The Paper Google: How a Utopian Dream to Catalog All Knowledge Was Destroyed by War

The Architects of a Paper Utopia

Long before the first server hummed to life, the dream of a globally connected network of knowledge existed not on silicon, but on paper. In Brussels, at the close of the 19th century, two Belgian jurists, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, embarked on a project of breathtaking ambition: to collect, index, and cross-reference the entirety of human knowledge. They called their creation the Mundaneum. At its heart was the Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU), a colossal card catalog that would eventually swell to more than 12 million individual 3x5 inch index cards, each a node in a vast intellectual web.

An Unlikely Partnership

Otlet was the obsessive visionary, a man consumed with the theory of classification. La Fontaine, a future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was the well-connected pragmatist and internationalist. Together, they believed they were building more than just a bibliography. They were building an engine for peace. In an age reeling from conflict and grappling with an explosion of information, they argued that ignorance and misunderstanding were the true roots of war. If knowledge could be made universally accessible, they reasoned, humanity could be steered toward enlightenment and away from self-destruction.

The Analog Search Engine

The system was as ingenious as it was immense. Otlet and La Fontaine adapted and vastly expanded the Dewey Decimal System into their own Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), a framework so granular it could pinpoint concepts and relationships between disparate fields of study. This was the software. The hardware consisted of custom-built cabinets housing millions of cards, meticulously filled out by an army of clerks. For a fee, anyone in the world could submit a query by mail or telegraph. The Mundaneum's staff would then scour the archives, compile a bibliography, and mail the results back. It was, in essence, a human-powered, asynchronous search engine.

“Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way, a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory.” - Paul Otlet, 1934

Otlet's vision went far beyond cards in drawers. In his 1934 treatise, Traité de Documentation, he described a future where "electric telescopes" would allow a user to call up pages from any book onto a screen from the comfort of their home. He conceived of a system of links and symbols that would connect documents, creating associative trails—a clear prefiguration of the hyperlink. He was imagining the internet, a "World Brain," decades before the first computer was built.

An Idea Under Siege

For a time, the dream flourished. Housed in a wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, the Mundaneum was a hub of intellectual activity. But the project's idealism was no match for the brutal geopolitics of the 20th century. Financial support dwindled after World War I, and the Belgian government grew less patient with Otlet's space-consuming enterprise. The Mundaneum was forced to relocate several times, each move a blow to its integrity.

The final, catastrophic stroke came in 1940. When Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, they commandeered the Mundaneum's latest home. They saw no value in a project dedicated to universal knowledge and international peace. The archives were dismantled. An estimated 70 tons of index cards—representing millions of hours of human effort and countless connections of thought—were destroyed to make room for an exhibition of Third Reich art. Otlet, who died in 1944, witnessed the near-total destruction of his life's work.

The Ghost in the Web

For decades, the Mundaneum was little more than a historical footnote, its memory kept alive by a handful of acolytes. Its surviving fragments languished in obscurity until they were rediscovered in the 1990s, just as the World Wide Web was entering the public consciousness. Suddenly, Otlet’s fantastical prophecies didn’t seem so strange. His dream of a networked planet, accessible to all, had been realized in a form he could have scarcely imagined.

Today, a dedicated museum in Mons, Belgium, houses the rescued remnants of the Mundaneum. The endless wooden drawers and yellowed index cards stand as a monument not to a failed project, but to a profoundly resilient idea: that the human drive to connect, to share, and to understand is a force more powerful than any single technology or any single act of destruction.

Sources

• Publications
• Mundaneum
• Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium
• “The Internet: a Belgian story?” The Mundaneum
• The Mundaneum's Version of Google - Mark Ollig - Medium
• Mundaneum: the Belgian archive that anticipated the internet
• Paul Otlet, Google, Wikipedia, and cataloging the world
• The Internet Before the Internet: Paul Otlet's Mundaneum
• MAPPING KNOWLEDGE — Google Arts & Culture
• Celebrating the origins of the web - Google in Europe