In 1934, fifty years before the first web browser,

Paul Otlet described a system of networked computers—or “electric telescopes”—that would allow people to search through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. As the network spread, he foresaw it uniting individuals and institutions of all stripes—from local bookstores and classrooms to universities and governments. He dubbed the whole thing a réseau mondial: a “worldwide network.”

In one remarkably prescient passage, he wrote:

Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation in its entirety or in certain of its parts.

Who was Paul Otlet?

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An Internet of Paper

Paul Otlet described a future networked environment – the Mundaneum – that in many ways resembles the present-day Internet. But his vision extended well beyond the scope of a simple information repository.

The Mundaneum that Otlet imagined would serve as the intellectual nerve center of a a post-national world order, connecting governments, universities, bookstores, and other institutions in a utopian collaborative network.

Ultimately, Otlet imagined that such an environment would allow national boundaries to dissolve, eliminate the causes of war, and allow humanity to make a collective leap forward towards a more harmonious and enlightened state of being.

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A Web of Influence

The myth of the lone genius ranks as one of the persistent myths in Western culture. For all of Otlet’s personal brilliance, his ideas took shape at a particular place and time, often in close collaboration with his contemporaries. Otlet’s work provides a window into a broader – and largely overlooked – lineage of twentieth century thinking about the possibilities of a networked world.

H.G. Wells, the English science fiction writer and social activist, dreamed of building a World Brain; Emanuel Goldberg, a brilliant inventor of Russian Jewish ancestry, designed a fully functional mechanical search engine in 1930s Germany before fleeing the Nazis; Scotland’s Patrick Geddes and Austria’s Otto Neurath both explored new kinds of highly designed, propagandistic museum exhibits designed to foster social change; Germany’s Wilhelm Ostwald, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, aspired to build a vast new “brain of humanity”; the eccentric sculptor Hendrik Andersen and the famed architect Le Corbusier both worked with Otlet on the design of a World City to house a new, one-world government with a networked information repository at its epicenter.

Their work preceded – and prefigured – the work of later Anglo-American innovators like Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Andy van Dam, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Yet the contributions of these European pioneers have been largely ignored in the conventional history of the Internet, which has focused almost exclusively on the contributions of post-WWII Anglo-American inventors. The work of Otlet and his contemporaries invites us to broaden our horizons beyond the realm of computer science.

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Now available from
Oxford University Press

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Now available from Oxford University Press

Now available from
Oxford University Press