I don't know if you have ever heard of "Letter in a Bottle"? In 1492, after Columbus visited an American island, he wrote a letter to the Spanish Empress, sealed in a bottle along with a map of the Americas he had drawn, and threw it into the Atlantic Ocean, expecting it to drift to Europe, but it was not until the 1850s that the bottle was discovered. #数码科技要闻 #
After more than 300 years of drifting in the sea, can you still open and read the letter after discovery?
Although there was no trick a hundred years ago, it can now be clearly told that not only can you see, but also use "perspective"!
Recently, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released a study that can read letters written hundreds of years ago with pen and paper through emerging technologies without opening them.
In the early days, due to the scarcity and high cost of paper, before the mass production of envelopes in the 1830s, most letters were secured by folding complex "letterlocking" as a method of tampering, sealing them with wax, and installing tamper-proof devices.
In addition, the lock letter can also be used to judge the identity and background of the sender, because different people fold the letter differently. Therefore, the way the letter is folded is itself a precious historical trace.
In the past, in order to study the content of these letters, researchers often had to endure the destruction of the letters themselves, which was undoubtedly a kind of destruction of historical materials.
Therefore, the birth of this technology avoids the destruction of these precious historical letters, and is of great significance to the protection and interpretation of historical relics.
The air vision comes true, and the folding method is restored at the same time
On March 2, 2021, the research was published in Nature Communications, a sub-issue of Nature Communications, titled Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography Sealed documents for radiographic micro-tomography imaging are automatically virtually unfolded).
Authors are from MIT (Library, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab), Adobe R&D Center, King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, Utrecht University, Leiden University, and Nemegen University.
According to MIT's website, this groundbreaking study is the result of a cross-border, interdisciplinary collaboration between historians, historians, engineers, imaging experts, and other scholars.
The article mentioned that scientists at the Provincial Institute of Technology designed a new form of virtual reality technology, using a high-sensitivity X-ray scanner and computer algorithm, for the first time without opening the letter, through the "virtual letter" technology, successfully read the letters preserved in the "Briena Collection", including a letter that has not been opened for 300 years.
The "Briena Collection" refers to a mailmaster's chest containing undelivered letters sent from Europe to The Hague between 1680 and 1706.
A total of 3148 cataloged items were in the mailbox, including 2571 open letters, fragments and other documents, and 577 envelopes that had never been opened.
The chart below shows the four parcels the team mainly studied, and through the study of the four envelopes, the team further demonstrated the universality of the XMT method.
Each envelope is constructed in a different folding order: the inside of some bags folds diagonally relative to their outer contours. Others are bundled together by separate paper locks.
The research team also revealed for the first time the systematization of letter locking technology. After studying 250,000 historical letters, they designed a category and format chart to categorize the letters.
In the past, the analysis of "letter locks" has been limited to the physical level, but the physical integrity of the envelope cannot be guaranteed. The various flattening algorithms that have emerged have opened up a new path for interpreting damaged historical documents, but so far their applications have only been limited to scrolls, books, and files with one or two folds.
Dental X-rays have done a great job!
The whole amount of engineering looks huge, but the interpretation process is not as complicated as everyone thinks, on the contrary, the main technology used is only the X-ray that is very common in everyone's life, is it more magical? The specific approach of the research team is mainly divided into 3 steps:
(1) Scan these letters with X-ray micromography first.
(2) Generate a three-dimensional reconstruction, and then let the algorithm identify and distinguish each layer of the sealed letter.
(3) Since most of the ink and stationery form a different contrast, the content of the letter can also be displayed.
And the use of the "virtual letter" algorithm can not only let people read the unopened letter, but also visualize the crease at that time - through the computer to simulate the unfolding order of a letter in detail, you can gradually reproduce the specific steps of the "lock letter" to people.
You know, before the computational analysis, the researchers only know the recipient's name written on the surface of the parcel, which is not easy to restore to this extent, and also creates an opportunity to protect the integrity of the document.
At present, this algorithm has been open sourced.
David Mills, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London, said the scanner developed in the study was somewhat similar to a dental CT scanner, but its breakthrough was that it used stronger X-rays, which allowed humans to see more clearly traces of metal in the ink used to write text.
So what was written in this long-overdue letter from the European Renaissance?
The letter was sent on 31 July 1697 by Jacques Sennacques in Paris to his cousin Pierre Le Pers (French merchant in The Hague, Netherlands). The letter consisted mainly of Jacques asking Pierre to provide a death notice from his relative, Daniel le Pers.
However, the letter was never delivered (for unknown reasons) and was eventually found in the suitcase of a postman. The letter was discovered in 1926 and handed over to the Postal Museum until the past decade, when it was studied by historians, scientists, conservators and computer engineers of the Unlocking History Research Group, CNN reported.
Privacy intrusions brought about by technological maturity
It has to be said that the algorithm of this virtual letter is very innovative, not only allowing the author to read the unopened letter, but also visualizing the crease and gradually reproducing the locking step. The starting point from the research team is good, but the progress of science and technology has always been a double-edged sword, bringing convenience and at the same time generating hidden dangers.
There are also netizens who have questions about this, since they can read over the air, or just use a simple X-ray, then after the future technology matures, is it difficult to protect personal privacy?
For example, major private paper documents such as diaries and important documents can be read without direct contact, and the harm caused by them will be immeasurable.
Nowadays, the proliferation of personal privacy violations is piling up, like the Face app that was fired before, which can make your face old and genderable through algorithms, and has also been exposed to the risk of stealing facial data.
They are all algorithms, and the impact they can have depends on the direction of use. I only hope that in the future, while various technologies tend to mature, we must pay more attention to returning to life itself.
After all, it is far from us to interpret a hundred years ago, but it is easy to spy on the secret of a piece of paper on a person nearby, what do you think?