WWW@1934

On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, the fading medieval city of Mons feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and meet in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “reseau,” which might be translated as “network”—or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

As the Mundaneum museum celebrate its 10th anniversary, the curators are planning to release part of the original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history.

In 1895, Otlay met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him...