Thornwell Jacobs (February 15, 1877 – August 4, 1956) was a professor, historian, author, fundraiser, university founder, and Presbyterian minister.

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.

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.

He selected young men from the top 10 percent of recent high school graduates for his intense university program.

In the unique educational experiment, team members were to stay in college six years and do two to three times as much work as an average student.

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.

[14] 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.

Other rules were that he followed a daily schedule with time allotted for classes, meals, exercise, reading in the library, studying, and sleep.

[16] In 1922, in the churchyard of the Cranham rectory in England, Jacobs located the burial place of British General James Edward Oglethorpe, namesake of the old university.

[11] He made an effort to have his remains and those of the general's wife's moved to Atlanta where they were to be reburied in a tomb on the Oglethorpe campus,[17] but there was opposition from Georgia organizations and English authorities that caused this to not come to fruition.

[19] Jacobs originated and conceived the Crypt of Civilization millennial idea for a historic time treasure trove of 1930s cultural objects sealed in a specially designed room at Oglethorpe University in 1935.

He discussed this proposal in an article in Scientific American in November 1936, because he was astounded by the shortage of information on people that lived in communities and settlements that were established as a basis for nations and empires that came about later.

[23] Jacobs devised a plan to present a story of customs of humans on Earth and put it down in a detailed written design.

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.