Updated 3 March 2021 at 16:26 IST
Sealed letter mailed in 1697 finally opened by researchers virtually 'without tampering'
Researchers have finally read an unopened letter that was mailed back in 1697 but was not delivered after developing a way to virtually “unfold” such letters.
- World News
- 3 min read
The researchers have finally read an unopened letter that was mailed back in 1697 but was not delivered after developing a way to virtually “unfold” sealed letter packets without actually breaking the seal. The new technique, called “letterlocking” has been described in the journal Nature Communications which is a practice of using elaborate slits, folds, creases and tucks to turn a flat sheet of paper with a written message into a tamper-resistant package.
It is also believed that the new found technique had been long in place for several centuries. Jana Dambrogio, a conservator with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries in Cambridge, Mass. told NPR “The envelope as we know it, the gummed envelope, wasn't invented until the 1830s...And so before then, everyone letterlocked.” However, the technologies for letterlocking had varied greatly with people folding and sealing their messages in a range of different ways.
Dambrogio reportedly said, “They can make it look like it's less secure and have security hidden on the inside...Or they can make something look very secure, but it actually isn't that secure on the inside, when you open the letter packet." Letterlocking did not get much attention until only recently. But in the past, archivists would open looked letters by simply cutting them. "What do we lose when we open the unopened?" asks Dambrogio. She also told the media outlet that finds it "thrilling" that the sealed letter can be opened "without tampering with the letter packet, leaving it to study as an unopened object."
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What was in the letter?
Since Dambrogio opened the letter with a team of researchers without disturbing it, it was revealed that the letter was written in 1697. It was found in The Hague in an old postmaster’s trunk. The inks that were used at that time contained high amounts of metal, therefore, the team used an X-ray scanner that can create 3D images of teeth to make a 3D image of the letter.
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Then, the writing on the sealed letter reportedly showed up “as a very bright region on the scan," like a bone would appear on an X-ray, Amanda Ghassaei of Adobe Research told NPR. However, because the letter was folded so many times, the letter had several layers close together and words looked jumbled. Ghassaei said that the team had to “find a way to manipulate that data and actually virtually unfold it so that we could get it into a flat state”. Finally, the researchers used a brute-force algorithm and found out that the letter was sent t request an official death certificate for a relative.
Published By : Aanchal Nigam
Published On: 3 March 2021 at 16:29 IST