This is a cultural history of 5000 years of time capsules and other related information transfers across time. It examines both the formal and the popular culture aspects of the time capsule, from its roots in ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian building-foundation deposits to the present utilization of spacecraft probes and other extreme locations. The deposits of 3000 BCE had no definite date and time to be opened; in 1876 CE came the idea of target-dated deposits. Also discussed are how real time capsules work, notional and archaelogical time capsules, the height of the time capsule’s popularity from 1935 to 1982, the preservation of writings in time capsules, keeping time in a perpetual futurescape, and turn of the century hype surrounding millennium time capsules.