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Thornwell Jacobs (February 15, 1877 – August 4, 1956) was a professor, historian, author, fundraiser, university founder, and Presbyterian minister. He earned degrees from Presbyterian College in South Carolina and the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. He wrote The Law of White Circle, a novel about set during the Atlanta race massacre of 1906.
Jacobs reestablished Oglethorpe University, becoming its president and developing intense educational programs. His motivation for this was that his grandfather attended the original college and told him of educated people that had graduated from it to become productive citizens in society. Unfortunately, it had been forced to cease functioning because of the American Civil War.
He conceived the Crypt of Civilization time capsule idea for a historic time collection of 1930s cultural objects sealed in a specially designed place on campus for people of the 82nd century to find to see how the people on Earth lived in the 20th century.
In 1909, Jacobs returned to Atlanta for a fundraising project to benefit the growth of Agnes Scott College. He then established a Presbyterian college in Atlanta. He also planned to reestablish the old Oglethorpe University near Atlanta, where his grandfather, Ferdinand, had been a faculty member. His grandfather had told him stories about the university's graduates; some were governors, some were poets, some were ministers, some were farmers, and some were merchants. Oglethorpe University, named for British General James Edward Oglethorpe the founder of the colony of Georgia and the first governor of the state of Georgia, was chartered a Presbyterian institution in 1835. The college had been closed during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Jacobs started the religious publication Westminster Magazine in 1911 which promoted the reestablishing of Oglethorpe University as a college again. Jacobs reopened the school of higher education and reestablished it from 1913 to 1916. He restored and rebuilt the old college from a fund he raised of $500,000 (). He became its president on January 21, 1915, and continued in that position for nearly 30 years until 1944. As a salesman, Jacobs was able to get financial backers for Oglethorpe University like J.T. Lupton, a Chattanooga Coca-Cola bottling businessman, who gave $100,000 for the hall that bears his name at the university. Jacobs was able to get newspaper czar William Randolph Hearst to give a quarter of a million dollars cash and other donations to the university. According to Judson C. Ward, historian and vice president of Emory University, Jacobs was an outstanding salesman, master showman, and man of ideas with a flair for attracting publicity.
The team's daily routine was to start classes at 7 am and attend until 1:30 pm. They could then play and exercise for a while. Then in the afternoon, they would continue their studies until 10:45 pm. They could participate in extracurricular activities except for fraternities, which were thought to interfere with their studies. The average student typically studied 15 hours' class work a week, but the brain team would apply 25 to 30 hours a week. The average student attended college 8 months a year, but Jacobs' team would attend the college 11 months out of the year. The courses taught at the university included astronomy, geology, paleontology, and anthropology, as well as various types of art, physical exercise, shorthand, Greek, French, German, Italian, Spanish and philosophy.
One winner of the six-year Oglethorpe scholarship, Marshall Asher Jr of Athens, Texas, gave details of his experiences as a member of the brain team. He explained that he entered a statewide contest for the scholarship in the summer following his high school graduation, and he earned high scores on a comprehensive set of exams. In the middle of September 1939, he was notified to report to Oglethorpe to replace a member of the experiment that dropped out. When he arrived, the first thing that happened was that he met the other ten young men participating in the program. Then he was notified of the conditions regulating the scholarship. He was guaranteed room, board, and regular school fees if he would follow the experiment's rules. The most important one was that he was to buy all the necessary books and keep them in his possession. The next rule was that he was to attend a designated church each Sunday assigned by Jacobs. He could not smoke, drink liquor, gamble, or swear. He remained in his room every evening, except Saturday, to prepare for the next day's lessons. Other rules were that he followed a daily schedule with time allotted for classes, meals, exercise, reading in the library, studying, and sleep. He was told that the education he received would include every subject taught in the university and would take six years of study at 11 months a year. He was told that he would take twice the load of the average student and be expected to make grades of at least 90. At the end of 20 months, he was the lead student with an average grade of 95 and six, remaining in the rigid rule test project. He had received a four-year Bachelor of Arts degree. All the students that would graduate at the end of the six-year period would receive the special degree of doctor of arts and sciences.
Jacobs put Dr. Thomas Kimmwood Peters in charge of the project in 1937 because of his experience as a scientist, photographer, and inventor. For the next three years most every conceivable phase of living was investigated and cataloged. There were 960,000 pages of book knowledge microfilmed by specially designed cameras of Peters' innovation. To show the level of scientific achievement, contents included 250 motion pictures about industries, processes of manufacture, surgical operations, scenes of everyday life, fiction films, documentaries, a motion picture history of the United States from 1895, and a still photography history from 1840. Additionally, to show how to live in the 20th century, fashions in 30-inch miniature models were made dressed by prominent costume designers, complete with patterns for full-length reproduction in the future. Also included was a complete five-and-ten-cent store, dishes, newspapers, chewing gum, optical instruments, musical instruments, cataloged musical recordings, scale models of railroad locomotives, automobiles, yachts, ocean liners, airplanes, air-conditioning systems, and samples of food with associated drinks.
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