A time travelers dilemma: where to store vintage documents for hundreds of years

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I’ve taken up time traveling as a nice hobby to keep me busy. It’s a little time consuming, but definitely worth it.

But it’s also pricey, what with the plutonium and all.

Fortunately, I’ve stumbled on a brilliant solution. Souvenirs! Specifically, I find that even the most mundane artifacts from a few centuries ago are worth beaucoup bucks when sold at auction today.

Take a letter from Ben Franklin, circa 1750s. That guy would correspond with anybody, and he loved to show off his wit and witticism. All it takes is a short missive asking for his opinion on swarthy Germans, and he’s happy to provide a lengthy retort.

And that, my friends, can collect a pretty penny.

If it’s authentic, that is.

See, I’ve encountered a problem. If I receive a letter from Ole Ben in 1753 and immediately return to the present to auction it off, it’s an obvious fraud: it’s not nearly old enough to be real.

I need instead to keep it secure and hidden, from 1753 until today, whereupon I can retrieve the genuinely aged document and earn a return on my investment (don’t fight the hypothetical).

Where do I do that? I need it well preserved, so it doesn’t get destroyed. And I need to put it somewhere that wont be completely transformed over 2 and a half centuries.

Any ideas?

2

A shorter timeline but the best preserved comic book collections from the 1930-40s were almost all discovered in cold, dry, dark house basements.

You need to survey a house with such a basement in the 21st Century and discover the nooks and crannies that haven’t been disturbed in 300 years before making your trip.

3

I figure preserving anything from the 20th century is relatively easy: I can get a safe deposit box at a major bank. Surely they’ll still be in existence today, and I can just access it by bringing in the key.

4

But they didn’t have those boxes in the 18th Century. I’m using that example to describe the places with the best environmental conditions with the least risk of discovery.

5

Invest in some sort of tightly sealable pouch or package made of gold (for its chemical inertness). Store it in a lava tube on the moon away from sunlight. (Any decent time machine should be tunable for location within reason.)

6

One problem with recent documents is the acidic content that causes breakdown.

7

Isn’t one issue is that you need a reasonable level of degradation? You put your Ben Franklin documents in a dark airtight container and it’ll still look pretty new.

8

I recommend a cave in a dry climate, such as Hidden Cave in Nevada. I suggest time-travelling to the near future and googling for new cave discoveries in such areas, which gives you a list of appropriate caves that had not been discovered yet as of the time you intend to sell your souvenirs.

9

Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in which someone was able to obtain via a time machine a rare 18th century signature but the paper is so new that it’s believed to be a forgery.

10
  1. Find a clearing in a very rural area in your current time with noteworthy land formations nearby.
  2. Jump back to 1753 and find the same location. If it’s currently inhabited by anyone nearby shout “Dang Flab-bit” and jump back to current time to redo Step 1 with a different clearing.
  3. Buy a good iron chest/strong box in 1753 and engage in much correspondence about nothing of importance. Maybe lookup George W. as well. Place the correspondence in the chest and bury it deep in the ground in the clearing.
  4. Jump back to your current time, go back to the clearing, and start digging. If it’s not there or is too damaged start over at step one in a different clearing.
11

Unfortunately, when you go back to the clearing you discover that it has been paved over and turned into a strip mall which is anchored by “Ben Franklin’s Hemporium and Head Shop.” So, you try again with another clearing but discover that it has been excavated to make a massive underground parking garage named, “Washington’s Park-A-While”. So you try a third clearing only to return to find that it has been turned into a theme park called “Thomas Jefferson’s Freedom Emporium and Discount Slave Market”. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

The Moirai don’t like anybody fucking with fate.

Stranger

12

Could you lock it in a box in 1901, and get it out in 1999, and go back to 1901, and lock it in a box, and…

13

My thinking is to find an old farmhouse that you know will survive through the centuries. If you buy it in 18th century America, when it’s new, you can store the items in a safe inside.

Of course, you’d need to find a caretaker for the place, in order to keep it in fact standing all those years. Ideally, you can find a family that would stay there generation after generation, always serving as residents of the home while you are the silent landlord (either that, or you need to keep traveling months at a time, for hundreds of years, doing spot maintenance).

14

If I understand the OP, time travel is expensive due to its plutonium usage. So the fewer trips to accomplish this fund raising scheme, the better.

15

Never mind

16

Why do you need to do all that if you have already found the perfect candidate in the present day?

17

There’s a few centuries of interim time during which the place might be sold or renovated. No good storing a vintage document if some guy who is going to upgrade the plumbing finds it in 1902.

18

Sorry. I was doing a little editing. What I’m trying to get across is that you should already be aware if an old house in the present day has upgraded plumbing. All of your issues are solved by just doing your homework in the present day.

19

Aren’t there institutions in Britain that have endured for centuries and maintained archives of documents the whole time? Colleges, insurance companies, law firms, banks, etc.. Many I’m sure would have agreed back in the day to hold documents for a small nominal fee. Maybe you’d need to research in the modern era for ones that haven’t suffered any catastrophic fires or got bombed in the Blitz, etc. but it ought to be doable.

20

Do you have any idea how much work that would entail? A house that lasts for hundreds of years takes work. Imagine being on guard for fires for over two hundred years.

Who has that kind of time?