This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
A quarter of a million personal belongings were handed in on London's public transport throughout 2013, including 27,000 mobile phones, 34,000 valuables such as jewellery and tens of thousands of bags.
The items change perceptibly every year. "Mobile phones started out huge," says Paul Cowan, manager of Transport for London's Lost Property Office (LPO). "We still have some big Panasonic bricks as mementos -- and ridiculously small later models such as the Motorola StarTAC and Nokia 8830. And now they're are getting bigger again; it's like an archaeological dig -- you can see how technology and society have changed by what people lose."
About ten per cent of found items have personally identifiable information on them, but for the remainder a vast amount of metadata -- such as serial numbers and scratches -- is logged in a central database. Objects are then sorted into LPO's three-storey warehouse, where up to 70,000 items are kept. Once something's been identified in the database, it takes two minutes to fetch. "We rely on people's honesty," says Cowan. "And the fact that 250,000 items were turned in last year says there are a lot of honest people in London."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
