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 memo, the note was carefully folded or ‘letter locked’. The old technique, which transformed the letter in its own safe package, prevailed before the invention of envelopes.
However, for unknown reasons, the note never reached the recipient and was stored in the trunk of a postal worker, where it remained unnoticed for centuries. Now it has a team of international researchers deciphered the content of the more than 300-year-old minutely sealed letter – without opening it!
Written in French and translated into English by the scientists, it read:
Dear Sir and Cousin,
It has been a few weeks since I wrote to ask you to draw up for me a legalized extract 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 effort I have made for you. It is important to me to have this extract. You will be delighted to purchase it for me to send me news about your health to the whole family at the same time. I also pray that God will maintain you in His holy graces and cover you with the blessings needed for your salvation. Nothing more for the moment, except that I pray you to believe that I am complete, sir and cousin, your most humble and most obedient servant,
Jacques Sennacques
The sequence of events that lead to this groundbreaking technology began in 2015 when MIT curator and “letter lock” expert Jana Dambrogio 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 suitcase with 600 unopened letters?’” Said Dambrogio. Live Science“He had me unopened.”
The treasury of sealed correspondence belonged to 3,100 letters that had been hidden unnoticed in a suitcase in the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague since 1926. It had once belonged to the 17th-century postmaster Simon de Brienne. Historians believe that the post office stored the undelivered letters in hopes of someday getting paid. That’s because in the 17th century it became the receivernot the sender, who bore the shipping costs. “The idea was that if they kept the letters that weren’t delivered, someone would eventually show up for them, at which 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 bequeathed the letterbox – considered an asset in that period – to an orphanage. Somehow the coffin found its way to the Dutch Ministry of Finance in The Hague and eventually to the postal museum, where it was until recently.
Since opening it fragile letters they would destroy, Dambrogio and her team decided to develop technology to virtually unseal them. They started with a highresolution Dental X-ray scanner to create a detailed three-dimensional image of a sealed letter. While the writing could be seen very clearly on the inside, similar to how a tooth appears on an X-ray, the numerous closely pressed layers of folded paper overlapped the words.
Told Adobe Research’s Amanda Ghassaei NPR, “The challenge here was really to try and find a way manipulate that data and actually virtual unfold it so we can get it in a flat state and sort of basically to generate something that looks like a picture of the letter if it had been opened and squashed. But in reality, we didn’t even touch the letter. “
To solve the problem, the researchers have created a Advanced algorithm that can decipher the writing in the smartly folded letter, fold by fold. The virtual opening allowed the team to read the content “while retaining the conclusive evidence of the letter”. The algorithm, first tested in 2016 to study a partially opened letter, took nearly five years to perfect. Holly Jackson, an MIT student who worked on the project, told me NPR, ‘We’ve been there a bit sophistication this pipeline, in an effort to complete it automated, fully generalizability to many different complicated folding patterns. ”
Once perfected, they used it to digitally and fully open four locked letters decoding that of Sennacques.
The scientists who put their revolutionary technology in the magazine Nature Communications plan now on March 2, 2021 to decipher and translate all sealed letters in the Brienne collection and display them in the Museum for Communication. Those who cannot visit can digitized versions on one dedicated website. The new technology will also allow scientists around the world to study the tens of thousands of unopened historical letters, including the hundreds in the Prize Paper collection that Britain took from enemy ships between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Sources: Live Science, NPR.org, thisiscollasal.org.