This Time Capsule Room Was Sealed in 1940. We’re Supposed to Open it in 8113

It's one of the most "ambitious" time capsules.

Staff at the Oglethorpe University in Atlanta closed a door on May 28, 1940. Behind the door waits a carefully assembled portrait of a vanished world made for strangers to explore 6,000 years from now.

The Crypt of Civilization had a startling ambition. It aims to preserve the texture of modern life across a span longer than recorded history itself. Its creator, Thornwell Jacobs, wanted to give the distant future what ancient Egypt had not given him: a crowded, deliberate record of how a civilization thought, worked, played, and imagined itself.

It’s like archaeology in reverse. Instead of leaving ruins behind by accident, Jacobs wanted to choose what the future would find.

For visual purposes I used AI only to enhance and color the original Oglethorpe University Archives images. The images were not altered any further than that. I want to help my readers better envision this place.

“This Is How We Lived”

Jacobs became president of Oglethorpe in 1915. Years later, while studying ancient Egypt, he was struck by a simple problem: much of what survived came from monuments, tombs and scattered inscriptions. They told later generations that a civilization had existed but didn’t reveal all that much about how its people lived from day to day.

By 1936, Jacobs had turned that observation into a concrete plan. He wanted to build a record for future archaeologists before his own world slipped into the same kind of silence.

He chose an unused swimming pool beneath Phoebe Hearst Hall. The chamber was large enough to hold a small archive of modern life, about 6 meters long, 3 meters wide and 3 meters high (20 x 10 x 10 feet). Workers reinforced the room, lined its walls, sealed fragile items in protective containers, replaced the air with inert gas and welded a stainless steel door shut. To the best of our knowledge, this should last for thousands of years.

Jacobs set the opening date for 8113 CE. His reasoning reached back to the Egyptian calendar, which he believed began in 4241 BCE. From that date to 1936, he counted 6,177 years. Then he sent the crypt the same distance into the future, turning it into a message placed midway between the earliest recorded history he recognized and a world no one could describe.

Old Snapshot

The whole point was to send a message and show how life was like in that day and age. That’s why there aren’t any valuables in the room, but rather common household objects.

×

Get smarter every day...

Stay ahead with ZME Science and subscribe.

Daily Newsletter
The science you need to know, every weekday.

Weekly Newsletter
A week in science, all in one place. Sends every Sunday.
No spam, ever. Unsubscribe anytime. Review our Privacy Policy.

Thank you! One more thing...

Please check your inbox and confirm your subscription.

The crypt contains hundreds of thousands of pages on microfilm, along with books, recordings, newsreels, a radio, a typewriter, electric light fixtures, games, toys, plastic samples, and devices for reading the stored material. The builders even included a wind-powered generator, a practical nod to the possibility that electricity might not be waiting outside the door in the ninth millennium.

The inventory also drifts wonderfully into the mundane. Artificial eyelashes, ladies’ stockings, playing cards, a beer container, a toaster-like appliance, mannequins, a plastic bird, and even a model of Donald Duck. Such objects might look silly at first glance. But for a far away civilization, a toy, a cosmetic item, or a household gadget may become evidence as precious as a royal inscription. A future scholar could read status, gender, industry, diet, leisure, and desire in things their makers took for granted.

But Jacobs also accounted for another problem: the future might not read English. So the crypt included a device meant to teach the language. It paired pictures with written words and spoken sounds, hoping to give its finders a path into the rest of the archive.

Its builders knew they might be misunderstood. They sent instructions anyway.

The Future Has a Way of Losing Things

But perhaps the biggest problem time capsules face in general is (ironically) forgetfulness.

People bury them with ceremonies and plaques. Then buildings change owners, records vanish, plaques corrode, and the children who watched the burial grow old. Sometimes, wars happen, or unexpected closures.

RelatedPosts

Grim Discovery in Belgian Cave Reveals Neanderthals Ate Their Own Kind, Possibly as an Act of War
Prehistoric wine discovered in inaccessible caves forces a rethink of ancient Sicilian culture
How Roman priests walked through the “Gates to Hell” — and came back
Ancient Brits made goblets from skulls

This is more common than you’d think. The International Time Capsule Society estimates that around 95% of time capsules are lost, and they estimate that around 9,000 out of 10,000 capsules buried since World War II are lost. This almost happened here, too.

The Crypt of Civilization nearly faded from attention within a few decades. In 1970, Paul Hudson, then a student, came across its sealed entrance while exploring a restricted area of Hearst Hall. He later became a historian and helped found the International Time Capsule Society, an organization created to track capsules before they disappeared from public memory.

The society estimated that thousands of time capsules exist around the world, many of them already lost. Some were buried for centennials and bicentennials. Others were sealed under monuments. Some may still sit beneath parking lots, waiting for descendants who no longer know they are there.

The Oglethorpe crypt has fared better because it was too grand to forget completely. Still, no plaque can command 6,000 years of obedience. Wars, climate, neglect, redevelopment, and curiosity all stand between Jacobs’s plan and the year 8113.

A Curated Image

The crypt offers a record of its age, but not a perfectly unbiased one. Its contents reflect the choices, habits and prejudices of 1930s America. The collection is expansive, yet it cannot represent everyone equally. A future civilization opening the door would find not “humanity” in full, but a curated portrait shaped by class, race, nationalism, technology, and the assumptions of the people doing the preserving.

That limitation may make it more valuable, not less. Archives always reveal their makers.

The crypt was sealed as World War II spread across the planet. Its optimism sits beside catastrophe. At the very moment nations were destroying cities and lives, Jacobs asked the far future to believe that civilization might continue long enough to receive this message.

The room remains closed today. Visitors cannot enter. They can only stand before the door in Atlanta and imagine the hands, or maybe appendages, that may one day open it.

Inside waits a version of us: earnest, flawed, inventive, frightened, but strangely hopeful.

You can find the Crypt’s complete inventory list here.