Hello and bonjour!
And welcome to the historic university city of Mons
in the French-speaking part of Belgium
and today we’re asking the question:
who invented the internet?
And the immediate problem with that question is, where do you start?
You could talk about Leonard Kleinrock
and the team who sent the first ever online message,
or Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
who created the world’s first website;
and then there’s Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn,
who are often called "the Fathers of the Internet",
because they invented the fundamental way that computers talk to each other.
Let’s face it, there’s a whole bunch of programmers and engineers who deserve a mention.
But before all of them,
who actually came up with the idea to start with?
Who were the grandparents of the internet?
Vint Cerf himself said,
"the idea of the internet was born in Belgium."
And that’s why I’ve brought you all here to see a giant 100-year-old filing cabinet.
(Aside: This had BETTER be a good story...)
This is a small fraction of what was once the greatest filing cabinet on the planet.
It was a collaborative project designed to store the entirety of human knowledge;
the idea was you could look up any topic you wanted and find the answers in here.
So each of these drawers contains hundreds of little paper index cards,
and each one of those carries information about a different subject,
with knowledge contributed by experts from around the world.
Basically, if you were trying to invent Wikipedia in 1910,
this is what it would look like.
The insane project was the brainchild of a beardy Belgian called Paul Otlet
and his moustachioed Nobel-prize-winning mate, Henri Lafontaine,
and they called it the Mundaneum (Munder-nay-um).
Or Mundaneum (Mundane-eum).
Munda...
Let’s be honest, they were better at inventing things than they were at naming them,
because this is only the start of the ideas that they came up with.
A few years later, Otlet was already talking
about the possibility of storing all this information electronically somehow.
But annoyingly for him, neither the PC nor the internet server had been invented yet,
so the two men ended up having to make 12 million paper index cards,
and a filing cabinet the size of half a palace.
Literally.
This one.
This is the Palais du Cinquentenaire in Brussels,
and in 1914,
the Belgian government handed over an entire wing of the building to Otlet and La Fontaine.
After a brief interruption for World War One, they moved in,
and the giant filing cabinet rapidly expanded until it took up more than 100 rooms.
It wasn’t just index cards they kept here;
it was also huge archives of books, magazines, other publications, and other media.
Luckily Otlet and La Fontaine had also invented a way to organise all of this stuff;
a system called "Universal Decimal Classification "
which was so good, it’s still used by librarians even today.
And when they finally opened to the public in 1920,
the Mundaneum attracted masses of visitors,
most of them just ordinary people wanting to learn about stuff.
And you could learn about anything here:
history, geography, science, mathematics,
there were even some cards dedicated to, shall we say, more adult topics.
- Oh la la!
(They weren’t kidding when they said this was where the internet was born.)
And for 4 years the project was a huge success.
But in 1924, the government decided that the idea of ordinary people learning stuff was overrated,
and they cleared out half the rooms
in order to hold a trade fair for the Belgian rubber industry.
The relationship between Otlet, La Fontaine,
and the Belgian government never really recovered after that,
but the Mundaneum was allowed to remain at the Palace
- albeit squeezed into a smaller space.
And meanwhile Otlet continued to develop his ideas about electronic storage.
In 1934 he published a book called Le Livre sur Le Livre,
literally "The Book On The Book",
in which he wrote this:
« La Table de Travail n’est plus chargée d’aucun livre...
- The work desk no longer has any books on it.
In their place is a screen and a telephone.
All the books and all the information are kept remotely
in a huge building that has the space required to store them.
The place that stores the information will also distribute the information,
using a wire,
or maybe without a wire.
You can ask them a question, and a page will appear on your screen;
and there will be loudspeakers in case what you are looking at requires an audio accompaniment.
- Oh not again!
In one short passage, he’s predicted server farms, the web, Google, YouTube and wi-fi,
and you can see why Vint Cerf said this is where the idea of the internet came from.
Admittedly, some of those ideas had already
been floating around in science fiction writing for a few years.
But ultimately, Otlet was the first person to predict to future quite so accurately,
so fully, and so clearly.
Unfortunately though, in the same year that he wrote those words,
the Belgian government finally pulled the plug on the Mundaneum project,
and kicked them out of the Palace.
The giant filing cabinet remained inside while Otlet and La Fontaine looked for a new location,
but then in 1941, Nazi troops entered Brussels, stormed the building,
and destroyed a large part of the archive.
And that was really the end of the Mundaneum.
The two men were already quite old by then -
La Fontaine died in 1943
and Otlet a year later,
and since then their pioneering work and visionary ideas have faded away into history.
But even if you’ve never heard of them before,
hopefully they would be quite pleased that they way you found out about them
was on something called the Internet.
- I knew it!
If you’d like to visit what remains of the world’s greatest filing cabinet,
it now lives inside a former department store in central Mons.
The Museum is open from Wednesdays to Sundays,
and it’s a 15 minute walk from the main railway station here,
which itself is about an hour south of Brussels.
Entrance to the ground floor is completely free,
- you only have to pay if you want to see the exhibitions upstairs -
and it’s all fully wheelchair accessible.
And that’s it for today;
as always, thank you all for watching,
and I’ll see you soon.