Crypt of Civilization
The Crypt of Civilization is a sealed airtight chamber built between 1937 and 1940 at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, in Metro Atlanta. The 2,000-cubic-foot (57 m3) room contains numerous artifacts and documents, and is designed for opening in the year 8113 AD. During the 50th anniversary year of its sealing, the Guinness Book of World Records cited the crypt as the "first successful attempt to bury a record of this culture for any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet Earth."
Thornwell Jacobs (1877–1956), referred to as "the father of the modern time capsule", claims to be the first in modern times to conceive the idea of consciously preserving man-made objects for posterity by placing them in a sealed repository. Jacobs's inspiration for the project was sparked by the Egyptian pyramid and tomb openings in the 1920s. He was struck by the scarcity of historical information available from these ancient civilizations and imagined having a "running story" of the customs of human life from the beginning to the 1930s modern culture.
Although the claim that 4241 BC (July 19) is the "earliest fixed date" has been discredited since Jacobs, he noted that 6,177 years had passed between when the Egyptian calendar was established in 4241 BC and the present year (AD 1936). This figure served as the rationale for setting the opening of the crypt for 8113, as it was 6,177 years away.
Jacobs’s Crypt of Civilization intrigued America and was duplicated by many others. In the mid-1930s, George Edward Pendray, a public relations executive for the Westinghouse Electric Company, was given an assignment to come up with a promotional event for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Pendray, also an amateur rocketeer, suggested burying a "time capsule", a sealed rocket-shaped vessel made of a metal alloy called "cupaloy". The Westinghouse time capsule is a 7-foot-long (2.1 m) rocket-shaped tube with a metal exterior that encapsulated articles in a Pyrex inner tube. Pendray’s project was originally named a "time bomb", but the name was later changed to time capsule. Pendray’s time capsule is scheduled to be opened in 6,100 years.
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