The Mundaneum

The core concept of the internet search engine was invented in the 1990s. Except it wasn't. The idea of a massively cross-referenced information search engine was invented by a man named Paul Otlet one hundred years earlier, which he actually created in the form of 12 million index cards filed in a continuous catalog. Remember the cabinets with tiny drawers full of cards which used to be the "search engines" in libraries when you were a kid? Same thing, just much, much bigger. Otlet called it The Mundaneum. He demonstrated it on a several occasions, taking random questions from a roomful of observers and answering each question quickly and accurately. Eventually, however, the Belgian government tired of footing the bill for something which had only limited academic use and cut him off. Otlet died in obscurity in 1944.

Something the article does not mention, however, is the fact that the Allied cryptologists working on Ultra during World War II, the project which broke the German Enigma code and thereby greatly shortened the war, used an extremely similar system to cross-reference and track all of the decrypted German communications around the world. Otlet would not have known about it, of course; the Ultra project was the most closely guarded secret of the war. Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who worked on the project out of Bletchly Park, is usually given credit for creating the complex organization system used to file and search Ultra decrypts. After reading the article, however, I find the similarities are astounding. I cannot help but wonder if Turing was influenced by Otlet's invention.