On May 23, 1914, the Lower Wall Street Business Men’s Association in New York was commemorating several great events in the country's history, including the “union of the Colonies” - the birth of the USA - exactly 140 years before.
The men decided to fill a great bronze box with various documents pertaining to the history of Wall Street and the interests of the people who ran it. They also included a programme with the current day’s proceedings and a copy of an iconic 1774 letter, from New York to Boston, urging the colonies to unit.
Former mayor and current Chamber of Commerce President Seth Low then handed the box to the New York Historical Society . He explained that the 1774 letter inside was “the first suggestion of a union of the colonies in connection with the then approaching conflict with the mother country”. The historical society was given instructions for the box to remain sealed until the Colony Union’s 200th birthday, in 1974. (You can read the New York Times account of events at the time here .)
But when 1974 rolled around, the box was still gathering dust in the society’s warehouse. It is thought that the city’s fiscal crisis of the time might have something to do with the box being forgotten. On top of this, the people behind the capsule in the first place, the Lower Wall Street’s Business Men’s Association, didn’t actually exist anymore.
Almost 25 years later, in 1998, the New York Historical Society’s Decorative Arts Curator Marji Hofer was cataloguing artefacts in that very same warehouse when she came upon the bronze box.
“On October 11, 1614, the Dutch Republic granted a charter and a three-year fur trading monopoly to the New Netherland Company,” said Professor Nick Yablon, a historian with the society and something of an expert on time capsules. “It was this event that the Wall Street merchants were celebrating in 1914.” He suggested that as the original opening date had passed, the chest should be opened in 2014 to celebrate 400 years since the trade agreement.
So last week, a crowd gathered around the historical society’s CEO Dr Louise Mirrer, with art handlers Daniel Santiago and Richard Miller, waiting for the chest to be unsealed for the first time in a century.
Once the box had been opened, Professor Yablon was the one to remove the contents: the documents and news reports from 1914 and the 1774 - and a message from the past.
“There was also a telegram from the governor of New York which is partly addressed to the time capsule organiser,” said the professor, “but also to the future governor of New York in 1974.”
Given that the time capsule was opened forty years later than it was meant to have been, it has become the world’s oldest example of one - created before the phrase “time capsule” had even been put to use.
The bronze box is now going to preserved using modern techniques, resealed and stored for its next scheduled opening in 2074, which it will no doubt create the same sense of wonder - if not more so - as it caused in this day and age.
In celebration of the whole event, high-school students from the historical society’s internship programme have created a time capsule of their own, hoping for it to be opening in a century’s time. Of course, as these are teenagers and not businessmen from Wall Street, the contents of this new time capsule are going to be a little different.
Some of the contributions include - among other things - an iconic New York paper coffee cup, a subway poster, a library card from the New York Public Library, a gay pride Tshirt, a Kindle, and a number of popular websites stored on a flash drive. But just so the business people of the future don’t feel left out, a copy of The Economist was also thrown in for good measure. We can only imagine what future generations will make of all that!
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