Natural caves with state-of-the art technology will store in deep freeze records of everything that made people around us tick, bringing time to a standstill. Our descendants, thousands of years from now, will not have to dig through our garbage to learn how we lived.

The world’s largest, safest, and most modern storage facility is Iron Mountain Inc.

Iron Mountain, named after a depleted iron ore mine, has become the world’s leader in storing and protecting historical public and private records. It serves 235,000 customers from the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe, employs more than 14,500 people, and owns 830 storage facilities worldwide.

The company operates at least six top secret and highly secure underground facilities, with state-of-the-art security and temperature and humidity controls. All storage areas are secured against environmental hazards. In the event of a fire, dry gases will remove oxygen and extinguish flames with no damage from water or chemicals.

Herman Knaust, called “Mushroom King” by his Hudson River compatriots, set up Iron Mountain in 1951 in Livingston, New York. Knaust had become wealthy from growing and selling mushrooms. In 1936 he purchased a depleted iron mine to grow his crop. The astute businessman searched for other uses of this mine once the mushroom market became less attractive.

Knaust had a wake-up call when he helped Jewish refugees without proper papers relocate to the United States after World War II. He realized that loss of personal identification or loss of company records could be a legal quagmire for anyone, business or private citizen.

Knaust seized the opportunity. He knew how to use publicity to further his goals. He invited US General Douglas MacArthur to visit Iron Mountain and used this opportunity to tout his service to the world.

This company’s most-talked-about storage facility is in an old iron mine in the hills of western Pennsylvania. This mine spans an area of 1,000 acres, and so far more than 85 percent is still undeveloped. At present, this cave houses all kinds of information for more than 2,400 customers and is watched over and taken care of by 1,700 employees.

A documentary entitled “Frozen in Time”—produced in 2004 by Terence Smith, Media Correspondent and Senior Producer of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer—told of the Bettmann Archives, the world’s most renowned private collection of historical photographic and graphic images, which is stored at Iron Mountain.

“With its imposing name and military-tight security,” says Smith, “you might think that the Iron Mountain National Underground Storage Facility is one of those forbidding places where presidents and generals huddled during the Cold War. Instead, in this old limestone mine, some 200 feet beneath the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, is the Corbis/Bettmann Film Preservation Facility. The goal is not to destroy but to preserve—not to end time, but to stop it altogether.”

Smith reminisced, “Iron Mountain is a city unto itself. In the 1950s, it was advertised as a blast-proofed nuclear bunker, complete with all the comforts of home.”

Gary H. Anthes of Computerworld visited one of Iron Mountain’s underground storage facilities in 2003. He says, “The idea of trucking records to a hidden, blast-proof underground storage facility sounds so very 1950s, but increased regulation and electronic delivery systems have stoked the demand for Iron Mountain’s off-site archiving services.” Anthes found security measures—which included a search for weapons, cameras, or tape recorders—quite extensive but necessary, as the location is top-secret.