Lincoln’s Watch
A piece of history that had lain hidden for nearly 150 years was just uncovered at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1861, watchmaker Johnathon Dillon, while repairing Abraham Lincoln's watch, left a note for posterity that, apparently, no one had seen since he scratched it into the inner workings of the watch.
Dillon, working in a D.C. watch repair shop in 1861, told family members that he -- by incredible happenstance -- had been repairing Lincoln's watch when news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked in South Carolina. It was the opening salvo of what became the Civil War. Dillon told his children (and, half a century later, a reporter for the New York Times) that he opened the watch's inner workings and scrawled his name, the date and a message for the ages: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."The story continued on as a legend in the Dillon family. Now, an expert watchmaker has opened up Lincoln's old watch at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and discovered that the story is true. Though the message is not exactly the one Dillon recalled in the interview 50 years after he scratched it in, it is still an interesting part of history. Did Dillon have any idea his message would be seen by people several generations on? Considering that he scribed the date, I think it's a safe assumption that he did. It was the watch of a sitting president, after all. But I can't help but wonder about the cases in which we don't expect our written words to survive the ages. Think of the personal letters that collectors gather, found in attics and basements, of historical figures who shaped the world in which we live, or of soldiers gone to war and their loved ones back home. Could they have known that their letters would be seen decades, centuries, later? Some of our historical figures, such as Jefferson and Adams, were no doubt writing for posterity at a certain point in their lives. But there are countless letters out there, some gathered and published in book form, others sitting in private collections, which the authors surely never imagined would be seen by anyone other than the intended recipient. How will the digital word fare? How many of today's bloggers are writing for posterity? When I write, my target audience is in the here and now. I write a great deal about current events and sprinkle cultural references here and there that might be lost on future generations. But while individual posts are aimed at the present, part of the purpose of this blog as a whole is to record my thoughts for posterity. I want to be able to look back thirty years from now, if the content is still available, and see how my thoughts have evolved from my experiences. Assuming my wife and I have children before it's too late (we're really pushing it, waiting as long as we have), I want them to have a record of what was on their old man's mind. I could just write a journal in a paper notebook, but that's no fun. I can't get abusive comments from anonymous morons that way! If this blog is to survive, though, it will require active effort on my part. That goes for any blog, but it's doubly important if you aren't hosting on your own hardware (as, I assume, the majority of bloggers are not). There's no guarantee that my web host will be around even five years from now. If they go under and I don't have a backup, all of my content will be gone. Then there's the risk of human error. Very recently, I botched a software upgrade on another blog I maintain and managed to lose a huge chunk of content. A pocket watch can be inscribed and forgotten. A letter can be written, mailed off, and never thought of again. They may survive, they might not. But the nature of the internet, in its current form, doesn't allow us such luxury. Our digital data has inifinite potential to survive. It can be backed up and transferred to multiple mediums. When current storage formats are obsolete, it can be copied to a different format. But because of that same property, the lack of a physical form, it can't survive without active effort. I wish I could know how much of the data on today's internet will be around 100 years from now.