The unopened letter: Photo: Jana Dambrogio (MIT) An international team of researchers have used advanced scan technology to read a 300-year-old letter without opening it. The letter forms part of a treasure trove of 2,600 letters that were written and sent between 1689 and 1706 but never reached their destination. Undelivered and unclaimed, these so-called dead letters were kept in a linen-lined leather chest waterproofed with sealskin where they remained, perfectly preserved, for the next three hundred years. The prudent owner of the chest was Frenchman Simon de Brienne. In 1676 De Brienne became postmaster of The Hague and assumed responsibility for the postal traffic to and from France, the southern Netherlands and Spain. The chest now forms part of the Museum for Sound and Vision in The Hague.