I'm thinking this is the way they figured it would go. We'll bury the box now, in 1795, and they'll open it in 2015 when someone hoverboards over to the State Capitol and finds it underneath the building foundation.
On Tuesday at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the world got a look at what Revere and Adams thought was worth remembering.
Museum conservator Pam Hatchfield opened the 10-pound box during a news conference, using a porcupine quill and her grandfather's dental tool to remove each item. The box contained a Massachusetts commonwealth seal, a page from Massachusetts colony records, five folded newspapers, a dozen coins--including a 1652 "pine tree shilling"--and the inscribed silver plate, which still had fingerprints on it, she said.
The silver plate was "probably made by Paul Revere and engraved by him," museum director Malcolm Rogers said, according to CNN. "That was the treasure at the end."
No word yet on what the newspapers actually said, because first need to be sure they can actually unfold them without damaging them. My guess is that the contain endless speculation about who would be running for president in 1796, as well as detailed analysis of "gaffes" by John Adams and discussion of whether Federalist policies under George Washington were too strongly influenced by the Tea Party.
Or something like that.
I suppose the appeal of an item like this depends on your interests. I think history is much more interesting than modern politics, especially the horse-race aspect that political junkies find so fascinating for whatever reason. You can read about it all day long, but it's not often that Samuel Adams and Paul Revere can essentially hand you a box of their stuff and say, basically, Here, this is what we think you should know about the time in which we lived.
Of course, neither of them could have imagined what life would be like at the unknown future date when the time capsule would be opened, so they didn't know what we wouldn't know, if you're following me. They couldn't have imagined the Internet, phones (let alone mobile smartphones) or any of the modes of travel and other things that simply seem normal to us today. They weren't so much speaking to us because they didn't know us. They couldn't have even been sure that the nation they had founded would be around 220 years in the future.
Nice job by them that it is. I'm not sure the same will be true 220 years from now at the rate we're going, but that's a topic for another day.
