The Internet

Early forecasts of a global information network

H. G. Wells – “World Brain” (1936–1938) Wells proposed a “permanent world encyclopaedia” that would be “so compact that every university and school could have a duplicating set,” yet accessible “from any distance” through telephones, microfilm readers and other communications links [2]. He imagined it as a “mental clearing-house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared” [2]. The goal was political and educational unity: a common reference work constantly revised by experts all over the planet.

Vannevar Bush – “As We May Think” (1945) Bush’s Memex was a desk-sized device that let an individual “store all his books, records, and communications, and … consult them with exceeding speed and flexibility” [1]. Its defining feature was “associative indexing”: the user could link any two items and share those “trails” with others, anticipating hypertext, bookmarks and social tagging. Bush stressed personal control—each researcher would build a private corpus and then exchange trails, creating an informal scholarly network.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the Noosphere (written 1930s–1940s, published 1955) Teilhard envisaged a “sheet of thinking … a new layer, the ‘noosphere,’ superposed on the biosphere” produced by “the tremendous acceleration and intensification of communications” [3]. Through radio, newspapers and future media, “minds are setting up a concerted orchestration in which they do not so much exchange—still less lose—their individuality as reinforce and complete one another” [3]. Unlike Wells’s institutional project or Bush’s personal workstation, Teilhard framed the coming network as a step in cosmic evolution toward an “Omega Point” of collective consciousness.

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Points of convergence

• A universally accessible store of knowledge (Wells) [2]
• High-speed, non-linear linking of documents (Bush) [1]
• A planetary layer of interconnected minds (Teilhard) [3]

Together these sketches foreshadow core attributes of today’s internet: global reach, hypertext navigation, real-time collaboration and the sense of an emerging “global mind.”

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Divergences and tensions

• Governance: Wells imagined an expert-run institution; Bush relied on loosely shared personal trails; Teilhard saw an organic, quasi-spiritual evolution.
• Motivation: Wells sought to avert war through shared facts, Bush to augment individual scholarship, Teilhard to advance human consciousness.
• Medium: Wells and Bush still assumed microfilm; Teilhard spoke abstractly, leaving room for later electronic implementations.

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Public discourse timeline

1936–1938 Wells’s lectures and essays on the World Encyclopaedia circulate in newspapers and the Royal Institution, stirring debate about international cooperation [2].

July 1945 Bush publishes “As We May Think” in The Atlantic; scientists demobilising from WWII discuss how to keep up with exploding research literature [1].

Late 1940s Information-science journals analyze Bush’s “associative indexing.” Microfilm companies market devices echoing Memex rhetoric [1].

1955 Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man appears posthumously, provoking controversy among theologians and biologists over its blend of evolution and mysticism [3].

1960s–1970s Computer pioneers such as J. C. R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart cite Bush and, less directly, Wells; the idea of a shared, interactive knowledge network migrates from microfilm to computers and packet switching (discussion extends beyond the supplied sources).

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Early 20th-century thinkers did not foresee packet switching, TCP/IP or social media, but their writings mapped the conceptual territory: global accessibility, associative linkage and collective intelligence. The internet materialised these concepts through digital electronics rather than microfilm or mystical energy—yet the lineage from World Brain, Memex and Noosphere is unmistakable.

— Written by WikleBot. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources below.

Sources

1. https://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf
2. https://archive.org/stream/worldbrain00wells/worldbrain00wells_djvu.txt
3. https://archive.org/stream/ThePhenomenonOfMan/phenomenon-of-man-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin_djvu.txt
4. https://www.thewikle.com/resources/RONFELDT-OriginsAttributesNoosphere-2020.pdf

Question

How did earlier thinkers predict the internet?