Forgotten Prophet of the Internet Philip Ball Ponders the Tale of a Librarian Who Dreamed of Networking Information

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Forgotten prophet of the Internet Philip Ball ponders the tale of a librarian who dreamed of networking information.

he Internet is considered establish the league in Geneva, in neu- a key achievement of the tral Switzerland, rather than Brussels. computer age. But as for- But their objective was much more Tmer New York Times staffer Alex grandiose, utopian and strange. Wright shows in the meticulously Progressive thinkers such as researched Cataloging the World, H. G. Wells (whom Otlet read) desired BELGIUM MUNDANEUM, the concept predates digital tech- world government in the interwar nology. In the late nineteenth cen- period, but Otlet’s plans often seemed tury, Belgian librarian Paul Otlet detached from mundane realities. conceived schemes to collect, store, They veered into mystical notions of automatically retrieve and remotely transcendence of the human spirit, distribute all human knowledge. influenced by theosophy, and Otlet His ideas have clear analogies with seems to have imagined that learn- information archiving and net- ing could be transmitted not only by working on the web. Wright makes careful study of documents but by a a persuasive case that Otlet — now symbolic visual language in posters largely forgotten —deserves to and displays. In the late 1920s, he and be ranked among the conceptual architect Le Corbusier devised a plan inventors of the Internet. to realize the Mundaneum as a build- Wright locates Otlet’s work in a ing complex full of sacred symbolism, broader narrative about collation as much temple as library. Wright and cataloguing of information. overlooks the real heritage of these Compendia of knowledge date back ideas: Otlet’s predecessor here was at least to Pliny the Elder’s Natural Paul Otlet’s Mondothèque workstation. not Gesner but Italian philosopher History (ad 77–79) and the collec- Tommaso Campanella, who in 1602 tions of Renaissance scholars such as Swiss networks made possible by the personal- described a “City of the Sun” in which citizens naturalist Conrad Gesner, although these computer revolution that was shaped by the imbibed knowledge from great, complex wall were digests of typically uncited sources. Otlet counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. paintings. This aspect of Otlet’s dreams looks sought to collect everything — newspapers, The real focus of this story is not the ante- backwards to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism books, pamphlets, photographs — and to cedents of the Internet. It concerns dreams of as much as it looks forward to the information devise a method of categorization that would a utopian world order, shared by many around age and the Internet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, rival the Dewey decimal system. Wright the end of the nineteenth century and after politicians remained unconvinced, dooming tells a poignant story of the elderly, perhaps the First World War. This was Otlet’s grander Otlet to frustration and ultimate failure. senile, Otlet stacking up jellyfish on a beach vision, to which his collecting and catalogu- The modern ability to access Isaac New- and then placing on top an index card bearing ing were merely instrumental. In 1919, with ton’s Principia online would have delighted the number 59.33: the code for Coelenterata politician Henri La Fontaine — a commit- Otlet. That so much more network traffic in his Universal Decimal Classification. ted internationalist awarded the 1913 Nobel involves cats and pornography would have Otlet envisaged a ‘Mundaneum’, a reposi- Peace Prize — Otlet successfully petitioned devastated him. He was devastated enough: tory of all knowledge. Central to the scheme the Belgian government to fund plans to house the actual Mundaneum never amounted to was the Universal Bibliography, a card index the collection in a wing of a grand building more than a corner of the building hosting the with more than 15 million entries in filing in Brussels. He dubbed this space the Palais Palais Mondial, and the government edged cabinets. Realizing how much space and Mondial. The two men him out of there in 1924 to make room for an labour such a system demanded, Otlet advo- imagined an ‘intellec- exhibition on rubber. After losing funding for cated the miniaturization of documents (on tual parliament’ for all the cataloguing project in 1934, Otlet clung microfilm) and planned automatic systems humanity, in which the to a corner of the premises until the Nazis to locate information, like steampunk search organization of knowl- destroyed most of his collection in 1940. engines. This knowledge, he thought, might edge would contribute The remainder mouldered for decades in be broadcast to users by radio, and stored in a towards philosopher various buildings in Brussels; what survived workstation called a Mondothèque, equipped Auguste Comte’s vision now sits modestly in the new Mundaneum in with microfilm reader, telephone, television of a rationally governed Mons, a former garage. But there is another and record player. society. In part, their Mundaneum in Brussels: a conference room All this can be correlated with the software ideas paved the way for Cataloging the given that name in Google’s European office. and hardware of today. But Wright recog- the League of Nations World: Paul Otlet It is a fitting tribute, and Wright has offered and the Birth of ■ nizes that the comparison goes only so far. and the United Nations the Information another. Otlet’s vision was consistent with the social — although Otlet was Age climate of his day: centralized, highly man- distraught when the ALEX WRIGHT Philip Ball is a writer based in London. His aged and hierarchical. It was quite unlike Paris Peace Confer- Oxford University next book, Invisible, will be out in August. the distributed, self-organized peer-to-peer ence of 1919 elected to Press: 2014. e-mail: [email protected]