07/29/2025
She was afraid people would rewrite history, so she recorded over 300,000 hours of TV over 35 years on 71,000 VHS tapes.
Marion Stokes recorded television programs nonstop for over three decades. She started in the late 1970s, and by 1979 she was relentlessly capturing everything 24/7, from news to sitcoms, because she noticed that TV networks often erased old shows to save space and money.
As a former librarian and activist, Marion cared deeply about making information available to everyone and wanted to save TV history so powerful people couldn't rewrite it however they wanted.
Marion once kept up to eight videotape recorders running at the same time, and she got her family to help. For example, her son Michael remembers having to rush home from dinner to change the tapes. When Marion died in 2012, she had recorded about 71,000 tapes. This made her the only person to save such a complete record of television from that time.
Now the Internet Archive is digitizing her collection so anyone will be able to watch it online. Thanks to Marion's dedication, her dream of giving everyone access to knowledge is finally coming true.
While some sources (NBC News, CNN, etc.) claim she recorded around 800,000 hours of VHS tape. However, later Snopes clarified that the 2013 story claiming 140,000 tapes was not correct, as the total number of tapes counted and shared by the Internet Archive is 70,000+. So maybe the 800,000-hour figure was estimated by accounting for 140,000 tapes.
So, mathematically, 24 hours × 365 days × 35 years = 306,600 hours, which is just over 300,000 hours. So I chose this more realistic figure instead.
