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Virtually opened a letter sealed for 300 years

2021-03-03T21:52:33.559Z


The document, dated July 31, 1697, was sent by a certain Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague, to request a death certificate (ANSA)


The secrets of a letter sealed for 300 years have been revealed:

folded with a complex technique that had to make it inviolable

, it was virtually opened and read without causing damage thanks to a special X-ray microtomography scanner developed to study the composition of the teeth.

The result is published in the journal Nature Communications by an international research group led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.

The ancient document object of the study belongs to the 'Brienne collection', consisting of 2,600 letters never delivered, which arrived in The Hague from all over Europe between 1680 and 1706, and remained locked inside a trunk owned by a worker of the postal service.

At that time, since the use of envelopes was not widespread to ensure that the letter reached the recipient undamaged, a technique of folding the sheet ('letterlocking') was used as an alternative, which represented a sort of physical encryption.

A real challenge for historians, forced to dissect documents to be able to open and read them.

To avoid such an invasive surgery, MIT researchers thought of using a microtomography scanner (similar to CT scan but more powerful) that colleagues at Queen Mary University of London had developed to study the minerals contained in the teeth.

Applied to one of the letters in the archive, it made it possible to reconstruct the document in 3D: thanks to a series of algorithms it was possible to virtually separate the different layers of the sheet and view the words written above, made intelligible by the metals contained in the ink. .

It thus emerged that the letter, dated July 31, 1697, was sent by a certain Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague, to ask for a copy of the death certificate of a certain Daniel Le Pers.

"Using virtual deployment to read a personal story that has never seen the light of day, and has never reached its intended recipient, is truly extraordinary," comment the researchers.

Source: ansa

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