We are fortunate to still have access to the vast amount of the visual demonstration material that Otlet and La Fontaine created in the course of their fifty-year passion (not to mention the index cards a visitor may peruse freely in their filing cabinets). Some of the graphic posters resemble vast and complex pyramids with tiny writing and lots of arrows, others seem to anticipate the pictorial spreads in a Dorling Kindersley book. A geopolitical atlas on boards takes its place next to a sketch of an ideal international museum, while a chart delineating the governing structure of the Union of International Associations hangs near a three-dimensional plan of the ideal ‘classification and presentation of didactic material’. For years these items were gathered at the opulent Palais Mondial in Brussels, but when they were ignominiously displaced by a rubber trade fair in 1923, Otlet was forced to store them in a variety of unsuitable locations, including his home and the basements of buildings throughout Belgium. Only in 1998, fifty-four years after his death, did they take their permanent and honoured place at the new Mundaneum in Mons.
What did the traditional encyclopaedists make of all this? Not much. They certainly didn’t appear to be threatened by Otlet and La Fontaine’s new systems; most editors seemed too busy updating their editions. But the remnants in Mons are deeply prescient. Paul Otlet in particular was grasping towards a future of hyperlinked information retrieval. Inevitably one thinks of the Internet, although Otlet’s vision was primarily tempered by a philanthropic and political liberalism. As his biographer Alex Wright concludes, his tireless endeavours are important ‘not just as a kind of historical curio, but because he envisioned a radically different kind of network: one driven not by corporate profit and personal vanity, but by a utopian vision of intellectual progress, social egalitarianism and even spiritual liberation.’
That was the future, then. Its zenith, during the last summer before the war seemed inevitable, occurred at a gathering at the Trocadéro in Paris in August 1937. It is not unusual for today’s historians of technology to look back at that five-day conference as the dawn of the Information Age, although back then it was just the plain old World Congress of Universal Documentation. Delegates from forty-five countries discussed acquisition, retrieval and storage, all the librarian’s favourites, and there was a particular focus on the exciting potential of microfilm. Paul Otlet spoke again on his big subject, the potential of emergent technologies to benefit the scholarly exchange of information and, by implication, a peaceable global government – a United Nations before its time. Not everyone at the conference had such generous internationalist plans: a German delegation delivered a speech ominously titled ‘The Domination of Knowledge’.
Other speakers included H.G. Wells, who had his own last-days-of-empire vision of how the world’s knowledge might be colonised and controlled. Like Paul Otlet, the author believed that the answer lay in a universal network; knowledge alone, if properly organised and disseminated, could still save the world from itself.
Saving the world from itself: H.G. Wells consults his volumes at home in Kent
* A shy and introverted boy, Otlet began ordering things in his life from a young age; after school, while others played with hoops, he enjoyed reclassifying the books in his student library. When La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, he was acclaimed as ‘the effective leader of the peace movement in Europe’. A losing battle, alas, and an ironically grisly one: the following year, in one of its first conflicts of the war, the British army would be forced into bloodied retreat by the Germans in – of all places – Mons.
* One could make the case, of course, that the Paris Expo was itself encyclopaedic. As Alex Wright observes, the show was not yet the gaudy parade of corporate-sponsored glamour that such things would become. Certainly there was hoopla, and much excitement over new cinema technologies, escalators and food preservation (Campbell’s soup cans made an early appearance), but this combined with a series of ‘august-sounding international congresses’ to make it as much an academic convention as a trade fair. The novel topics for discussion would soon inform new pages in Britannica and Brockhaus: psychology, aeronautics, vegetarianism, homeopathy, alpinism and beverage-yielding fruits. See Alex Wright, Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford, 2014).
* Leonie La Fontaine, a leading figure in the Belgian peace and women’s rights movements, believed that the Mundaneum would advance both causes by connecting like-minded individuals throughout the world. She established the Office central de documentation féminine (1909), an early networking group.
* It was an early multidisciplinary approach, but not too removed from what Coleridge attempted with his Metropolitana.
P
PANTOLOGY
Two months later, on the evening of 14 October 1937, H.G. Wells stepped ashore in New York to begin his first lecture tour of the United States. He was seventy-one. He planned seven talks in six weeks, and a few important diversions along the way, including meetings with Henry Ford in Detroit and President Roosevelt in Washington. A reporter at the dockside asked him about the possibility of war, but Wells predicted no conflict for two years, ‘because the nations are not quite ready’.
And he had a scheme to prevent the war happening at all. Lasting peace could be achieved, and global prosperity enhanced, with a thing he called the World Encyclopaedia. It was an ambitious but attainable goal, he told his awed audiences in Boston and Chicago, ‘a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarised, digested, clarified and compared.’ It would be nothing less than a vibrantly pulsing ‘World Brain’. It was the epitome of pantology: a systemic view of all human knowledge.
Wells had been perfecting this idea since the First World War. But the skies had never been so dark: only now, he proclaimed, had the prospect of catastrophe turned a faintly fanciful notion into an overwhelming need.
A decade before his lecture tour, his photograph had appeared on the cover of Time, thick walrus moustache, self-satisfied countenance. His celebrity had begun with his science fiction novels – The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds – but in later years he had developed a reputation as a serious historian. His joint roles as public doom-monger and prophetic problem-solver had met much encouragement in the media, not least because he repeatedly railed against ‘the backward-looking stupidity’ of the powerful.
In 1936 the New York Times visited him at his home overlooking Regent’s Park, finding both ‘a divine cockney’ and ‘the outstanding Utopian of this distracted generation’. He was a workaholic with no time for theatre or opera when there were new treatises to write. Age had only strengthened him, or at least hardened him, and in the arena of cross-Atlantic public affairs he was still ‘too big to be ignored’.