On August 23, 2015, Google dedicated a doodle to honor the 147e anniversary of his birth. The Silicon Valley giant then paid tribute to one of its inspirations, because Paul Otlet, an unfairly overlooked Belgian lawyer, is a pioneer of search engines.
Born in 1868, this Brussels resident is driven by a simple dream: to bring together all of humanity’s knowledge in a place accessible to all. Half a century before the birth of the byte, seventy years before the first computer, Paul Otlet intended to create a sort of physical Internet in the form of a universal index of human knowledge.
At first glance, the task seems daunting. Or even impossible. Nowadays, one could easily store the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia (around 100 gigabytes of data) on a USB stick. On the other hand, printed on paper and stored in a library, it would be particularly bulky (the English version of the online encyclopedia alone would occupy 3,757 volumes, or a 10 square meter room entirely filled with books).
And yet, venturing to the archives center of the Mundaneum in Mons (Hainaut, southern Belgium), open to the public since 1998, the visitor is amazed by the 6 kilometers of archives which run along the walls. Hundreds of shelves whose drawers, meticulously labeled, contain around 12 million files listing the world’s knowledge – whether books, posters, newspaper clippings, photographs… A titanic and ant-like work which owes everything to its two instigators, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine.
“Classify the world”
We should not be surprised by their meticulousness and their sense of organization: these two Belgians are lawyers. It was while working on a common collection of jurisprudence in 1890 that they traced the outlines of their Universal Bibliographic Directory (RBU), an index of the knowledge of humanity which would be launched in 1895. Their classification is based on ten categories, numbered from 0 (“generalities”) to 9 (“geography, biography, history”), each then being subdivided into a certain number of subcategories to facilitate exploration.
The objective? “Scientific production becomes more intense, scientific publications multiply, as well as the number of people who can or who must use the information contained by the thousands and thousands in books, magazines and newspapersnoted Paul Otlet in 1908. The consequence is that we must make these enormous masses of documents increasingly accessible to the general public.”
This is how the famous file cabinets were born, receptacles of the Universal Bibliographic Directory, which can still be admired today along the walls of the Mundaneum. Despite the scale of the task, their contents swelled rapidly: from 400,000 files at the start of the project, it rose to a million and a half files in 1897 and up to 18 million in the mid-1930s.
The two founders are supported in this enterprise by numerous volunteers, volunteers and librarians. At the same time, Paul Otlet amassed an incredible quantity of documents which he wanted to make into a documentation center, attaching himself to each one as a precious fragment of knowledge to be saved. Thus is born, under their fingers, an analog precursor to the Internet.
A humanist project
Be careful, this is not a simple bookseller’s fad. Convinced pacifists (Henri La Fontaine received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913), the two lawyers know, like the 18th century Encyclopedistse century, that the free flow of information guarantees peace and social justice, while ignorance invariably leads to war. This is one of the reasons why their Mundaneum (whose name evokes the mythical ark of the Flood) found a welcome response in the interwar period, particularly with the League of Nations.
In the meantime, the project was installed in 1920 at the Palais Mondial in Brussels, in the Cinquantenaire park. Using 150 rooms, it is compared by newspapers to a contemporary Tower of Babel. The Universal Bibliographic Directory allows you to search for documents relating to a given subject, it attracts the attention of researchers from around the entire planet. Many telegrams flocked to consult this exponential database: the first search engine in the world was born! “What we recommend is to form a universal union among all those who devote themselves to intellectual work”rejoices Henri La Fontaine.
Of course, the project of a world Wide Web analog is only one component of the utopian city that Paul Otlet calls for, namely a “World City” seat of institutions, academies and museums, an international platform for sharing knowledge radiating well beyond the Belgian borders. Unfortunately, the German occupation of Belgium in 1940 destroyed his ambitions. After the war, the Mundaneum lost not only part of its collections (destroyed by the Nazis), but also the soul that had inhabited it for half a century. Furthermore, Paul Otlet died in December 1944, a year and a half after his long-time collaborator.
Back to the future
Continued by its admirers, the Mundaneum fascinates not only by what it has become – an encyclopedic directory of world knowledge – but also by its visionary instincts. As early as the 1930s, for example, Paul Otlet outlined the outlines of a “global network” that would remotely connect researchers around the world. “All things in the universe and all things of man would be recorded remotely as they happenedhe predicted in 1935 in his Universalism essay. Thus would be established the moving image of the world, its memory, its true double.
Doesn’t that remind you of anything? Paul Otlet imagined building this network on emerging technologies of the time, namely “radio, Röntgen rays, cinema and microscopic photography”. But what he had in mind was nothing more and nothing less than the first computer. He believed that all human knowledge could be accessed with a simple gesture. This gesture is what you do every day to check your emails, browse the news, or find out what the weather will be like.
This is perhaps what is most astonishing when contemplating the work of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine: the prophetic character of their enterprise. If they tired their eyes writing millions of bibliographic records, they were considering a project with much broader ramifications. And their writings announce, half-heartedly, the advent of search engines, videoconferencing, artificial intelligence, big data and even social networks… Who can say the same in the history of science?
Moved several times since 1941, the Mundaneum ended up stranded in Mons, 20 kilometers from the French border, in 1993. Astonishing coincidence, not far from there is one of its distant heirs. In 2010, Google installed its first data center there (data center) European.
