At the 1939 World's Fair, the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company buried what would be the first of two time capsules. With a design far ahead of its time, Westinghouse assured the contents would survive for 5,000 years, and thus it was "destined" for the inhabitants of the year 6939. What is inside the capsule? Everyday objects, samples of plastics, fabrics and metals, and more than ten million words stored on microfilm. Among those words appears a message from Albert Einstein himself, which has a certain pessimistic tone…
All signs point to executive and public relations expert George Edward Pendray as the creator of the Westinghouse capsules. Of course, such a task involves much more than burying a piece of metal. Time has been ruthless with other projects that didn't take the necessary precautions, but Westinghouse designed an alloy specially prepared to resist corrosion, called Cupaloy.
In essence, it is a cylinder of copper at 99.4 percent, with a length of 2.3 meters, a diameter of 22.2 centimeters, and a considerable weight of 360 kilograms. The space where the contents were stored resembles a giant glass ampoule, measuring 210 by 17 centimeters. Obviously, there can be no oxygen inside, and the chosen "replacement" was nitrogen.
By far, the most interesting aspect of the capsule is the ten million words and a thousand images stored on microfilm (the capsule includes instructions for building a reader). Three of the most important minds of the time shared their thoughts for deposit in the capsule: Thomas Mann (Nobel Prize in Literature 1929), Robert Andrews Millikan (Nobel Prize in Physics 1923), and Albert Einstein. The Spanish translation of the message that circulates contains several errors, so we took the liberty of making some humble adjustments:
Our era is abundant in creative minds, whose inventions could considerably facilitate our lives. Today we cross the seas thanks to the power developed by man, and we also employ that power to relieve humanity of exhausting muscular labor. We have learned to fly and are able to send messages and news without any difficulty to the most remote places in the world, by means of electric waves.
It's not a very encouraging description, to say the least. The critique of "the intelligence and character of the masses" forces us to think about the political situation at the end of the 1930s, with Nazi Germany on the verge of blowing Europe apart, and Albert Einstein virtually taking refuge in the United States (he received citizenship in 1940). Thomas Mann wasn't very positive either, calling the idea of the future as a better world "a fallacy of the doctrine of progress." In the end, I only hope that in the future this pessimism from such brilliant minds has become anecdotal, and that we truly are better.
More details about the capsule: Click here.
https://old.neoteo.com/la-paradoja-de-los-gemelos/
