Episode 238: The Crypt of Thornwell Jacobs

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Speaker 1 This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate TeMayo.

Speaker 1 How could it be that everything, literally everything people knew about ancient Egypt, knew about that culture?

Speaker 1 It was clearly so advanced, clearly so substantive, literally clearly, you couldn't miss it. The pyramids, you've seen them, they're enormous.
And the Sphinx and the statues and temples.

Speaker 1 And in the 1920s, everyone was seeing pictures in the newspapers of the treasures from the newly discovered tomb of Tutankhamun.

Speaker 1 That there was a civilization with a run that lasted thousands of years.

Speaker 1 So how could it be, Thornwell Jacobs really couldn't get his head around it, how could it be that everything anyone knew about that entire civilization came from fragments?

Speaker 1 A few structures, a paltry handful of surviving objects, and from literal fragments, from symbols written on crumbling papyrus found in pharaonic tombs, or just a handful of tablets found in Egypt or carved into stones at this one site, one place.

Speaker 1 That was all that survived. The sum total of all human knowledge about this extraordinary civilization came from just those few fragments.
It was incredible to think about.

Speaker 1 Thornwell Jacobs would say that he felt like he was living inside a submarine. Up would go the periscope and he'd look around for a bit and take in what he could about the world.

Speaker 1 But the view was always limited. He could read books, but only so many.
He could visit a new city, but only get to so many museums or churches, only walk so many of its streets.

Speaker 1 And he would know more about the world. He would be better off for having looked around, but

Speaker 1 think about what he was missing. A periscope can only see so much.

Speaker 1 And most of the time, most of one's life, is spent underwater.

Speaker 1 This is what was happening with Egypt, he would tell people. The fragments, the artifacts.
This is all we are able to see through our collective periscope. And think of all we've missed.

Speaker 1 A whole civilization, all of its history, wars, famines, inventions, kingdoms rising, falling, disappearing in the sand. All of those lives lived and forgotten.
It was a shame.

Speaker 1 Thornwell Jacobs didn't want to be forgotten.

Speaker 1 He thought his life so worthy of remembering that his memoir, which came out in 1945, and I'm sorry, I'm sure you probably already know all this, but on the off chance that you don't remember, the book is called Step Down Dr.

Speaker 1 Jacobs. It runs 1100 pages and lays out his life and his various accomplishments.

Speaker 1 And once again, I'm going to ask you to forgive me for taking up time here by listing those accomplishments, because surely as Edison is to inventing the light bulb, and Lincoln to preserving the Union, or Armstrong to landing on the moon, Thornwell Jacobs is to opening a university in the suburbs of Atlanta, and spending many years in England researching the burial place of General James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia and the namesake of said university.

Speaker 1 I know you know all that, I'm sure, but you can always read all about it in his memoir, an exhaustive detail, and learn about this man, his life, and again and again and again about his views, including a lot of positive ones about slaveholders, negative ones about black people and Jews.

Speaker 1 and so much praise for the men he admired. Particularly those whose names ring out throughout history.

Speaker 1 Men like Oglethorpe, a military leader, then a member of the British Parliament, then a colonial governor, and now, as you know, a university. Jacobs writes about him with no small amount of flair.

Speaker 1 He had a fine eye for detail. In one passage on page 893, he offers a quite charming description about a bird's nest on his windowsill.

Speaker 1 recently vacated by a family of robins, and beyond that window, a university coming to life as spring has finally taken root after a wet winter, while he looks out from his office in Lupton Hall, a building named after the man who owned the largest Coca-Cola bottling franchise in southeastern Tennessee.

Speaker 1 But today we turn our periscope to Thornwell Jacobs' most enduring accomplishment, the invention of the time capsule.

Speaker 1 That thing where one places things from one's own time, puts them in some durable container, puts that container in the ground, or in the cornerstone of some new construction, or beneath the floor of a new gym in an old high school, with the intention that that container will be opened at some future date, some 25 or 50 or 150 years hence.

Speaker 1 Some time that may feel impossibly distant to those in the present, a time of flying cars or of ecological collapse, who could say, we in the present are left to only imagine the future.

Speaker 1 And that is the exercise, perhaps, for those making time capsules.

Speaker 1 Gives the people in the present a moment to think about their own moment in the context of history and imagine a future moment in history without them in it.

Speaker 1 An invitation to think about the strangeness of time.

Speaker 1 Perhaps you have done this yourself. It is a thing that people still do, bearing time capsules, though it isn't quite the thing it used to be.
Time capsules had, as we say now, a moment.

Speaker 1 Maybe your teacher or your town organized one.

Speaker 1 And perhaps you participated, took a moment to think of your moment, the things you valued at that time in your life, or maybe what you just thought would be interesting or even hilarious to suddenly be discovered by some future person.

Speaker 1 You were left only to imagine that moment, but that didn't make it less real. Time keeps coming.
The future does that.

Speaker 1 Maybe they would open it some decades from the moment you buried it, when you would, knock would, still be alive. Or perhaps longer, when you wouldn't.
And that could be a weird thing to think about.

Speaker 1 Perhaps you aren't thinking big enough.

Speaker 1 Thornwell Jacobs always thought big.

Speaker 1 And as a result, right now, about 20 feet below the surface of the earth,

Speaker 1 there is a room with a stone floor approximately two feet thick, set directly upon granite bedrock that formed about 300 million years ago, give or take.

Speaker 1 And I will now take you, in the spirit of Thornwell Jacobs, whose 1100-page memoir demonstrates his eagerness to explain his thinking. I will take you behind the curtain for a minute.

Speaker 1 So, when I am writing one of these stories, if I ever have a reason to say something along the lines of this thing that I am talking about is located or can be found wherever,

Speaker 1 I will always include the caveat that that thing exists during the time of this writing. Something like that.
Hopefully more elegant than that. But I do it for two reasons.
One is kind of highfalutin.

Speaker 1 Like I want you to think about time and and the moment in which you are living right now as itself historical.

Speaker 1 I want to destabilize time a bit for you.

Speaker 1 The other reason is just practical. I don't know when you're listening to this.
Maybe that thing in the story that I'm talking about isn't there anymore. That is the way time works.

Speaker 1 One moment's East Wing is another moment's ballroom.

Speaker 1 One moment's paradise is another moment's parking lot. One moment's jewelry factory is another moment's hot yoga studio.
It's all a spirit Halloween of the soul.

Speaker 1 But I am telling you that right now, whenever you are listening to this, and this show is preserved by the Library of Congress, it is all ones and zeros.

Speaker 1 It's not recorded on some crumbling VHS tape or wax cylinder in a basement in a known floodplain.

Speaker 1 So there is a chance that you could be listening to this a really, really long time from when I am recording it.

Speaker 1 But I am telling you that right now there is a room with a two-foot thick floor set on 300 something million year old bedrock, with a stone roof that is seven feet thick, with walls that are sealed with vitreous porcelain embedded in roofing pitch.

Speaker 1 And that room's single entrance is a door welded shut made of stainless steel.

Speaker 1 And before that door was sealed, the atmosphere in the room behind it was stripped of its oxygen and replaced with inert nitrogen to help preserve its contents.

Speaker 1 The room is the size of a swimming pool because it was once a swimming pool.

Speaker 1 But at the time of this recording, that room makes up a good portion of the basement of an administrative building on the campus of Oglethorpe University.

Speaker 1 It houses administrative offices, a lounge for students who commute to the university, as well as the crypt of civilization.

Speaker 1 Thornwell Jacobs thought big.

Speaker 1 He was well connected.

Speaker 1 In his decades at the helm of Oglethorpe University, He got to know everyone, mostly because he handed out honorary degrees to famous people like they wore gift bags at Golden Globe's after party, realized it was a great way to get the school's name in the papers.

Speaker 1 He gave out 150 of them. And so when he thought up his time capsule idea, he could really get that idea out there.

Speaker 1 So many of the biggest players in American media had gotten degrees from this guy, so they were happy to answer his call.

Speaker 1 So he wrote a big article about it in Scientific American, landed interviews in all the big newspapers, spoke about it on national radio. And everyone was into the idea, because it was a big one.

Speaker 1 It wasn't even going to be a regular time capsule, as we have come to know them.

Speaker 1 It was going to be a methodically constructed repository of human knowledge, which would solve for the people of the future the problem that the people there in his present in the late 1930s were right then having with the people of ancient Egypt.

Speaker 1 He wasn't going to provide the future with a periscopic view of the past. He wasn't going to leave them wondering how we lived, or how we built our temples, or mummified our boy kings.

Speaker 1 He wanted to give them the whole picture. His idea, the crypt of civilization and credit where credit is due, the dude came up with a hell of a name.

Speaker 1 His idea was a sensation for a time. And so into that crypt went objects from far and wide.

Speaker 1 Many from the general public. Toys, dresses, gadgets, an electric razor, a radio, a typewriter, a can of Budweiser.
Jazz records by Artie Shaw that were donated by the man himself.

Speaker 1 You know, plenty of time capsule-y stuff.

Speaker 1 But Jacobs was thinking bigger. He got the Army Corps of Engineers to consult in the room's design.

Speaker 1 He got Kodak to help put thousands of pages of books onto microfilm, then donate machines to read that microfilm, make instructions on how to use them, even to build them from scratch if those machines had somehow broken down.

Speaker 1 There were engraved steel plates of issues of the Atlanta Journal Constitution because the newspapers themselves wouldn't survive.

Speaker 1 There were specially printed publications about eugenics because it was the late late 1930s. There were recordings of Hitler and FDR and Stalin and Mussolini and many other world leaders of the day.

Speaker 1 There was a mutoscope, a kind of hand-cranked film viewer that would play a movie that would give the people who opened the crypt the information required to piece together the English language if they needed to.

Speaker 1 And so then there could be all sorts of memos and notes. that would talk about what the objects were, about how they were preserved, about why they were left there at all.

Speaker 1 Also that the people of the future would be better off than the people of Thornwell Jacob's time, sifting through the Egyptian sands, knowing they'd never find all the answers they were looking for about the past.

Speaker 1 About who those people were.

Speaker 1 About how they lived.

Speaker 1 And so there,

Speaker 1 in Georgia, Right now

Speaker 1 lies the crypt of civilization with a plaque by the door that forbids anyone to open it until the year 8113.

Speaker 1 So I am pretty sure that it is still going to be there when you're listening to this.

Speaker 1 Jacobs wrote the plaque. I don't think you would have missed the chance.
He signed it. So there is a chance.

Speaker 1 If it turns out that the engineers and scientists of the late 1930s who advised Jacobs on his project were correct, and the crypt of civilization survives until that date on the door, and there are people around to open it, who knows what will happen in the next several thousand years,

Speaker 1 those people could possibly, perhaps reasonably, assume that this Thornwell Jacobs was an enormously important figure in our ancient civilization.

Speaker 1 Despite the fact that Pretty much any other spot in the history of the 20th century to which they could direct their metaphorical periscope would reveal a world utterly unaware of its existence.

Speaker 1 It may well be that our own civilization, with its steel and plastic and forever chemicals, its books and movies and ones and zeros,

Speaker 1 may be more legible to the people of the future than ancient Egypt has been to us.

Speaker 1 But it also could be that they assume Thornwall Jacobs was the mightiest among us.

Speaker 1 I am am pretty sure I know which of those he would have preferred.

Speaker 1 This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in November of 2025. This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

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