In July 1697, Jacques Sennacques of Lille, France, wrote a letter to his trading cousin, Pierre le Pers, in The Hague. The topic of discussion was a death certificate from his relative, a topic that the cousins had previously discussed, but which Le Pers had not followed. The letter was the Renaissance equivalent of a “for my previous email” and was only read for the first time since it was stamped 324 years ago.
But even though it was read, the letter remains unopened. It is letterlocked, a term coined by MIT curator Jana Dambrogio for letters that use specific folds and slits to seal, without the need for an envelope. Letter lock it was the typical way of sealing the messages of the days before to the mass-produced envelopes; Queen Elizabeth I of England had at least five different variations of letter blocking to privatize her correspondence.
In a unique application of the technology, Dambrogio’s team “deployed” the Sennacques epistle virtually using X-ray microtomography, which allowed researchers to circumvent the often detrimental process of a manual letter opening. The team’s investigation was published Tuesday in Nature Communications magazine.
“I remember a feeling of joy, as in, [oh my god] we finally did, “said co-author Rebekah Ahrendt, a musicologist at Utrecht University, in an email.” Having worked with this collection for a few years, the effect of “I’m probably the first person to read this since it was written “has worn out a bit … That said, this letter is such a wonderful example of the concerns of normal people right now.”
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It is not known why the Pers never received the letter, given his profession, perhaps he moved. But the sealed letter remained in the hands of The Hague’s leading postmasters, Simone de Brienne, and his wife, Marie Germain. The couple did not rule out the attached family matter because in those days the letters were acquired by the recipients, not paid for by their senders. Some postmasters kept unclaimed letters in case someone finally came to buy them. The couple in charge of The Hague charge was hoarding or decidedly optimistic, because they stayed on the cards until they died. Thousands of letters by Brienne and Germain were kept in an old trunk and 600 of them are locked messages; is an incredible set of time-suspended European conversations, now called the Brienne Collection. The collection resides in The Hague Museum of Sound and Vision.
Throwing X-rays through the letter written by Sennacques produced the spread of iron-rich ink that he wrote down on each fold of the letter. The intensity of the X-rays was about a third of that used by the machine itself for its original purpose: imagining teeth and bones.
“We started with a computed tomography with very high resolution of the folded card pack, basically a 3D X-ray image,” said Amanda Ghassaei, lead co-author, the project’s algorithm engineer and who has previously worked at folds in origami, in an email. “From here, our algorithm detects individual layers of paper in the scan and reconstructs the folded geometry. This computational pipeline allows us to observe scripts, watermarks, stamps, internal folds and any other information hidden inside the packet of letters without doing any damage to the original artifact.
But that was not enough. The team also had to decipher the folded letter, understanding which characters fell into the deployed version. To do this, they employed a computer flattening script, to deconstruct the letter without touching it. While it’s an imperceptible mess of outside characters, wrapped in khaki paper, the research team was able to extract the message without any problems.
The research team did not describe any of the folded provisions of Sennacques ’letter in code; the algorithm made the strong geometric elevation.
“We know the message and the complex internal mechanics of these letters only because they have been virtually reconstructed,” said co-author Holly Jackson, an MIT student and project algorithm engineer. “Our methods are fully automatic, unbiased to guide scanning and do not require prior knowledge of the folded geometry of a letterpacket.”
Therefore, to write the new article, the team used X-rays to detect the arrangement of the ink on a centennial piece of paper, built and deployed an algorithm to virtually deploy that paper, and described the contents of this letter. next to it a complex dictionary for the various letter-blocking techniques as the greatest practice in days before envelopes. Essentially, the play was triple.
The sum of these efforts is a clear plan of attack for the approximately 600 lettered objects left in the chest. Cousins scruples, marital disputes, state secrets, who knows?
It’s as close as history can get to holding your breath.