32 Facts About Paul Otlet

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, lawyer and peace activist; predicting the arrival of the internet before World War II, he is among those considered to be the father of information science, a field he called "documentation".

Paul Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the and.

Paul Otlet was born in Brussels, Belgium on 23 August 1868, the oldest child of Edouard Paul Otlet and Maria.

Paul Otlet's father, Edouard, was a wealthy businessman who made his fortune selling trams around the world.

Paul Otlet's mother died in 1871 at the age of 24, when Otlet was three.

Paul Otlet's father kept him out of school, hiring tutors instead, until he was 11, believing that classrooms were a stifling environment.

Paul Otlet soon developed a love of reading and books.

At the age of 11, Paul Otlet went to school for the first time, a Jesuit school in Paris, where he stayed for the next three years.

The family then returned to Brussels, and Paul Otlet studied at the prestigious College Saint-Michel in Brussels.

Paul Otlet's father remarried to Valerie Linden, daughter of famed botanist Jean Jules Linden; the two eventually had five additional children.

Paul Otlet was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven and at the Free University of Brussels, where he earned a law degree on 15 July 1890.

Paul Otlet married his step-cousin, Fernande Gloner, soon afterward, on 9 December 1890.

Paul Otlet then clerked with famed lawyer Edmond Picard, a friend of his father's.

Paul Otlet soon became dissatisfied with his legal career, and began to take an interest in bibliography.

Paul Otlet's first published work on the subject was the essay "Something about bibliography", written in 1892.

In 1891, Paul Otlet met Henri La Fontaine, a fellow lawyer with shared interests in bibliography and international relations, and the two became good friends.

Paul Otlet founded the in 1895, later renamed as the International Federation for Information and Documentation.

In 1896, Paul Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending the requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Charles van den Heuvel has referred to the service as an "analog search engine".

Paul Otlet envisioned a copy of the RBU in each major city around the world, with Brussels holding the master copy.

Otlet journeyed to the United States in early 1914 to try to get additional funding from the US Government, but his efforts soon came to a halt due to the outbreak of World War I Otlet returned to Belgium, but quickly fled after it became occupied by the Germans; he spent the majority of the war in Paris and various cities in Switzerland.

Paul Otlet spent much of the war trying to bring about peace, and the creation of multinational institutions that he felt could avert future wars.

In 1921 Otlet wrote to W E B Du Bois offering the use of the Palais Mondial for the 2nd Pan-African Congress.

Paul Otlet renamed the Palais Mondial to the Mundaneum in 1924.

Paul Otlet integrated new media, as they were invented, into his vision of the networked knowledge-base of the future.

Paul Otlet was a firm believer in international cooperation to promote both the spread of knowledge and peace between nations.

At several occasions, Paul Otlet published racist statements dressed up as scientific facts, starting at the beginning of his career with L'Afrique Aux Noirs where he argued that white people or 'westernized' blacks were to be tasked with 'civilising' Africa.

In 1933, Paul Otlet proposed building in Belgium near Antwerp a "gigantic neutral World City" to employ a massive number of workers, in order to alleviate the unemployment generated by the Great Depression.

Paul Otlet died in 1944, not long before the end of World War II, having seen his major project, the Mundaneum, shuttered, and having lost all his funding sources.

Paul Otlet published a biography of Otlet that was translated into Russian and Spanish.

Paul Otlet's writings have sometimes been called prescient of the current World Wide Web.

In 1934, Paul Otlet laid out this vision of the computer and internet in what he called "Radiated Library" vision.

Paul Otlet's grave is located in the Etterbeek Cemetery, in Wezembeek-Oppem, Flemish Brabant, Belgium.