Pitch to friends or fam­i­ly the idea of a trip to Mons, Bel­gium to vis­it the Mun­da­neum, and you may be met with a less-than-enthu­si­as­tic recep­tion. That’s unfor­tu­nate, since such an expe­ri­ence could fun­da­men­tal­ly change the way they regard tech­nol­o­gy they use every day. Though its name may seem to promise unre­lieved dull­ness today, the Mun­da­neum arose out of enor­mous high-tech ambi­tions. The idea behind it, as con­ceived by Bel­gian lawyers Paul Otlet and Hen­ri La Fontaine, was to gath­er, clas­si­fy, cen­tral­ize, and make uni­ver­sal­ly avail­able all human knowl­edge. This may sound famil­iar to any­one who’s used the inter­net, but it was a rather bold­er propo­si­tion at the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

Otlet and La Fontaine’s “city of knowl­edge” may not have been ful­ly real­iz­able at that time, but tech­nol­o­gy had made it imag­in­able. The Dewey Dec­i­mal Sys­tem, with its stan­dard­ized card cat­a­logs, had been around since 1876. Start­ing in 1895, Otlet adapt­ed that basic tool to a far larg­er project: the Mun­da­neum took shape as a vast paper archive. Mil­lions of index cards, each record­ing bib­li­o­graph­ic details about a sin­gle book, arti­cle, or doc­u­ment, were filed away in row upon row of cat­a­log draw­ers. (See image below.)

“Otlet made this card cen­tral to his sys­tem,” writes Sid­ney Perkowitz at JSTOR. “Aim­ing to cap­ture every book ever pub­lished, the Mun­da­neum stored bib­li­o­graph­ic data for books under the UDC [Uni­ver­sal Dec­i­mal Clas­si­fi­ca­tion], along with mag­a­zine arti­cles, images, and more on over 15 mil­lion cards crammed into cat­a­log draw­ers.” Orig­i­nal­ly housed in Brus­sels’ Cinquan­te­naire Palace, the Mun­da­neum was meant to get its own build­ing designed by the for­ward-think­ing Le Cor­busier by the end of the nine­teen-twen­ties. Alas, it was nev­er built, and after the Nazi inva­sion of 1940, the Mun­da­neum was scrapped for a Third Reich art exhi­bi­tion.

Dis­cus­sions of the Mun­da­neum in our time often high­light what Otlet (1868–1944), despite the pro­jec­t’s many tribu­la­tions, even­tu­al­ly envi­sioned as “a glob­al ‘réseau’ or net­work of ‘elec­tric tele­scopes.’ These ear­ly work­sta­tions were to be linked to the Mun­da­neum by tele­phone and the new tech­nol­o­gy of tele­vi­sion. A user would phone in a query, and the answer in a book or oth­er source would appear dis­played on a per­son­al screen, which could be split to show mul­ti­ple results.” Con­vinced that all homes would even­tu­al­ly have access to the net­work, he con­sid­ered even the pos­si­bil­i­ty of “data shar­ing and social inter­ac­tions among its users.” This dream of the inter­net avant la tech­nolo­gie is now enshrined at the Mun­da­neum muse­um, which is open five days a week. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can point your elec­tric tele­scope to its online cat­a­log any time.

Image by Zin­neke, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

via JSTOR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Rise and Fall of the Great Library of Alexan­dria: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

The First Music Stream­ing Ser­vice Was Invent­ed in 1881: Dis­cov­er the Théâtro­phone

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

Meet the Syn­topi­con: The Ambi­tious Index That Tried to Orga­nize All of West­ern Thought (1952)

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

Do All Roads Lead to Phi­los­o­phy on Wikipedia?: They Do About 97.3% of the Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Twen­ty years ago, Unit­ed States sen­a­tor Ted Stevens drew long-last­ing online ridicule by describ­ing the inter­net as “a series of tubes.” While some com­men­ta­tors not­ed that the anal­o­gy was­n’t quite as out­landish as it seemed, most react­ed with noth­ing more than amused baf­fle­ment. Where had Stevens come up with that image? Giv­en that he was born in 1923, per­haps he was draw­ing on mem­o­ries of a tech­no­log­i­cal won­der of his child­hood: the under­ground pneu­mat­ic sys­tems through which mail was deliv­ered in major Amer­i­can cities from the eigh­teen-nineties until the ear­ly nine­teen-fifties, whose sto­ry is told in the It’s His­to­ry video above.

Such series of tubes entered ser­vice in Lon­don, Paris, and Berlin in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. In 1893, Philadel­phia became the first Amer­i­can city to get one, thanks to the advo­ca­cy of tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mind­ed depart­ment store mag­nate-turned-Post­mas­ter Gen­er­al John Wana­mak­er. At the inau­gu­ra­tion, writes Hid­den City’s Har­ry Kyr­i­akodis, Wana­mak­er “placed a Bible wrapped in an Amer­i­can flag into a can­is­ter that went fly­ing (under­ground) to the Cen­tral Post Office with a loud ‘whish’.” Philadel­phi­a’s net­work expand­ed apace, even­tu­al­ly includ­ing near­ly twen­ty miles of tun­nels, and “New York City, Boston, Chica­go, and St. Louis adopt­ed sim­i­lar deliv­ery sys­tems by 1898, all oper­at­ed by the Post Office Depart­ment.”

Oper­at­ed at a seri­ous loss, that is: when the U.S. got involved in World War I, the Post Office sus­pend­ed pneu­mat­ic ser­vice to con­serve resources. Only in the twen­ties did the tubes start whish­ing again in parts of New York and Boston, whose high vol­umes of mail could poten­tial­ly jus­ti­fy the oper­a­tion. In fact, the sheer amount of mail even­tu­al­ly got to be too much for the steel cap­sules and the cast-iron tun­nels through which com­pressed air pushed them. As retired U.S. Postal Inspec­tor Robert A. Cohen explains it in his his­to­ry of these sys­tems, “It takes a cer­tain amount of time for a gal­lon of liq­uid to trav­el through a fun­nel. Two gal­lons take twice as long to pass through. The val­ue of the Pneu­mat­ic Tube Ser­vice decreased as mail vol­ume increased.”

The pro­lif­er­a­tion of auto­mo­biles and the expan­sion of their sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture dealt an even more seri­ous blow: after World War II, deliv­er­ing mail on the roads had clear­ly become more effi­cient than doing it under­ground. Some “rock­e­teers,” as the sys­tem’s oper­a­tors were called, stuck it out until Decem­ber 12, 1953, when pneu­mat­ic mail ser­vice was offi­cial­ly sus­pend­ed all across the coun­try.

This marked the end of an era, espe­cial­ly for the rock­e­teers said to have used the net­work to sur­rep­ti­tious­ly receive orders from their favorite sand­wich shops. Remem­ber­ing Ted Stevens’ noto­ri­ous remark, it’s tempt­ing to describe the series of tubes that were pneu­mat­ic mail deliv­ery sys­tems as an ear­ly ver­sion of the inter­net — and even more so it was already get­ting peo­ple hooked on food deliv­ery.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Steam­punk Clocks of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Paris: Dis­cov­er the Inge­nious Sys­tem That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Time­keep­ing in the 1880s

What’s Under Lon­don? Dis­cov­er London’s For­bid­den Under­world

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

An Archi­tect Breaks Down the Design of New York City Sub­way Sta­tions, from the Old­est to Newest

Futur­ist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Tele­phone, Free Col­lege & Pneu­mat­ic Tubes Aplen­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.