This 1940 time capsule came with its own windmill
In 1940 he welded shut a converted swimming pool packed with 1930s objects, with instructions not to open it until noon on May 28, 8113. The chamber is 20 feet long and 10 feet high, sits on bedrock under a stone roof 7 feet thick, and had its oxygen pumped out and replaced with nitrogen. It holds seed samples, dental floss, a woman's purse with typical contents, an electric toaster, a pacifier, a manual typewriter, Lincoln Logs, a plastic Donald Duck, a bottle of Budweiser, Artie Shaw records, and microfilm of more than 800 books running over 600,000 pages.
- ▪In 1940 he welded shut a converted swimming pool packed with 1930s objects, with instructions not to open it until noon on May 28, 8113.
- ▪The chamber is 20 feet long and 10 feet high, sits on bedrock under a stone roof 7 feet thick, and had its oxygen pumped out and replaced with nitrogen.
- ▪It holds seed samples, dental floss, a woman's purse with typical contents, an electric toaster, a pacifier, a manual typewriter, Lincoln Logs, a plastic Donald Duck, a bottle of Budweiser, Artie Shaw records, and microfilm of more than 800
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/03/crypt-of-civilization.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:12:55 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T19:45:42.956Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T19:45:42.956Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cMpT6M9EyDGt · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This 1940 time capsule came with its own windmill Ellsworth Toohey 12:12 pm Mon Aug 3, 2026 Crypt of Civilization — Not credited / Public domain (via Wikipedia) Thornwell Jacobs, the president of Oglethorpe University in Georgia, worked out that 6,177 years had passed since the start of the Egyptian calendar, and decided to aim the same distance forward. In 1940 he welded shut a converted swimming pool packed with 1930s objects, with instructions not to open it until noon on May 28, 8113. The chamber is 20 feet long and 10 feet high, sits on bedrock under a stone roof 7 feet thick, and had its oxygen pumped out and replaced with nitrogen.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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