Thread by @Herms98

Age 712: West City College graduate Dr. Briefs invents a revolutionary system for storing objects of any size inside tiny capsules. He then goes on to found a corporation for producing these capsules. Its name escapes me. #HistoryofEver

Dr. Briefs’ life story is outlined in rather surprising detail in his Daizenshuu 7 bio, including the tidbits that he majored in physical chemistry and got his doctorate from West City College (as you might expect), then founded Capsule Corp after inventing the capsule (likewise)

(物理化学/physical chemistry is possibly a typo for 物理科学/physical science, since both are read as butsuri kagaku, although I’ll leave it to you to judge which if either seems a better fit for developing capsules)

How capsules function remained a mystery until the start of the Buu arc, when Bulma rather offhandedly notes that they store objects by converting things into particles. Sure it’s meaningless bafflegab, but what else would you expect?

This explanation for how capsules work is repeated in their Daizenshuu 7 entry, along with a note on how capsules remain unknown out in the remote countryside (a reference to them being absent from Penguin Village throughout Dr. Slump)

As for when Capsule Corporation was founded: according to the DB Online timeline, the company celebrates it’s 250th anniversary in Age 962 by opening up a museum of human history. 962-250=712, although the timeline itself doesn’t include an entry for CC’s founding.

Briefs’ D7 bio describes him as the most successful person of the 700s (ie the century’s most successful man). Early fan translations misconstrued this as him being born in the year 700, but so far he has no official birth year.

Actually 700 isn’t too bad of a guess, since he does look about 50 when he first appears in 750. This would make him only 12 when he founds CC, although Bulma and Tights’ early development in Jaco makes this far from impossible. Either way, he and his wife never seem to age

Around the same period as Capsule Corp’s founding, more revolutionary science is afoot: the government funds theoretical physicist Tokunoshin Omori’s efforts to build a time machine, but it all ends in tragedy. It’s just as well anyway, since time travel is a galactic crime.

The Jaco manga doesn’t specify when Omori’s time machine project was beyond “long ago”, but Omori himself is 67 during Jaco. If we assume he’d be at least 30-40 to head a big project like that, and at most 50 to count as “long ago”, that puts the project between 700 and 720, ish

Tomorrow: class issues!