Episode 3: For the Futurians
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At high noon on September 23, 1938, at the precise moment of the autumnal equinox, a seven-and-a-half foot long, torpedo-shaped metal object was lowered into a steel shaft that extended fifty feet below the surface of the earth. Resting upon a bed of waterproof cement, it was entombed in pitch and a layer of concrete, and a marker stone was placed on the surface above it. The men who deposited it there hoped it would remain undisturbed; even as they expected the land around it to change, the sea nearby to rise and fall, even the country it was buried in to rise and fall, and fade away—until someday, in a distant, unknowable future, it would be all that remained of all that they had been. It was the world’s first time capsule. Hello, and welcome to Rime, where we’re telling timeless tales from the history of poetry. I’m your host, MJ Millington.
The men who were responsible for this time capsule were executives of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, which had begun life roughly 50 years before, manufacturing electrical systems after licensing Nikola Tesla’s alternating current and induction motor patents. They were a direct competitor of Thomas Edison and his company General Electric. But the company branched out with the passing years, and went on to manufacture home appliances and hydroelectric turbines; electrify railway lines; and co-found NBC in 1926. Oh, and they also dabbled in a bit of arms manufacturing: in 1915 they began producing rifles for Czar Nicholas’ army. Two years later the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian government, however; and the order for over one million rifles was canceled. On the brink of bankruptcy, Westinghouse was bailed out by the US government, who bought the rifles for its own military.
By the time 1938 rolled around, though, the company was back on top—captains of industry, as the saying goes. They had even built the first industrial atom smasher the year before. Their place in history was secure. But was it secure enough? The 1939 World’s Fair was on the horizon, and Westinghouse public relations representative George Edward Pendray was tasked with coming up with a suitably impressive campaign, something that could potentially extend the name of Westinghouse into the far distant future. So it was that Pendray invented the time capsule.
Well, almost. The idea of leaving items for the future had been around the 18th century, in the form of boxes placed into the cornerstones of newly constructed buildings. There were also century boxes, such as the Detroit Century Box, packed in 1900 with letters and coins, to be opened—you guessed it—a century later. There was even a structure called “The Crypt of Civilization,” a room that had been established at Oglethorpe University in Georgia in 1937, though it was not sealed until 1940. Its creator, Thornwell Jacobs, had enthusiastically followed Howard Carter’s excavations of King Tutankhamun’s tomb the decade before, and the scarcity of historical information about ancient cultures inspired him to collect together an assemblage of artifacts from his own time, to preserve for some future society a record of his own—one that, he was forced to admit, would someday vanish just as the ancient Egyptians’ had.
It was Pendray, though, who finally coined the term “time capsule” (incidentally, he also coined the word “laundromat”—good man for a neologism)—and indeed, the time capsule that Westinghouse revealed at the 1939 World’s Fair was truly the first of its kind. The company drew upon all its considerable manufacturing resources to craft a capsule that could withstand the rigors of time—5000 years of time, to be exact. It was decided that the capsule should remain sealed until the year 6939; and if it was going to last that long, it was going to need some serious engineering. The outer body of the capsule was made of a new Westinghouse alloy called Cupaloy—99.4% copper and highly resistant to corrosion. It was torpedo-shaped “for strength and convenience,” as Pendray’s pamphlet “The Story of the Time Capsule” states, and was 7.5 feet long and 8 3/8 inches in diameter. “The walls are one inch thick,” he writes, leaving an inner chamber “lined with an envelope of Pyrex glass, set in a water-repellant petroleum wax base. Washed, evacuated and filled with humid nitrogen, an inert, preservative gas, this glass inner crypt contains ‘the cross-section of our time.’”
And just what was in that “cross-section of our time?” This is of course the fun part for the modern historian—what did the businessmen and manufacturers of 1938 think was representative of their culture? What did they want the future to know about themselves? Luckily for us, they left a list, printed in a pamphlet called The Book of Record of the Time Capsule. “For the guidance of ‘Futurians,’” Pendray writes, copies were distributed to “libraries, museums, monasteries, convents, lamaseries, temples and other safe repositories throughout the world,” in addition to the copy placed inside the capsule. The Book of Record not only lists everything inside the capsule, but also how the Futurians can find it. And what a treasure trove for the people of 6939! As Pendray admits, “choosing what was to go into the Time Capsule crypt proved perhaps the most difficult problem of all, because nothing short of an enormous gallery of vaults could accommodate all the objects and records of any civilization.” But persevere they must; and so the Time Capsule Committee (yes, that really was its name) “turned to archaeologists, historians and authorities in virtually every field of science, medicine and the arts,” and on the basis of their suggestions the committee chose “thirty-five articles of common use [including a slide rule, cosmetics, baseball cards, and a pack of cigarettes]… seventy-five samples of common materials [including asbestos] … and an essay, reduced to microfilm, reproducing books, articles, magazines,” et cetera. All in all the microfilm contains 22,000 pages of text and 1000 pictures, for a total of more than 10,000,000 words. And so it was that poetry died, like so many things, by committee.
Because although the Book of Record tells us that included amongst these 10 million words is the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on verse, no actual poetry was included in the capsule. No Inferno; no Paradise Lost; no Homer; not even Shakespeare made the cut. Some of the greatest achievements in human history, works of literature that have the power to move the spirit, to show what we are at our best and our worst—and none of it is there. So what did the Committee approve for inclusion? Excepting the Bible, most of it is the literary equivalent of the dreck that made it into the capsule in physical form: other Encyclopedia Britannica articles. Newspapers and magazines like Reader’s Digest. A work of criticism by Thomas Mann, though none of his novels. Only two novels made it in, actually: Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis, and Gone With the Wind. Then there’s the Westinghouse Stockholder’s Quarterly for August 1938; along with many other works on industry. There are four complete works on canned and frozen foods. And the final humiliation: a Sears Roebuck catalog. No Shakespeare, but Sears.
And as a poet, and lover of poetry, this is a fascinating omission to me. Because that two-page encyclopedia entry on “verse” that was included is so impenetrable to the untrained reader, and so pompous to boot, that it makes me wonder if the Time Capsule Committee was more than just dismissive of poetry, but actually downright hostile to it. Because in the very same 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica there’s a comprehensive, well-rounded, easy to read article on poetry under the term—well, Poetry. But here’s a brief excerpt of what they chose instead: “It was at this moment that a final attempt was made to disestablish the whole scheme of English metre, and to substitute for it unrhymed classic measures. In the year 1579 this heresy was powerful at Cambridge, and a vigorous attempt was made to include [poet Edmund] Spenser himself among its votaries. It failed, and with this failure it may be said that all the essential questions connected with English poetry were settled.”
And that’s how the article ends. In 1579. That’s all the Committee and their consulting “authorities on art” thought the Futurians needed to know about an aspect of humanity that’s as ancient as language itself. Poetry seemed only slightly less difficult for the folks stocking the Crypt of Civilization down in Georgia: their microfilm library contains a very small collection of Richard Burton, Lucretius, and the Oxford Book of Greek Verse. Hey, at least they tried.
But don’t fret, dear listener, because as it turns out, poetry wriggled its way into the Westinghouse time capsule after all. It occurred to me that, in addition to the verse portions of the Bible, there might well be some poems in the magazines that were microfilmed. The Book of Record quite handily lists the specific issue of each title included, so I chose those most likely to have had poetry in them, and got to work in my local research library. And there they were. Because in 1938 it wasn’t just the New Yorker and the Atlantic publishing poetry, as they still both do today, but also the American Mercury, the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal, which circulated to millions of readers. Poetry was more present in mainstream American culture than it is now; making its omission in the time capsule that much more ironic. But we won’t be bitter: instead we’ll celebrate what was there. Because honestly, if the type of greatest hits poetry that I’d expected to find in the capsule had been there, then I probably would have just stopped there. But because it wasn’t, I went looking for more; and I found poems and poets that were new to me, and worthy of reading and resuscitation. And almost all the poems I found in those pages were written by women.
Quick statistic: the five magazines that published poetry that I mentioned above included 15 poems. And 10 of those poems were written by women—women I had never heard of, like Florence Burrill Jacobs, Frances Frost, and someone tantalizingly signed only by the name “Elspeth.” The men were equally strangers to me, except for Robert Frost, who had two poems in the Atlantic Monthly in September 1938. That’s a two-thirds majority of writing by women. And we think we’re so advanced now. Luckily, we get to take pleasure in poetry from any age, which is the whole point of this podcast. And so here are three gems that slipped into Westinghouse Capsule I, despite the Time Capsule Committee.
Testimony by Florence Burrill Jacobs [published in the Saturday Evening Post, May 7, 1938]
“No,” rasped old Jonathan, “I don’t agree
With any resurrection, neither mind,
Body nor spirit, beast nor humankind;
That takes belief too credulous for me.
I’m a blunt man, who never put much stock
In theories a person can’t explain
All right and clear—it goes against the grain
To listen to this ‘faith and wonders’ talk.”
He turned with one last sniff and dropped a brown
Seed pellet in the loosely furrowed drill—
Another and another—squatted down
To rearrange the earth with loving skill.
“By June,” he bragged, “I’ll have nasturtiums here
Bigger’n the ones you raved about last year.”
The Rain Came Down by Frances Frost [published in the Saturday Evening Post, May 7, 1938]
The timber line was looped with cloud;
The peak had blown off into sky;
The smoke of fine rain swept unloud
Down the dark hemlock slopes to die
Softly upon the valley’s breast,
Deeply among the meadow flowers.
Men in a barn door paused to rest
And watched it slant. A child for hours
Had pressed his nose against the pane
And seen and then not seen his hill.
Rail fences glistened with the rain;
From the woodshed corner came the spill
Of the worn barrel and the eaves
Yet overflowed. A woman took
Hot fragrant loaves of golden sheaves
Out of the oven; and the brook
Poured through her heart across its stones
And a lost leaf whirled therein and sank.
The wet cows shifted grateful bones.
The rain came down. Earth sighed and drank.
Happiness Makes Up in Height For What It Lacks in Length
by Robert Frost [published in the Atlantic Monthly, September 1938]
Oh, stormy stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn,
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.
Perhaps all of this is moot, and the presumably non-English speaking humans, aliens, or hybrid human-aliens of the year 6939 won’t need our help with poetry even if they do find the time capsule left for them. But that’s not really the point anyway. The point of time capsules is ultimately that we don’t trust the future. We don’t trust the Futurians to come to the right conclusions about us; we have to make sure that they recognize the achievements we want them to, understand the things we want them to understand about us. Even if it means that we elide over certain aspects of ourselves, even positive ones, because they’re not part of the image we want to present. It’s a form of paranoia, and a form of control—not too different from Victorian writers burning their letters before they died, so their reputations wouldn’t be contaminated by their humanity. Why try to control what the future thinks of us, especially when we reveal as much by our exclusions as our inclusions? Perhaps the true time capsules are accidental anyway. For what do we have left of the cultures that preceded us? Songs, stories, poems, myth, art, vestiges of language and stone. The things that mean something will survive—even if meaning too gets weathered with the passage of time. Cultures do survive, even if it’s just by the mysteries they leave behind.
You know what, though? Perhaps there’s something to be said for wanting to share something about ourselves that we’re proud of. There’s something to be said for the attempt to serve something greater than ourselves, to want to see it last the ages. So I’ve decided to create a Rime Capsule: a time capsule full of poetry submitted by you, dear listeners. Include your poem titles, or full texts, or links in the comments for this episode’s shownotes, and I’ll gather together a capsule-full and bury it somewhere special. For the Futurians.
Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. Our theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. Thanks for listening! Make sure to visit the Rime website at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll find complete shownotes for this and every episode; and the full text and recordings of all the poems mentioned. You’ll also find my own poetry and visual art, so check it out. And if you enjoy this podcast and want to support it for free, please leave Rime a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. Those ratings really help potential listeners find the great stories we’re telling here. Until next time!
Sources
The American Mercury, September 1938.
Atlantic Monthly. September 1938.
The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy […]. New York: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, 1938.
“Crypt Books.” [photocopy of six-page list of books included in the Crypt of Civilization]. Courtesy of Eli Arnold, Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University, 2018.
The Crypt of Civilization time capsule at Oglethorpe University: crypt.oglethorpe.edu
Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1938.
New Yorker, September 3, 1938,
Saturday Evening Post. May 7, 1938.
The Story of the Westinghouse Time Capsule. East Pittsburgh, PA: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, 1939.