Dale’s Daily Data: Time Capsules

It seems time speeds up as you get older….making us realize that life is passing us by quicker than we think.  Maybe that’s why there’s a fascination with wanting to leave a part of ourselves behind…to make a statement to future generations that we were here.  The pyramids of Egypt give us a good idea of what life was like thousands of years ago.  Will people thousands of years from now wonder what our lives were like….will they care?  We’re not really sure…but at least we’ll give them a chance with the dozens of time capsules that are buried every year.  Elementary schools, universities, states, cities, scientific groups and clubs are always putting together collections of photos, CD’s, documents and other items to be opened years, decades or centuries in the future.  Problem is many of them get forgotten or stolen.  That’s why the International Time Capsule Society was formed in Atlanta to document every time capsule to give it a better chance of actually being opened someday.  At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Westinghouse company filled a seven-foot long cylinder with the modern items of the day and buried it with instructions that it not be opened for five-thousand years.  A company executive came up with the term time capsule and it entered the English language overnight.  Westinghouse buried a second time capsule at the World’s Fair in New York in 1964.  Among the items included in that time capsule were a bikini, a Beatles record, credit cards, a Poloroid camera, plastic wrap, an electric toothbrush, a ballpoint pen, an American flag, a transistor radio, contact lenses, birth control pills, freeze-dried food and a bible.