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 others from reading the confidential note, the note was carefully folded or “letter blocked”. old technique, which transformed the letter in its own right sure package, was predominantly before the invention of envelopes.
However, for unknown reasons, the note never reached the recipient and was instead hidden in the trunk of a postmaster, where it remained. detected for centuries. Now a team of international researchers has decipherable the content of the over 300 years meticulous sealed letter – without opening it!
Written in French and translated into English by scientists, he said:
Dear Sir and Cousin,
It has been a few weeks since I wrote to you asking you to draw up for me a legalized fragment of the death of Sir Daniel Le Pers, which took place in The Hague in December 1695, without hearing from you. I am writing to you a second time to remind you of the pain I have taken on your behalf. It is important for me to have this extract, you will be very happy to buy it to send me news about your health of the whole family at the same time. I also pray that God will keep you in His holy graces and cover you with the blessings necessary for your salvation. Nothing more for the time being, except that I beg you to believe that I am complete, sir and cousin, your humblest and most obedient servant,
Jacques Sennacques
The chain of events that lead to this innovation the technology began in 2015, when MIT curator and “letter blocking” expert Jana Dambrogio received a phone 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 600-letter unopened trunk?’ Dambrogio said Living science. “He had me ‘unopened.'”
The sealed treasure correspondence was among the 3,100 letters that went unnoticed in a trunk at the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 1926. It once belonged to the seventeenth-century postal director Simon de Brienne. Historians believe that the post office stored the undivided letters in the hope that they would be paid one day. That’s because in the seventeenth century it was consignee, not the sender, who incurred the postage. “The idea was that if they kept the undelivered letters, then someone could come back for them, at which point they would pay,” said Rebekah Ahrendt, a music historian and co-author of the study. Wired news.
When Brienne died in 1707, he tied up the trunk of letters – considered an asset at the time – to an orphanage. Somehow, the trunk made its way to the Dutch Ministry of Finance in The Hague and finally to the postal museum, where it remained until recently.
Since the opening fragile the letters will destroy them, Dambrogio and her team have decided to develop technology to unseal them virtually. They started by using aresolution X-ray dental scanner to create a detailed three-dimensional image of a sealed letter. While the writing inside appeared very clear, similar to the way an X-ray tooth appears, many the layers of folded paper pressed side by side caused the words to overlap.
Said Amanda Ghassaei of Adobe Research NPR, “The challenge here was really to try to find a way to manipulate those data and in fact practically unfold it so that we can reach it in a flat state and, in fact, a kind Generate something that looks like an image of the letter if it had been opened and flattened. But in reality, I didn’t even touch the letter. “
To solve the problem, researchers created a sophisticated algorithm capable of deciphering cleverly folded, crease by crease writing. The virtual opening allowed the team to read the content “while keeping the evidence blocking the letters”. algorithm, which was first tested to study a partially open letter in 2016, took almost five years to perfect. Holly Jackson, an MIT student who worked on the project, said NPR, “It simply came to our notice then refinement this pipe, trying to fully realize it automatize, all in all generalizable to a lot of different complicated folding patterns. ”
Once perfected, they used it to open four digitally and completely locked letters decode the one in Sennacques.
Scientists, who revealed themselves revolutionary technology in the diary Communications about nature on March 2, 2021, you now intend to decode and translate all the sealed letters from the Brienne collection and display them at the Museum of Communications. Those who cannot visit will be able to read digitized versions on a dedicated website. The new technology will 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.