LONDON, ENGLAND—According to a statement released by Queen Mary University of London, an international team of researchers used an X-ray microtomography scanner to read a 300-year-old letter while leaving its seal intact. The letter, which had been folded in on itself to become its own envelope, is one of 2,660 letters found in a postal trunk that had never been delivered. The trunk and the letters are now housed at the Dutch National Postal Museum in The Hague. Previous attempts to read such letters often resulted in damage to the fragile documents. Team members Graham Davis and David Mills said the highly sensitive X-ray scanner was developed to map the mineral content of teeth, but it is also capable of detecting minute amounts of metal in historic ink. Once the scans were completed, they were assembled with an algorithm so that the letters could be “virtually unfolded” and read. In this letter, dated July 31, 1697, Jacques Sennacques asked his cousin, Pierre Le Pers, a merchant in The Hague, for a certified copy of the death notice of Daniel Le Pers. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Communications. To read about another discovery from the Netherlands, go to "Letter from Leiden: Of Cesspits and Sewers."
