In 1936, Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, president of Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia (United States), conceived one of the most ambitious projects in the history of cultural preservation: to capture a complete sample of human civilization and seal it for more than 6,000 years. What would become the Crypt of Civilization is today considered the first planned time capsule of the modern era, and its history is as fascinating as its contents.
The Idea of a Visionary
Thornwell Jacobs was not a scientist in the traditional sense, but a versatile academic — historian, writer, poet, and administrator. Born in 1893, he became president of Oglethorpe University in 1915, at the age of only 22. The university, founded in 1835 and named in honor of James Edward Oglethorpe, founder of the Colony of Georgia, had closed its doors during the Civil War and had just reopened in 1916 under Jacobs's leadership.
His idea for a time capsule was born from a simple yet profound reflection. He was frustrated by the gaps in our knowledge of ancient civilizations. If modern archaeologists struggle to reconstruct the daily life of the Egyptians or the Romans from scattered fragments, why not make the job easier for those who come after us by leaving them a complete, organized, and deliberately assembled sample?
Jacobs presented his project in the November 1936 issue of Scientific American magazine, under the title "Why Not a 'Crypt of Civilization.'" The article detailed his plan to create a sealed chamber containing a representative sample of 20th-century civilization. The publication generated considerable interest in the press and public, and helped popularize the idea of intentional preservation for the distant future. This article even directly inspired the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which launched its own time capsule project shortly after.
Calculating the Opening Date
To determine the preservation period, Jacobs used an original and elegant mathematical reasoning. In 1936, the oldest known records of Egyptian civilization dated back to approximately 4000 BCE, a gap of some 6,000 years from the present. By symmetry, Jacobs chose to project the capsule exactly 6,177 years into the future, setting the opening date for May 28, 8113.
The idea was poetic: the temporal gap between the opening of the crypt and the time of its creation would be equivalent to that between the earliest known written documents and the 20th century. The discoverers of the year 8113 would be at the same temporal distance from us as we are from the first Egyptian scribes. It was a way of placing the crypt at the exact point of symmetry of recorded human history.
The Construction
Construction of the crypt began in August 1937 in the basement of Phoebe Hearst Hall, a building at Oglethorpe University. Phoebe Hearst Hall was named after Phoebe Apperson Hearst, an American philanthropist and mother of press magnate William Randolph Hearst, who had contributed to the university's funding. The room measures approximately 6.1 meters long, 3 meters wide, and 3 meters high. It rests directly on the granite bedrock of the Piedmont, the geological region on which Atlanta sits, providing considerable geological stability.
The interior walls were lined with porcelain enamel plates, a material chosen for its exceptional resistance to corrosion and the passage of time. The entire structure was sealed with pitch (a petroleum tar derivative) to ensure maximum watertightness. The access door, made of solid stainless steel, was welded in place during the final closure.
Thomas Kimmwood Peters, an inventor and engineer, played a crucial role in the project. He supervised the technical aspects, including the design of the preservation system and the microfilming method. Peters also developed a specific device for reading the microfilms, whose manufacturing plans were included in the crypt so that future discoverers could rebuild it if the technology had been forgotten.
Encyclopedic Contents
The contents of the Crypt of Civilization are truly encyclopedic, and their assembly mobilized Jacobs and his team for nearly three years. The ambition was to give as complete a picture as possible of human civilization in the early 20th century.
More than 640,000 pages of text were microfilmed, including the Bible in several versions, the Quran, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, works of Shakespeare, complete encyclopedias, and foundational scientific works. Hundreds of newsreel films document world events of the 1930s. Audio recordings on more than 200 discs capture famous voices of the era, including those of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Neville Chamberlain.
The crypt also contains a remarkable collection of everyday objects intended to illustrate life in the 1930s and 1940s: a set of Lincoln Logs (a wooden construction toy popular in the United States since 1916), a Donald Duck doll, a typewriter, an electric toaster, a can of Budweiser beer, a dental appliance, fabric samples, agricultural seeds, and women's beauty products.
A reading device for the microfilms and recordings was included, accompanied by detailed instructions for its manufacture — a thoughtful precaution in case the technology had been forgotten by the year 8113.
A linguistic guide was carefully prepared, starting from images and simple concepts to teach English to future discoverers. This guide assumes that the people opening the crypt in 8113 might not speak any modern language, and it progresses methodically from the concrete to the abstract, from images to words, then to sentences and complex concepts. The approach draws on the work of linguists of the era on language learning and constitutes in itself a fascinating document on early 20th-century pedagogy.
The Solemn Closure of May 28, 1940
The Crypt of Civilization was officially sealed on May 28, 1940, during a ceremony attended by local dignitaries, representatives of the national press, and members of the university community. The historical context made the moment particularly poignant: Europe had been at war since September 1939, France was on the verge of falling (the armistice would be signed on June 22, 1940), and the prospect that civilization itself might not survive lent particular urgency to the act of preservation.
Thornwell Jacobs delivered a speech emphasizing the importance of transmitting a faithful testimony of the era, with its greatness and its miseries, its hopes and its despair. A plaque affixed to the welded door indicates the instructions for opening in 8113 and formally requests that the crypt not be opened before that date.
The Legacy of the Crypt and the ITCS
Thornwell Jacobs is today nicknamed "the father of the modern time capsule." His project directly inspired Westinghouse's, whose preparation began after the publication of the article in Scientific American. The Westinghouse Electric Corporation publicly acknowledged this lineage, and G. Edward Pendray, the inventor of the term "time capsule," cited Jacobs as a source of inspiration. Jacobs passed away in 1956 at the age of 63, but his legacy endures well beyond his own life.
In 1990, for the 50th anniversary of the crypt's closure, the International Time Capsule Society (ITCS) was founded at Oglethorpe University, co-founded by Paul Hudson, the university's librarian. Its mission: to document and promote the study of time capsules around the world. The ITCS established a global registry of known time capsules and produced a list of the 10 most remarkable capsules in history. The ITCS estimates that approximately 80% of time capsules are lost, forgotten, or destroyed before their planned opening date — a figure that underscores the difficulty of transmitting memory across centuries.
The Crypt of Civilization holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest planned time capsule. Oglethorpe University continues to serve as its guardian, and the crypt is regularly inspected from the outside to verify the integrity of the structure. Phoebe Hearst Hall still stands and is used by the university.
More than eight decades after its closure, the Crypt of Civilization continues to fascinate. It embodies the idea that even in the face of uncertainty about the future, the gesture of preserving and transmitting remains profoundly meaningful. It is this same conviction that drives every person creating a digital capsule on Capsul.
Sources
- Jacobs, Thornwell. "Why Not a 'Crypt of Civilization,'" *Scientific American*, November 1936. - International Time Capsule Society (ITCS), Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia. - Oglethorpe University, "Crypt of Civilization," official website. - Jarvis, William E. *Time Capsules: A Cultural History*. McFarland & Company, 2002. - *Guinness World Records*, entry "Oldest time capsule." - Hudson, Paul. "The International Time Capsule Society," Oglethorpe University, 1990.