What Was Found Inside the Oldest American Time Capsule | Hacker News Reader

What Was Found Inside the Oldest American Time Capsule

smithsonianmag.com

50 pointsjonbaer10 comments

My fifth grade class in elementary school (1968-1969 school year) built a time-capsule filled with our drawings and writings and even a reel-to-reel audiotape recording of our predictions of the world in 2001. The time capsule was opened that year, with some TV news crews at the big school ceremony for the opening. (I missed the ceremony entirely, living in Taiwan at the time, but my mom attended the ceremony and met up with many of my classmates from that year.) We predicted concern about environmental pollution, ongoing efforts to find renewable energy sources, and fixed-rail mass transportation systems for our town. I predicted considerably more progress in people getting over racism and all of humankind treating their fellow human beings like their fellow human beings than has actually happened so far, one of the big disappointments of my adult life. None of us, of course, had any idea how pervasive personal computing technology would be in daily life by 2001, nor did we anticipate how much manned space exploration would diminish by that year.

Coins and newspaper... Sounds like it's stuff they just grabbed around the house before heading to the ceremony.

Here's what's in the new one (to be opened in 100 years).

http://www.wbur.org/2014/11/19/new-lion-time-capsule-boston

David Ortiz bobblehead, Iphone , Marathon Medal , Legal Seafood Menu ...

Call me sentimental, but the addition of a 150 year old piece of currency from the country you just won your independence from, along with newly minted currency of your less than 20 year old democracy, sounds exactly like the items that should be remembered. The very fact that these items are mundane and quaint to us would possibly give the people who placed these items great satisfaction knowing their newly formed country lasted even a hundred years.

Indeed, if these would have been coins newly minted from the federal mint, then the act[0] that allowed for their creation had only been passed 3 years prior.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_Act_of_1792

I woulda preferred treasure maps... just me.

Yeah. My impression watching the ceremony was "so... someone literally emptied his pockets into this thing and called it a day."

How much would a newspaper that cost 2¢ then cost today?

Depends if it was the same one or not.

i imagine he was asking about inflation. using this inflation calculator (http://www.in2013dollars.com/1795-dollars-in-2000?amount=2), which doesn't support entering cents, to find that two 1795 dollars equate to $26.47. dividing by 100 gives us about 26 cents. a bit less than i expected.

That's pretty cool that we can just x-ray it to see what's inside before we open it. This box was last opened (in 1855) 40 years before the discovery of the x-ray (1895).

I bet most of the content must have been Paul Revere's idea.

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