On July 31, 1697, a French lawyer named Jacques Sennacques wrote an urgent message reminding a cousin in the Netherlands to send him a family member’s death certificate. To prevent others from reading the confidential memo, the note is carefully folded or ‘letter closed’. The ancient technique, what transformed the letter to his right safe package, was common before the invention of envelopes.
For unknown reasons, the letter never reached the recipient and was rather hidden in a postmaster’s trunk, where it remained. unnoticed for centuries. Now a team of international researchers decipher the content of the older than 300-year-old closely sealed letter – without opening it!
It was written in French and translated into English by the scientists and said:
Dear Sir & Cousin,
It’s been a few weeks since I wrote to you asking you to draw up a legal excerpt from the death of sire Daniel Le Pers, which took place in The Hague in December 1695, without you hearing. I am writing to you a second time to remind you of the pain I was having on your behalf. It is important for me to have this extract. It will be a great pleasure for me to get it for me to send me news about your health from the whole family to me at the same time. I also pray that God will sustain you in His holy grace and cover you with the blessings needed for your salvation. For the time being, nothing more, except that I must believe you that I am perfectly, sir and cousin, your most humble and obedient servant,
Jacques Sennacques
The series of events that led to this pioneering work technology began in 2015 when MIT curator and Jana Dambrogio, a letter-lock expert, 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 letters? ‘, “Said Dambrogio. Live Science. “He ‘unopened’ me.”
The treasure chest of sealed correspondence was one of the 3,100 letters that had been sitting unnoticed in a suitcase at the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, the Netherlands, since 1926. It once belonged to the 17th-century postmaster Simon de Brienne. Historians believe the post office stored the undelivered letters in hopes of one day being paid. This is because in the 17th century the recipient, not the sender who bore the postage. “The idea was that if they kept the letters that were not delivered, someone would eventually show up for them, at that point they would be paid,” said Rebekah Ahrendt, a music historian and co-author of the study. Wired news.
When Brienne died in 1707, he bequeath the tribe of letters – considered an asset during that period – to an orphanage. Somehow the coffin made its way to the Dutch Ministry of Finance in The Hague and eventually to the postal museum, where it lay until recently.
Since the opening of the fragile letters they would destroy, Dambrogio and her team decided to develop technology to virtually seal it. They started by a highresolution X-ray dental scanner to create a detailed three-dimensional image of a sealed letter. While the writing inside is very clear, similar to how a tooth appears on an X-ray, the many layers of folded paper pressed close together made the words overlap.
Amanda Ghassaei of Adobe Research said NPR, ‘The challenge here was really to try to find a way manipulate that data and actually almost unfold it so we can get it in a flat state and actually some sort of generate something that looks like an image of the letter when opened and flattened. But in reality, we have not even touched the letter yet. ‘
To solve the problem, the researchers have a sophisticated algorithm that can decrypt the script in the cleverly folded letter, fold by fold. The virtual opening enabled the team to read the content “while preserving evidence for the letter retention.” The algorithm, which was first tested in 2016 to study a partially opened letter, took almost five years to perfect. Holly Jackson, an MIT student who worked on the project, tells NPR, ‘We were quite like that refinement this pipeline tries to complete it automatic, complete generalize very different intricate voupatrone. ”
After it was perfect, they used it to open four closed letters digitally and completely decode that one of Sennacques.
The scientists, who revolutionary technology in the journal Nature communication on March 2, 2021 plans to now decode and translate all the sealed letters in the Brienne Collection and exhibit in the Museum of Communication. Those who can not visit can visit the digitized versions on a devoted website. The new technology will also enable scientists worldwide to study the tens of thousands of unopened historical letters, including the hundreds in the Prize Paper collection taken by enemy ships by Britain between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Resources: LiveScience.com, NPR.org, thisiscollasal.org.