A signed, sealed but not delivered letter from 1697 has finally been read with the help of a high-tech scan that looked inside without breaking its seal.
Credits: Image: Courtesy of MIT Libraries Caption: Researchers were able to read the contents of a letter from Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague. Caption: The virtual unfolding technology generates 2D and 3D reconstructions of the letter.
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An international team of scholars has read an unopened letter from early modern Europe without breaking its seal or damaging it in any way using an automated computational flattening algorithm. The team, including MIT Libraries and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers and an MIT student and alumna, published their findings today in a
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A signed, sealed but not delivered letter from 1697 has finally been read with the help of a high-tech scan that looked inside without breaking its seal.
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Virtual unfolding algorithms allow us to read this unopened letter with a paper lock from the Brienne Collection in The Hague, Netherlands. Photo courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive.
Opening a letter may seem like a straightforward task, but that’s only in the age of mass-produced gummed envelopes, first invented in the 1830s.
For hundreds of years before that, many people relied on “letterlocking,” sealing their mail with a sequence of elaborate creases, folds, tucks, and slits. There were hundreds of different ways this could be deployed to secure mail from prying eyes.