Laura Rosenfeld, Tech Times

Our world has changed so dramatically within the past few decades, it's often difficult to imagine what life was like 30 years ago, let alone a century ago. Luckily, we have things like museums and archives to help us remember.

But no preservation technique has quite the same allure and mystique about it as the time capsule. The New York Historical Society opened a century-old sealed time capsule on Oct. 8, which it claimed was the oldest in the world, although a time capsule from 1901 was recently discovered inside a lion statue in Boston. Anywho, bet you want to know what was in it, right?

Here are the time capsule's contents, which were packed into a fancy bronze box by the Lower Wall Street Business Men's Association and former New York Mayor Seth Low, according to Mashable:

- Photograph of Ellen Jay, a direct descendant of John Jay

- New York Chamber of Commerce arbitration record from 1772 to 1779

- New York Stock Exchange directory from 1914

- Sons of the Revolution in New York yearbook and annual report

- A copy of The World, a 1914 almanac and encyclopedia

- A book titled History and Reminiscences of Lower Wall Street and Vicinity by Lower Wall Street Business Men's Association member Abram Wakeman

- A history of the bank of New York from 1784 to 1884

- Annual reports of different city groups, such as the Saint Andrew Society, the Holland Society and Daughters of the Cincinnati

- Copies of various newspapers, including The New York Times, New York Herald and New York Tribune

So this big reveal was kind of a bust. There were no crazy doodads, expensive treasures or even long-lost love letters to be found. Womp womp. Then again, this is what you get when you have only one group with a very specific demographic collect items that are meant to represent a city famous for its diversity. If the city had enlisted items from everyone in its melting pot, from immigrants to factory workers to the elite, we probably would have gotten a more interesting, not to mention accurate, depiction of what it was like to live in the world's most famous metropolis in 1914. But really, we're just lucky to have this time capsule at all. It was originally intended to be opened in 1974 in honor of the tricentennial of the New Netherland Company Charter, but the museum didn't know it existed. Margaret Hofer, the museum's current curator of decorative arts, found the chest in the late 1990s in an art storage warehouse in Chelsea. The time capsule tradition dates back to 1876, when metal boxes were sealed during the Philadelphia Exposition, Nick Yablon, author of the upcoming book The Birth of the Time Capsule, told The Daily Beast. If New York's time capsule had been opened in 1974 when it was supposed to, it would have been the first time capsule of its kind instead of Philadelphia's, which was opened in 1976. Because everyone will obviously want to know what life was like in the year 2014, the New York Historical Society invited its teenage historian interns to choose which items to include in a new time capsule to be sealed and opened in 2114. They included items that everyone 100 years from now should know about, such as an iPhone, a Starbucks cup and a shirt that reads, "Some dudes marry dudes. Get over it."

I wonder what people a century from now will have to say about all of that.

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Tags: time capsule New York
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