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People doubled letters as envelopes to ensure the security of a document, but today we can access them without anyone knowing any better.

Scientists read 300-year-old letters without opening them • 7 min read Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.STOCK/Getty Images Unopened letters more than 300 years old that were folded using mysterious techniques have now been read for the first time without opening them, a new study finds. For centuries, before mass-produced envelopes started proliferating in the 1830s, most letters across the globe were sent using letterlocking, a method of folding letters to become their own envelopes. These intricate techniques also often served to help recipients detect if mail had been ...

The unopened letter, written in the 1600s, was intricately folded to protect it from prying eyes.

The first of its kind experiment allows the Renaissance letter, from the Dutch postal museum collection, to be read without damaging the paper or breaking the seal.

Loading video... VIDEO: Computer-generated unfolding animation of sealed letter DB-1538. In our paper we describe how "virtual unfolding " was used to read the contents of sealed letterpackets from 17th-century Europe without physically opening... view more  Credit: Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive. In a world first, an international team of researchers has read an unopened letter from Renaissance Europe - without breaking its seal or damaging it in any way. The research, published in Nature Communications, describes how an X-ray scanner used in dental resear...