Man Develops Photos from 120-Year-Old Time Capsule

The man who took these pictures was a brilliant photographer!

Mathieu Stern, a French photographer, and filmmaker living in Paris discovered a possible time capsule in his old family home. Upon finding a box from around 1900, he saw glass plate negatives inside and thought to develop them using an old photographic printing process called cyanotype.

The cyanotype method produces a cyan-blue print and is generally associated with engineers’ blueprints. It was famous in the early 20th century as an easy and cheapway to produce copies of drawings.