Even Before Memex, a Plan For a Networked World

phlurg writes "The New York Times presents an amazing article on 'the Mundaneum,' a sort of proto-WWW conceived of by Paul Otlet in 1934. 'In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web."' A fascinating read." (You may be reminded of Vannevar Bush's "Memex," which shares some of the same ideas.)

Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

The ultimate in prior art for the US Patent office. :-)

Science fiction to science fact

[Quantus347]

That ranks right up there with Jules Verne, Victor Appleton (The house name author of five generations of Tom Swift Novels), and (sadly) George Orwell in the Accurate Vision of the Future category.

Why didn't he pick up...

[wandazulu]

...some surplus machines from Babbage & Co.?

Kidding aside, anyone who can look at an enormous, overwhelming task of such mind-boggling complexity and think "I can do that." is deserved of high praise, regardless of whether he succeeded or failed.

A Logic Named Joe (1946)

[objekt]

Twelve years later than, but more accurately predicting the internet and sites like Google.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe [wikipedia.org]

The story's narrator is a "logic" (that is, a personal computer) repairman nicknamed Ducky. In the story, a logic named Joe develops some degree of sentience and ambition. Joe proceeds to switch around a few relays in "the tank" (one of a distributed set of central information repositories analogous to servers on the World Wide Web) and connect all information ever assembled to every logic, and simultaneously disables all of the censor devices. Logics everywhere begin offering up unexpected assistance, from designing custom chemicals to alleviate inebriation to giving sex advice to small children or plotting the perfect murder. Information runs rampant as every logic worldwide crunches away at problems too vast in scope for human minds.

the most fascinating part of the article, to me

[circletimessquare]

concerns otlet's upbringing:

Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children's natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.

When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. "I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle," he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.

In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world's published knowledge.

obviously you can see how his upbringing shaped his life's work and life's focus. to me, there are all kinds of crazy pluses and minuses to this idea of stifling your child's social upbringing in order to encourage his intellectual upbringing. of course, you need social skills in life to really succeed. at the same time, there is something genuinely valuable to be said about focusing a child's intellectual development in solitude. there's obvious trade offs here, but otlet seems to be a success, in a narrow focused way. one wonders at examples of lives that are failures of this kind of upbringing though

people always mention the successes of this kind of focused upbringing, like tiger woods or the williams sisters in tennis (parents focusing their kid's athletic talents). or parents who focus their children to be masters of the piano or cello. but for every yo-yo ma, one never hears about the hundreds who wind up as burn-outs, drug addicts or prostitutes

its an interesting subject, the focused childhood solitary education

Re:Good for him ...

[TheLink]

That's actually why I think patents aren't very useful.

If someone is really innovative even 30 years of monopoly isn't enough to help them - since most people won't get it.

But 30 years of monopoly would be terrible for > 99.99% of the approved patents (which are mostly pretty obvious - e.g. once you encounter the problem, the solution is easily found by anyone competent in the field).

The real innovators are so many steps ahead - they'll think of various problem, then the solutions, and then the problems with the solutions, and then the solutions for those problems, and so on, till they are decades ahead of everyone else.

As for those who say you should actually implement stuff to be able to claim a patent, I give the example of Douglas Engelbart and his team - they actually implemented a lot of stuff, and most people didn't get it till many decades later.

So to me I don't really think there should be patents on inventions - nowadays > 99.99% of them are just trivial junk that clutter up everything and get in the way of real progress. As is they are a net minus to the world. Giving 20 year monopolies to such "innovators" is a travesty, and allowing them to make a minor change and thus extend the monopoly for even longer is crazy - how does that encourage innovation?

If you want to reward innovators, I'd say we should have Prizes for Innovation that are awarded years after - much like the Nobel Prizes. After 10 or 20 years we should be able to tell whether something is really innovative and important.

Perhaps the application fees could go to a fund used to award the prizes and for administrative costs. Money could also come from other sponsors.

1844: Telegraph as the first InterNet

[peter303]

In some respect the invention of the telegraph changed the world forever because communications could be simultaneous around the earth. This would prevent gaffs like the Battle of New Orleans fought 29 years earlier, TWO WEEKS after the treaty ending that war had been signed because communications were so slow.

The capital burden of laying wires across continents and oceans helped create the modern corporations and banks. (In conjunction with railroads, steel, coal and petroleum development). There were wild economic booms and busts, not unlike the mainframes in the 1960s. PCs in the 1980s and dot.coms in the 1990s. The telegraph fueled modern media with a desire for today's news rather than weeks old letter and magazines.

The telegraph spawned other modern inventions. Randall Stoss's recent biography of Thomas Edison re-interprets the inventor in light of the dot.com boom. Several of Edison's inventions were aimed at cramming more messages on precious telegraph lines. The telephone arose out of the effort to send messages at different messages at separate frequencies. Voice is just using all frequencies. Several people beat Edison here, but he invented the first practical microphone. The phonograph was originally intended to record telegraph messages offline, then transmit them and record them at super-human speeds across precious telegraph lines. Recording and playing messages by themselves without the intervening telegraph became its own invention - the phonograph.

Re:Good for him ...

[thewebdude]

No, no, no...Tesla invented the interwebs, too:

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=703

In 1908, Tesla described his sensational aspirations in an article for Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony magazine:

"As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction."

In essence, Tesla's global power grid was designed to "pump" the planet with electricity which would intermingle with the natural telluric currents that move throughout the Earth's crust and oceans. At the same time, towers like the one at Wardenclyffe would fling columns of raw energy skyward into the electricity-friendly ionosphere fifty miles up. To tap into this energy conduit, customers' homes would be equipped with a buried ground connection and a relatively small spherical antenna on the roof, thereby creating a low-resistance path to close the giant Earth-ionosphere circuit. Oceangoing ships could use a similar antenna to draw power from the network while at sea. In addition to electricity, these currents could carry information over great distances by bundling radio-frequency energy along with the power, much like the modern technology to send high-speed Internet data over power lines.