Bettmann Archive

The Bettmann Archive is an image and photo collection that was founded by Otto Bettmann and currently is with a stock of about 11 million images owned by the media company Corbis.

As the cultural historian Bettmann in 1935 Germany was forced to emigrate to the U.S., he had in his luggage the foundation of an image and photo collection, which he founded in New York in 1936 a photo agency. In 1938, decreed this over 15,000 images. Their rights they sold, each with a one-time license to editors of newspapers, magazines and TV, as well as book editors and advertisers. Bettmann's entrepreneurial achievements was the development of this business model as well as the purchase and indexing the rapidly growing stocks.

In 1967 the company's collection and Gendreau 1972, Underwood & Underwood Collection buys and until 1980 the inventory of the archive grew to two million images. 1981 Bettmann sold the archive to the Kraus- Thomson Organization. Since 1995 part of the Bettmann Archive to Corbis, the world's second largest picture archive, which was founded by Bill Gates. Among the most famous images of the Bettmann Archive owns the image of Albert Einstein, showing his tongue, and images of the disaster of the Hindenburg Luffschiffes 1937.

Since 2002, store the contents of the archives in the Iron Mountain National Underground Storage Facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania, a former limestone quarry, where the originals are safely stored prior to maturity largely at a depth of 67 m at a temperature of -20 ° C.

The future of this storage facility and its eventual destruction after a fictitious disappearance of humanity (, USA " danger of collapse ", 2010 ) shown in episode 5 of the second season of the docu-fiction series Life After People.