of riposte to the museum," Dr Yablon says.

"Museums were seen as inadequate memorialisations of the present. They tended to be full of relics of other civilisations or they were collections that were massed haphazardly without any sense of how they illuminated the present.

"So the time capsule would be a narrower selection for future audiences or future historians to view."

According to Dr Yablon, one of the first people to create a time vessel was Chicago photographer Charles Mosher, an early advocate of eugenics.

Mosher created a "Memorial Safe" time vessel for the American Centennial Exposition in 1876, celebrating 100 years since the country's signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In his book Remembrance of Things Present, Dr Yablon writes that Mosher appears to have had "fears about the contamination of Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock".

To memorialise that stock, Mosher filled a safe with some 10,000 portraits of notable Chicagoans and their wives, as well as literature on "progenerate" schools and colleges.

Mosher invoked eugenics pseudoscience in "vaguely expressed hopes that the 'healthy' could be encouraged to reproduce ... and the 'unfit' discouraged", Dr Yablon says.

He writes that Mosher "gave physical form to his racial visions, rendering his eugenicist utopia concrete through the vessel".

Time capsules attracted others like Mosher, who included eugenicist pamphlets in their vessels.

Dr Yablon says there's a more altruistic element to the tradition of time capsules that could be embraced as we face the global challenge of climate change.

At the turn of the 20th century, Louis Ehrich, a Jewish American from Colorado Springs, created a time capsule intended for today's citizens of his city.

According to Dr Yablon, Ehrich was concerned about environmental degradation and other developments in America, such as class conflict.

"He used the time capsule there to kind of create and instil a sense of duty to future generations," he says.

As students across the world protest for climate change action, Dr Yablon believes time capsules could help create a sense of responsibility to future generations and negotiate a way forward.

"We need more than just a philosophy or a ... legal theory of the rights of future generations," he says.

"We actually need to create a sense of emotional connection. Time capsules are a very powerful way of creating that."

Simply by existing, time capsules acknowledge future generations because what's the point of creating a time capsule, if it won't have an audience?

In that way, they connect the future with the present.

"The time capsule expanded our idea of how we communicated through time," Dr Yablon says.

Take Scottish artist Katie Paterson's Future Library, a time capsule reimagined.

Paterson's large-scale art project began in 2014, when a thousand spruce trees were planted in a forest just outside of Oslo.

The trees will be allowed to grow for a hundred years before they are cut down and turned into paper, which will be used to print 100 previously unseen manuscripts, by authors such as Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Karl Ove Knausgrd.

Dr Yablon says it's a project that is about more than just the books.

"It's that idea of exercising stewardship over the forest that will create the wood for the paper that will print these books," he says.

"The book is the lure, but the real message is the need to... cultivate those forests and preserve them, and preserve the larger environment."

And in so doing, maybe time capsules can counter their darker past, by helping to create a brighter future.

Topics:history,19th-century,20th-century,race-relations,human-interest,united-states,australia

First posted March 01, 2020 07:00:00

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The history of time capsules has a dark side linked to eugenics. But their future is brighter - ABC News