![TfL lost property office on Baker Street - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/TfL_lost_property_office_on_Baker_Street_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1404542.jpg)
A lost and found (
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
) or lost property (
British English
British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Lexico, Oxford Dictionaries, "English language, English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in ...
), or lost articles (also Canadian English) is an office in a public building or area where people can go to retrieve lost articles that may have been found by others. Frequently found at
museum
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...
s,
amusement park
An amusement park is a park that features various attractions, such as rides and games, as well as other events for entertainment purposes. A theme park is a type of amusement park that bases its structures and attractions around a central ...
s and
school
A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes compuls ...
s, a lost and found will typically be a clearly marked box or room in a location near the main entrance.
Some lost and found offices will try to contact the owners of any lost items if there are any personal identifiers available. Practically all will either sell, give away, or discard items after a certain period has passed to clear their storage.
History
In Japan, the lost-and-found property system dates to a code written in the year 718.
The first modern lost and found office was organized in
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
in 1805.
Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader who ...
ordered his prefect of police to establish it as a central place "to collect all objects found in the streets of Paris", according to Jean-Michel Ingrandt, who was appointed the office's director in 2001.
However, it was not until 1893 that
Louis Lépine
Louis Jean-Baptiste Lépine (1846 - 1933) was a lawyer, politician and inventor who was Préfet de Police with the Paris Police Prefecture from 1893 to 1897 and again from 1899 to 1913. He earned the nickname of "The Little Man with the Big Stick" ...
, then prefect of police, organized efforts to actively track down the owners of lost items.
Organization
Lost-and-found offices at large organizations can handle a large and varied collection of articles.
Transport for London's lost property offices (which handle items lost on the city's
Tube
Tube or tubes may refer to:
* ''Tube'' (2003 film), a 2003 Korean film
* ''The Tube'' (TV series), a music related TV series by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom
* "Tubes" (Peter Dale), performer on the Soccer AM television show
* Tube (band), a ...
,
buses
A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...
and
taxis
A taxis (; ) is the movement of an organism in response to a stimulus such as light or the presence of food. Taxes are innate behavioural responses. A taxis differs from a tropism (turning response, often growth towards or away from a stimulu ...
) handles over 130,000 items a year, including 24,000 bags and 10,000
mobile phone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
s. Among the more peculiar items that have been handed in include a
wedding dress
A wedding dress or bridal gown is the dress worn by the bride during a wedding ceremony. The color, style and ceremonial importance of the gown can depend on the religion and culture of the wedding participants. In Western cultures and Anglo-Sa ...
, ashes in an
urn
An urn is a vase, often with a cover, with a typically narrowed neck above a rounded body and a footed pedestal. Describing a vessel as an "urn", as opposed to a vase or other terms, generally reflects its use rather than any particular shape or ...
, a
longcase clock
A grandfather clock (also a longcase clock, tall-case clock, grandfather's clock, or floor clock) is a tall, freestanding, weight-driven pendulum clock with the pendulum held inside the tower or waist of the case. Clocks of this style are common ...
, a
kitchen sink
Kitchen sink may refer to:
* ''Freaks of Nature'' (film), a 2015 comedy horror film, also known as ''Kitchen Sink''
* ''Kitchen Sink'', a 1989 horror short directed by Alison Maclean
* ''Kitchen Sink'' (TV series), cookery series on Food Network ...
, and several
wheelchair
A wheelchair is a chair with wheels, used when walking is difficult or impossible due to illness, injury, problems related to old age, or disability. These can include spinal cord injuries ( paraplegia, hemiplegia, and quadriplegia), cerebr ...
s. In Japan, a combination of infrastructure, laws and cultural norms result in a very strong lost-and-found system; Tokyo's lost-and-found system processes over 4 million items annually.
Other large organizations may lack a central lost-and-found office but have several offices attached to different administrative units. This is the case, for instance, at the
University of Illinois
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...
, where different campus units have both distinct offices and different unofficial retention and resolution policies (rules for how long to keep items and what to do with them once that period has expired). In addition to such distributed offices, a cross-unit office might also exist; again referring to the University of Illinois, this cross-functional unit rests in the Campus Police (Division of Public Safety).
Computing
Some
file system
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...
s contain a special
directory
Directory may refer to:
* Directory (computing), or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files
* Directory (OpenVMS command)
* Directory service, a software application for organizing information about a computer network's u ...
, called "lost+found" under
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
, where a
file system check places lost and potentially corrupted files when the correct location cannot be determined, and so requires manual intervention by the
user
Ancient Egyptian roles
* User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty
* Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User"
Other uses
* User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...
.
See also
*
Theft by finding
Theft by finding occurs when someone chances upon an object which seems abandoned and takes possession of the object but fails to take steps to establish whether the object is genuinely abandoned and not merely lost or unattended. In some jurisdi ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lost And Found
*
Property
Customer service