TIME CAPSULES: INSTANT ARCHAEOLOGY

Do not open until 8113.

That is the year The Crypt of Civilization, a time capsule sealed at Atlanta's Oglethorpe University in 1940, is due to be opened.

Though time capsules of a kind have been buried since the ancient Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, those often contained objects believed to be charmed and were more like cornerstones. The patient and optimistic creators of The Crypt of Civilization are credited with inventing the modern time capsule as an accurate record for future historians.

Time capsules have been called "instant archaeology." As the YELL Foundation's Millennium time capsule is intended to do, they provide future generations with a snapshot of life in yesteryear.

The Crypt of Civilization contains 640,000 pages of microfilmed material and hundreds of newsreels and recordings. At 20 feet long by 10 feet wide by 10 feet high, assembling the crypt's contents took two years.

Among the hundreds of common items in the crypt are a Donald Duck doll, dentures, a pacifier, a quart of beer, seeds, a motion picture projector and a small windmill to power the projector.

The first object beings that open the crypt in the 82nd century will see is a Mutoscope Language Integrator, a machine that when cranked displays a picture of an object with its name captioned underneath and pronounced on a phonograph record. The crypt lining depicts scenes from human history.

Not all time capsules are buried. The most famous flying time capsules are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which in 1977 blasted into space carrying recordings and images intended to communicate some essence of life on Earth -- among them greetings in 55 languages, and the sounds of surf, thunder, Beethoven and Chuck Berry.

LAGEOS, a satellite launched in 1976, contains maps showing the positions of the continents on Earth as they are believed to have been 225 million years ago, as they were in 1976 and as they were expected to be in 8.4 million years. The message was designed by famed astronomer Carl Sagan.

Some of us are much less willing to wait than the Atlantans who dreamed up The Crypt of Civilizations. A time capsule buried in Common Pleas Courthouse Park during Cape Girardeau's sesquicentennial in 1956 was unearthed only 35 years later when the bicentennial was celebrated in 1992.

The bicentennial followed the sesquicentennial so quickly because it was decided to date the city from Don Louis Lorimier's founding of his trading post in 1792 instead of from the founding of Cape Girardeau in 1806.

Among the items in the time capsule were a top hat, Southeast Missourian issues containing articles about the sesquicentennial, and a telephone directory.

City Councilman Melvin Gateley, who was chairman of the commission, recalls unearthing the steel drum.

"We couldn't even get it open," he said. "They had to go get a blow torch and cut it open for us."

But the drum had a tiny pin hole that allowed moisture in, destroying most of the contents.

" We tried to dry it out and salvaged just teensy pieces," Gateley said. "There were menus. Louis Schultz had a roster of the school faculty. There were jars of corn and wheat and rye. As soon as you touched them they turned to powder."

In 1994, the city's Bicentennial Committee placed a stainless steel time capsule in the above-ground mausoleum at Memorial Park. To be opened in 50 years, the capsule contains Bicentennial memorabilia, reports from St. Francis Medical Center and Southeast Missouri Hospital, Boy Scout And Girl Scout information, a Cape Girardeau phone book, miscellany about the city and the Southeast Missourian's annual progress edition.

This time the items were vacuumed sealed in a steel drum by a California company that specializes in time capsules.

Southeast Missourian/Fred Lynch

Randy Cox of Kelso, front, drove his superstock truck past Rodney Tweedy of Wolf Lake, Ill. whose truck stalled in the muddy water at the Gordonville City Park Saturday.