Thornwell Jacobs (1877–1956), President of Oglethorpe University from 1915 to 1944, is considered the father of modern time capsules by historian Paul Stephen Hudson. Jacobs was engaged in research in the 1920s for one of his books when he was astounded by the meager amount of detailed information available about ancient Egyptian life. He realized that practically all the accumulated knowledge we had of the civilization was based on two incomplete sources. One being the items found in tombs of the Pharaohs of Egypt and the kings of Sumeria and Babylonia. The second was from rock inscriptions and tablets found in ancient Assyria. He determined that while the ancient items found gave some degree of life events from thousands of years ago there were no complete and accurate records on any single generation of how people lived.