The Surprisingly Dark History of Time Capsules

These days, time capsules have a pretty wholesome reputation. Countless individuals, schools, and businesses have placed present-day items in sealed containers with the hope that they’ll provide illuminating information about a given era once eventually opened by a future generation (although they sometimes prove to be rather disappointing). But back when time capsules were first gaining popularity at the start of the 20th century, their purpose was often far more nefarious.

A Troubling Time Bomb

The term time capsule was coined by PR consultant George E. Pendray, who used the phrase to describe the container that was put together by the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Although the time capsule won’t be opened until 6939, the contents aren’t a mystery: It’s filled with everyday objects—including an alarm clock, an electric razor, money, and seeds—along with documents on microfilm and a newsreel to further explain how people lived during the 1930s.

Pendray’s first suggestion for naming the object was actually time bomb. The moniker was fitting given the vessel’s distinctly torpedo-like shape, but was nixed because of its connotations with war. A similar and concurrent room-sized project spear-headed by Thornwell Jacobs, the President of Oglethorpe University, was dubbed the “Crypt of Civilization,” but that name obviously never caught on.  

Time capsules had actually already been assembled a couple of hundred years earlier—just without a catchy name (at least, that we know of). In 2023, a copper box was discovered in the spire of the Church of St. Stanislaus in Wschowa, Poland, containing documents, newspapers, coins, and medals dating as far back as 1726. In 1795, Samuel Adams and Paul Revere buried a similar time capsule in the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. The box—which contains items such as newspapers, coins, Colonial records, and a medal depicting George Washington—was unearthed (and later reburied) in both 1855 and 2014.

But slightly later proto-time capsules were often filled with more sinister materials. In 1876, Charles Mosher created a Memorial Safe for the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. Mosher was an early promoter of eugenics, who, as Nick Yablon, a history professor at the University of Iowa, explained to Australia’s ABC News, had “fears about the contamination of Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock.” His time capsule was filled with around 10,000 portraits of people who he deemed to be the right stock, along with information about schools for proper instruction in child-rearing and laws that restricted who could have children. Yablon writes in his book Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule that the time capsule “gave physical form to his racial visions, rendering his eugenicist utopia concrete through the vessel.”

Other eugenics supporters soon followed in Mosher’s footsteps, using time capsules as a way to preserve their racist ideas about genetic improvement. Yablon reported that a link to eugenics—often in the form of pamphlets—popped up in nearly every time capsule he encountered from the early 1900s.

Unearthing a Better Future

Thankfully, the time capsules that are put together these days have left eugenics in the past. “The time capsule expanded our idea of how we communicated through time,” Yablon said, and as such, they can serve to encourage people to make the world a better place for those who will eventually open the capsule.

Since 2014, for instance, a book has been added each year to Katie Paterson’s Future Library project (the manuscripts are currently housed in Oslo Public Library, but they aren’t available for reading) and in 2114 the collection will be published using paper made from a purpose-grown forest in Norway. “The Future Library project is a vote of confidence in the future,” author David Mitchell, who has contributed a book to the project, explained to the BBC. “We have to trust our successors, and their successors, and theirs, to steer the project through a hundred years of political skulduggery, climate change, budget cutbacks and zombie apocalypses.”

Some time capsules aren’t even Earth-bound. In 1977, NASA launched twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2 into interstellar space with Golden Records on board to serve as time capsules. The two gold-plated phonograph records contain images and sounds relating to human life—including diagrams of human anatomy and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”—for the benefit of any extraterrestrials who might happen upon either of the crafts. 

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