On July 31, 1697, a French lawyer named Jacques Sennacques wrote an urgent message to remind a cousin in the Netherlands to send him the death certificate of a relative. To prevent other people from reading the confidential note, the note was carefully folded or the letter was “locked.” He old technique, which transformed the letter on its own for sure package, was prevalent before the invention of envelopes.
However, for unknown reasons, the note never reached the recipient, but was hidden in the trunk of a postmaster, where he remained. undetected for centuries. There is now a team of international researchers deciphered the content of more than 300 years meticulously sealed letter – without opening it!
Written in French and translated into English by scientists, it said:
Dear Sir and Cousin,
It has been a few weeks since I wrote to you asking you to write me a legalized extract of the death of Sir Daniel Le Pers, which took place in The Hague in December 1695, without hearing you. I am writing to you a second time to remind you of the pains I took on your behalf. It is important for me to have this extract, it will be a great pleasure for me to try it to send me at the same time news of your health from the whole family. I also pray that God will keep you in His graces and cover you with the blessings needed for your salvation. Nothing more at the moment, except that I beg you to believe that I am completely, sir and cousin, your most humble and very obedient servant,
Jacques Sennacques
The chain of events that leads to this breaker the technology began in 2015 when Jana Dambrogio, an MIT curator and expert on “letter blocking,” received a call from Daniel Starza Smith, a researcher at King’s College London. “He asked me,‘ What would you do if I told you there was a trunk with 600 unopened cards? “, Said Dambrogio Live science. “I had to ‘unopen.’
The sealing treasure correspondence it was among the 3,100 letters that had gone unnoticed in a trunk at the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, the Netherlands, since 1926. It had previously belonged to the seventeenth-century postmaster Simon de Brienne. Historians believe the post office stored letters that were not delivered in the hope of collecting someday. This is because, in the seventeenth century, it was the recipients, not the sender, who assumed the postage cost. “The idea was that if they kept the letters that weren’t delivered, someone could eventually show up for them, at which point they would be paid,” said Rebekah Ahrendt, music historian and co-author of the studio. Cable news.
When Brienne died in 1707, he legacy the trunk of letters – considered an asset during this period – to an orphanage. Somehow, the chest went to the Dutch Ministry of Finance in The Hague and finally to the postal museum, where it was until recently.
Since he opened the fragile the letters would destroy them, Dambrogio and his team decided to develop technology to virtually seal them. They started using oneresolution X-ray dental scanner to create a detailed three-dimensional image of a sealed letter. Although the writing on the inside appeared very clearly, similar to how a tooth appears on an x-ray, the numerous the layers of folded paper pressed together caused the words to overlap.
Said Amanda Ghassaei of Adobe Research NPR, “The challenge here was to really try to find a way to do that manipulate this data and actually virtually unfold it so that we can place it in a flat state and really kind of generate something that looks like an image of the letter if it had been opened and flattened. But in reality, we haven’t even touched the letter. “
To solve the problem, the researchers created one sophisticated algorithm capable of deciphering the writing of the cleverly folded letter, fold by fold. The virtual opening allowed the team to read the contents “while retaining letter-blocking evidence.” He algorithm, which was first tested to study a partially open letter in 2016, it took almost five years to perfect. This was said by Holly Jackson, an MIT student who worked on the project NPR, “It simply came to our notice then refining this pipe, trying to make it completely automated, completely generalizable to many different intricate folding patterns. ”
Once perfected, they used it to open four locked letters digitally and completely decode that of Sennacques.
Scientists, who revealed their revolutionary technology in the magazine Communications on Nature on March 2, 2021, he plans to decode and translate all the sealed letters from the Brienne collection and exhibit them at the Museum voor Communicatie. Those who cannot visit it will be able to read the document digitized versions a dedicated website. The new technology will also allow scientists around the world to study tens of thousands of unopened historical letters, including hundreds from the Prize Paper collection taken from enemy ships by Britain between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Resources: LiveScience.com, NPR.org, thisiscollasal.org.