The Internet: a world brain?

World Brain, one of H.G. Wells's many long-forgotten books, was published in 1938. Although written before the computer revolution, in many ways it anticipated the Internet and World Wide Web. But first, some background on Wells as a prophet.

In both science fiction and nonfiction, Wells's predictions were a fascinating mix of hits and misses. He took seriously the belief in canals on Mars, and intelligent Martians are featured in his novel The War of the Worlds, and in several short stories. In Anticipations (1901) he thought it unlikely that airplanes "will ever come into play as a serious modification of transport and communication." In the same book's chapter on modern warfare he wrote: "I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea." In The Way the World is Going (1928) Wells anticipated the "complete disappearance of radio broadcasting."

In "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper," first published in The Ladies' Home Journal, April 1932, Wells described the contents of a 1972 newspaper. His hits include the use of color in newspapers, increasing space devoted to science news, a reduction in body clothing, and the collapse of Communism, although this did not happen until much later than Wells had expected.

The misses in Brownlow's newspaper far exceed its hits. Wells thought that by 1972 nations would have been rendered obsolete by the rise of a world government. Heat from Earth's interior would replace fossil fuels. English spelling would be simplified, the stock market would vanish, the gorilla would be extinct, newspapers would be printed on paper made from aluminum, and a thirteen-month calender would be adopted worldwide.

Wells failed to anticipate television even though Hugo Gernsback, who began reprinting Wells's science fiction in his Amazing Stories, was actually broadcasting television pictures in the twenties! One had to build a TV set to receive a postcard-size picture, but the technology was well underway.

Wells's last major effort to foresee the future was his imagined world history, The Shape of Things to Come (1932). Its misses were huge. Like Brownlow's newspaper, the book failed to foresee television, space flight, atomic energy, or computers.

Wells's wrong predictions were overshadowed by his single most astonishing hit. His novel The World Set Free (1914) opens with passages from the diary of a physicist who has split the atom and released atomic energy. The diary could have been written by Enrico Fermi. Wells's physicist agonizes over the horrendous results sure to follow from his achievement but he reasons that had he not made it, other scientists soon would have. The novel describes a world war started by Germany's invasion of France in the middle of the twentieth century. What Wells called "atomic bombs" are dropped from airplanes. The novel closes with visions of space explorations, beginning with trips to "that great silvery disk," the Moon, "that must needs be man's first conquest of outer space."

World Brain, written while the clouds of World War II were gathering, consists of lectures and a few magazine articles. Wells sees knowledge increasing at an accelerating pace. At the same time, most people around the world remain incredibly ignorant. As Wells had earlier remarked, humanity is in a race between education and catastrophe. What can be done to raise the educational level of the world?

Humanity desperately needs, Wells was convinced, what he calls a Permanent World Encyclopaedia. It would take the form of some forty enormous volumes that would be continually updated. At the time Wells wrote, specialized science journals were proliferating rapidly. Today there are some fifty thousand of them worldwide. What is needed so desperately, Wells maintained, is a central clearinghouse for this vast glut of information. The great encyclopaedia would serve as a world brain" by means of which information could be recorded and rapidly distributed around the world.

Wells likens the human tact to intelligent persons with lesions in their brains - huge gaps between available information and public understanding. Horses have been replaced by cars, trains, and airplanes, Wells writes, but humanity is still in a horse-and-buggy stage. He emphasizes the rapid increase in travel and communication - what he calls the "abolition of distance." Yet in spite of such spectacular technical progress the world is like a ship in unchartered waters, sailing sluggishly toward a world community. For Wells, his mammoth encyclopedia would be a powerful force for unifying nations and speeding the coming of a war-free world.

Because English is now the world's most used language, Wells expected his Encyclopaedia to be in English. It would draw upon all the libraries of the world where information would be stored on microfilm:

It seems possible that in the near future we shall have microscopic libraries of record in which a photograph of every important book and document in the world will be stowed away and made available for the inspection of the student. . . . Cheap standardized projectors offer no difficulties. The bearing of this upon the material form of a World Encyclopaedia is obvious. . . . The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica.