Inside the Iron Mountain Vault Housing the ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ Negative
The hidden mine in Pennsylvania storing treasures of analog media

The Pittsburgh CBS affiliate went 220 feet below the pastoral landscape of Butler, Pennsylvania, to visit Iron Mountain‘s 1.8 million-square-foot land mine of a vault. It preserves many of the nation’s most valuable analog artifacts and houses a staggering amount of server space. There are several hundred thousand original prints of Hollywood movies, as well as the 11 million-image Bettmann Archive owned by Corbis, featuring the cracked glass plate negative of the 1932 ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,’ among other iconic photographs. In the video above, see the impressive length to which the organization goes in keeping the facilities secure, digitally archived, and climate-controlled, which includes managing an underground lake.
H/t Digg