In July 1697, Jacques Sennacques of Lille, France, scribbled down an offense against his cousin, Pierre le Pers, in The Hague. The topic of discussion was a death certificate for their family member, a topic the cousins had previously discussed, but Le Pers failed to follow up. The letter was the Renaissance equivalent of a ‘by my previous email’, and it was just read for the first time since it was sealed 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 slots to seal themselves, without the need for an envelope. Letter Lock was the typical way to seal messages in the days before envelopes with mass production; Queen Elizabeth I of England had at least five different fonts for the privatization of her correspondence.
In a unique application of the technology, Dambrogio’s team virtually “unfolded” Sennacques’ letter using X-ray microtomography, enabling the researchers to bypass the often damaging process of a manual letter opening. The team’s research was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
‘I remember a feeling of excitement, as in, [oh my god] we finally did it, ”co-author Rebekah Ahrendt, a musicologist at Utrecht University, said in an email. “After working on this collection for a number of years, the effect of ‘I’m probably the first person to read it since it’s written’ has faded a bit … It has been said, this letter is so a wonderful example of the concerns of normal people at this time. ”
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It is not known why Le Pers never received the letter – given his profession he may have moved. But the sealed letter remained in the care of the chief postmasters of The Hague, Simone de Brienne, and his wife, Marie Germain. The couple did not throw away the enclosed family matter because in those days letters were bought by recipients and not paid by the senders. Some postmasters kept unclaimed letters if someone would eventually come to buy. The couple who had the head of The Hague were stockpiled or resolutely optimistic because they held the letters until they died. Thousands of letters in the charge of Brienne and Germain were kept in an old trunk, and 600 of them were unopened letterless messages; it is a wonderful compilation of timely European talks, now called the Brienne Collection. The collection is located in the Hague Sound and Vision museum.
By firing X-rays through the letter Sennacques wrote down, the distribution of iron-rich ink he pushed over each fold in the letter was yielded. The intensity of the X-rays was about a third of those who use the same machine for its original purpose – to image teeth and bones.
“We start with a very high resolution CT scan of the folded letter package, basically a 3D X-ray,” said co-lead author Amanda Ghassaei, the algorithm engineer who led the project and who previously worked on the fold in origami, in an email. ‘From there, our algorithm detects individual layers of paper in the scan and reconstructs the folded geometry. With this calculation pipeline we can observe writing, watermarks, stamps, internal folds and any other information hidden in the letter package without damaging the original artifact. ”
But that was not enough. The team also had to decipher the folded letter to understand which characters fall into the unfolded version. To do this, they used an arithmetic typeface., to deconstruct the letter without touching it. Although an unnoticed jumble of characters from outside, enveloped in the khaki document, the research team was able to extract the message without any problems.
The research team did not describe any of the folded layout of Sennacques’ letter in code; the algorithm did the heavy geometric lift.
“The message and intricate internal mechanics of these letters are known to us only because they have been virtually reconstructed,” said co-author Holly Jackson, an undergraduate student at MIT and an algorithm engineer of the project. “Our methods are fully automated, biased to scan orientation, and require no prior knowledge of the folded geometry of a letter package.”
To write the new article, the team used X-rays to trace the layout of ink on a piece of centuries-old paper. They built and used an algorithm to virtually unfold the paper, and they described the contents of the letter next to it. a complicated dictionary for the divergent techniques of letter-closing as a greater practice in days before envelopes. In essence, the work was threefold.
The sum of these attempts is a clear plan of attack for the approximately 600 objects trapped in the chest. The worries of cousins, marital disputes, state secrets – who knows?
It is as close as history can hold its breath.