Westinghouse Time Capsules
There were record books about these time capsules given to thousands of libraries, museums, and other depositories worldwide to preserve the knowledge that they exist.
[1] New York publicist George Edward Pendray was editor for Literary Digest when in 1936 he interviewed Thornwell Jacobs, organizer of Oglethorpe University's millennia-spanning time crypt of objects preserved for the people of 8113 AD.
[7] Westinghouse claims that Cupaloy has the same strength as steel, yet will resist most corrosion over thousands of years because it becomes an anode in electrolytic reactions, receiving deposits instead of wasting away like most iron-bearing metals.
[11] Among the 35 small, everyday items placed inside Time Capsule I were a fountain pen and an alphabet block set.
Also included in the capsule were copies of Life magazine, a kewpie doll, one dollar in change, a pack of Camel cigarettes, a 15-minute RKO Pathe Pictures newsreel, a Lilly Daché hat, and millions of words of text put on microfilm rolls which included a Sears Roebuck catalog, a dictionary, and an almanac.
A variety of seeds were placed in the time capsule including wheat, corn, oats, tobacco, cotton, flax, rice, soy beans, alfalfa, sugar beets, carrots, and barley.
During packaging of the contents, under the direction of representatives of the United States National Bureau of Standards, each object was examined to determine whether it could be expected to endure 5,000 years.
Pendray was sent a letter by anthropologist Clark David Wissler that he felt most things were well represented in a draft list of the items going into the time capsule, except perhaps that of a sewing machine and noteworthy ceremonies (i.e. religious, weddings).
Rose Arnold Powell, known for attempting to get Susan B. Anthony represented on Mount Rushmore,[13] sent Pendray a telegraph requesting that he get an input from women's suffrage activist Carrie Chapman Catt.
Signers received tin pins, about 1.2 inches (30 mm) across (roughly the size of an American fifty-cent piece), stating, My name is in the Westinghouse Time Capsule for the next 5,000 years.
It is thought that this information will allow people of the future to determine the number of years that have elapsed since the capsule was buried by computing backward from their time.
The time capsule will likely move vertically or horizontally for geological reasons,[29] so an alternate electromagnetic field method was provided.
This method involves constructing a loop of wire 10 feet (3.0 m) in diameter and putting an alternating current (between 1,000 and 5,000 hertz) through it with a power of at least 200 watts.
[30] At the close of the 1965 World's Fair, a seven-ton "permanent sentinel" granite monument, made by the Rock of Ages Corporation, was installed.
The 50-foot-long (15 m) shaft was filled using pitch, concrete and earth, and the monument placed to mark the position where the two time capsules are buried.
[36] Robert Andrews Millikan's message, At this moment, August 22, 1938, the principles of representative ballot government, such as are represented by the governments of the Anglo-Saxon, French, and Scandinavian countries, are in deadly conflict with the principles of despotism, which up to two centuries ago had controlled the destiny of man throughout practically the whole of recorded history.
If the rational, scientific, progressive principles win out in this struggle there is a possibility of a warless, golden age ahead for mankind.
What we, in this year of Our Lord 1938, understand by the term "culture" a notion held in small esteem today by certain nations of the western world is simply this endeavor.
[38] TIME CAPSULE OF CUPALOY, DEPOSITED ON THE SITE OF THE NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR ON SEPTEMBER 23,1938, BY THE WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC & MANUFACTURING COMPANY.
[42] It also includes an illustration showing exactly where each of the 33 sounds of 1938 English are formed in the oral cavity in what Dr. Harrington refers to as a "mouth map.
