Westinghouse Time Capsules - Book of Record

Book of Record

The contents of Time Capsule I were recorded in a Book of Record of the Time Capsule of cupaloy deemed capable of resisting the effects of time for five thousand years, preserving an account of universal achievements, embedded in the grounds of the New York World's Fair 1939.

The purpose of the Book of Record is to preserve knowledge of the existence of the time capsule for 5,000 years, and to provide assistance to the people of the year 6939 in locating and recovering it. Someone perhaps might find a copy of the over 3,000 copies of the Book of Record distributed to museums, monasteries, and libraries worldwide. In order to avoid confusion about the 1965 time capsule, a supplement announcing Time Capsule II was sent to the original 3,000 depositories of the 1938 Book of Record.

Should all present day methods of determining time be lost, then the time for what is now called 1939 Common Era can be recognized by calculation from astronomical data. In the year 1939, there were two eclipses of the moon, falling on the third of May and the twenty-eighth of October. Also there were two eclipses of the sun, an annular eclipse on the nineteenth of April, the path of annular eclipse grazing the North Pole of the earth, and a total eclipse on the twelfth of October, the total path crossing near the South Pole. The heliocentric longitudes of the planets on the first of January at zero-hours Greenwich time were as follows:

The mean position of the North Star Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris) on the first of January was Right Ascension, 1 hour, 41 minutes, 59 seconds; North Polar distance, 1 hour, 1 minute, and 33.8 seconds. Astronomers of the early twentieth century determined that such a combination of astronomical events is unlikely to recur for many thousands of years. The people of the future will therefore be able to determine the number of years that have elapsed since the capsule was buried by computing backward from their time.