Time Capsules: Three Snapshots of Life and Their Contents

Time capsules are simply that.  A capsule that is essentially a snap shot of an era.  It seems to be a human need to communicate to those who as of yet do not exist, what life is like for us now.  It’s almost as though we dream of being the “King Tut’s Tomb” of the future, so to speak.  

In fact, we are so fascinated with preserving information about ourselves and modern life that the building of these special containers have become a legitimate industry.  Here are some time capsules that have been buried in the last two centuries and what they contained.

In 1878, a time capsule was buried under Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment in London.  Items included in the capsule are as follows:

• Bibles in four languages.
• A box of hairpins.
• A copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide of the World.
• A copy of Whittaker’s Almanac.
• A complete set of coins and weights of the day.
• A map of London.
• Copies of newspaper’s printed on the day the time capsule was buried.
• One of the hydraulic jacks used to raise Cleopatra’s Needle.
• A baby feeding bottle.
• Several toys.
• A collection of pictures of a dozen pretty English women.

A time capsule, which was placed under a memorial stone in Hong Kong commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, buried in 1897 was opened eighty years afterward.  It contained:

• A collection of coins of that time period.
• Copies of a local newspaper called the China Mail, whose front-page story listed the current opium trading prices.
• The details of a court case of a Mr. C. Holdsworth, a 230 pound Hong Kong resident who sued a rickshaw driver for refusing to provide him with transportation.

The Westinghouse time capsule, which was sealed at the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, New York in 1964 has a multitude of items inside.  The torpedo shaped capsule rests below a granite slab with an inscription with instructions to leave the capsule unopened for at least five thousand years.  These items include:

• Twenty million words of microfilmed text.
• The Bible.
• A piece of a heat shield from a spacecraft.
• A National Geographic World Atlas (on microfilm).
• Freeze dried food.
• A bikini.
• A Beatles record.
• A plastic heart valve.
• An electronic watch.
• A pocket radiation detector.
• A vial of desalted Pacific Ocean sea water.
• A ruby laser rod.
• A bottle to tranquilizers, a bottle of antibiotics and a bottle of birth control pills.
• A ballpoint pen, a rechargeable   and an electric toothbrush.
• A satellite radio receiver.
• A roll of superconducting wire.
• Credit cards, a pack of Kent filter cigarettes and a Polaroid camera.
• An electric toothbrush.