All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

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PANTOLOGY

Two months later, on the evening of 14 October 1937, H.G. Wells stepped ashore in New York to begin his first lecture tour of the United States. He was seventy-one. He planned seven talks in six weeks, and a few important diversions along the way, including meetings with Henry Ford in Detroit and President Roosevelt in Washington. A reporter at the dockside asked him about the possibility of war, but Wells predicted no conflict for two years, ‘because the nations are not quite ready’.

And he had a scheme to prevent the war happening at all. Lasting peace could be achieved, and global prosperity enhanced, with a thing he called the World Encyclopaedia. It was an ambitious but attainable goal, he told his awed audiences in Boston and Chicago, ‘a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarised, digested, clarified and compared.’ It would be nothing less than a vibrantly pulsing ‘World Brain’. It was the epitome of pantology: a systemic view of all human knowledge.

Wells had been perfecting this idea since the First World War. But the skies had never been so dark: only now, he proclaimed, had the prospect of catastrophe turned a faintly fanciful notion into an overwhelming need.

A decade before his lecture tour, his photograph had appeared on the cover of Time, thick walrus moustache, self-satisfied countenance. His celebrity had begun with his science fiction novels – The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds – but in later years he had developed a reputation as a serious historian. His joint roles as public doom-monger and prophetic problem-solver had met much encouragement in the media, not least because he repeatedly railed against ‘the backward-looking stupidity’ of the powerful.

In 1936 the New York Times visited him at his home overlooking Regent’s Park, finding both ‘a divine cockney’ and ‘the outstanding Utopian of this distracted generation’. He was a workaholic with no time for theatre or opera when there were new treatises to write. Age had only strengthened him, or at least hardened him, and in the arena of cross-Atlantic public affairs he was still ‘too big to be ignored’.

Previously Wells had forsworn the American lecture tour for reasons of inadequacy, specifically his weak voice. ‘The microphone is a great leveller,’ he announced, but it was just one of the things he regarded with a combination of wonder and terror. The aeroplane shrunk the world, but its bombs destroyed cities; the microphone was a useful boon to dictators.

‘Our world is changing,’ he always began his lectures (the script hardly varied from city to city), ‘and it is changing with an ever increasing violence. An old world dies about us.’ The principal culprits were politicians, particularly those who had failed at Versailles and misdirected the League of Nations (they simply refused to acknowledge the extent to which scientific advance clashed with their own centuries-old values). The gap that appeared between the ‘futile amazement’ of the Great War and the rapidly accelerating progress of the present was now a chasm, and he feared that our leaders were on the wrong and crumbling side of it.

And not only politicians, but educators too. He saw the most intelligent individuals in the world – university intellectuals, captains of industry, lawyers and doctors, conquerors of science – and observed their lack of connection with the requirements of modern society. He remarked how seldom their talents were designed to benefit the common good.

He had his solution: a world community linked by reason and enlightened thought. In one sense, he argued, such a thing already existed. ‘An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today, a wealth of knowledge [that might] suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but that knowledge is still dispersed, unorganised, impotent in the face of adventurous violence and mass excitement.’

And so he proposed ‘a greater encyclopaedism … an intellectual authority sufficient to control and direct our collective life’. He imagined ‘a permanent institution, untrammelled by precedent, something added to the world network of universities, linking and co-ordinating them with one another and with the general intelligence of the world.’ He referred to the great French achievements of Diderot and D’Alembert, and how he would use their spark to launch something vastly more elaborate.

They served their purpose at the time, but they are not equal to our current needs. A World Encyclopaedia … would be in continual correspondence with every university, every research institution, every competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the world. It would develop a directorate and a staff of men of its own type, specialised editors and summarists. They would be very important and distinguished men in the new world. This Encyclopaedic organisation need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralise mentally but perhaps not physically.

His American lectures were a refined précis of an address delivered the year before at the Royal Institution in London. There he called his ‘oligarchy of professors’ and other exceptionally competent people ‘a sort of modern priesthood’, although religion itself would not play a part. Instead, like Plato, ‘they would make the philosopher king’.

For the sake of argument, Wells placed himself in the role of ‘ordinary educated citizen’.

I will ask you to imagine how this World Encyclopaedia organisation would enter into his life and how it would affect him. From his point of view the World Encyclopaedia would be a row of volumes in his own home or in some neighbouring house or in a convenient public library or in any school or college, and in this row of volumes he would, without any great toil or difficulty, find in clear understandable language, and kept up to date, the ruling concepts of our social order, the outlines and main particulars in all fields of knowledge, an exact and reasonably detailed picture of our universe, a general history of the world …

After this, the student of knowledge could go deeper. The row of volumes would include a trustworthy reference to more detailed primary sources. In fields where there was controversy, ‘casual summaries of opinions’ would be replaced by ‘very carefully chosen and correlated’ arguments. Wells proposed that this World Encyclopaedia ‘would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world’.

Wells foreshadowed Orwell: ‘What a dreadful, dreadful world it will be when everybody thinks alike.’ But it wouldn’t be so, he insisted, decrying a dictatorship of knowledge. That said, some uniformity of order would be required. ‘It may be worthwhile remarking that it really does not enhance the natural variety and beauty of life to have all the clocks in a town keeping individual times of their own, no charts of the sea, no timetables, but trains starting secretly to unspecified destinations.’ He prioritised a garden over a swamp.

He had an early outline of what his new venture should contain. It would begin with an account of the philosophies of the world ‘compared critically and searchingly’. A history of languages would be interesting, followed by the origins and development of writing. Then it would be time for mathematical signs and symbols, accompanied by conceptions of time and space. After that, pure physics. After physics, chemistry and astronomy. Then the general science of life and biographies of scientists, pursued by health and medicine, ‘mental health as well as bodily health’, followed by sport and pastimes. Greek and Roman history would now find its unexpected place, next to stories of outstanding men and women, next to education, religion and ethics. ‘Two huge parallel sections would give a double-barrelled treatment of economic life,’ the first covering production and economic organisation, the second distribution and finance. Wells’s leftist interest in the principles and laws of property would get a look-in here, accompanied by an economic geography and global atlas.

The final part would have a different tone, for it would deal with beauty, culture and the artistic life. In this category, ‘Aesthetic criticism would pursue its wild incalculable, unstandardised career, mystically distributing praise and blame’ towards the cinema, radio, architecture and ‘the high mystery’ of the novel.

It was quite a soufflé. Wells admitted there was a lot here already covered by the Encyclopédie and Britannica, but now was the time to ‘bring those gallant pioneer essays properly up to date’. How much would such a thing cost, he asked himself. Only about half a million pounds annually, but ‘as much money to bring it into existence as would launch a modern battleship’.

Wells thought it preposterous that one newspaper had reported that he was to write the encyclopaedia himself, ‘all with my own little hand out of my own little head … at the age of 70!’ Instead, he planned to write only ‘an infinitesimal’ part. He suggested an ‘Encyclopaedia Society’ to handle the administration. He hoped it would be written in English, but a team of translators should be on hand to make it accessible to everyone in the world. He imagined a bibliography of between ten and twenty thousand items. He hoped the vast enterprise would constitute a world monopoly with no serious competition, and thus income would be generated from its sale to repay the investment.*

In London, Wells made it clear that while his ideas were yet to be executed, he was not ‘throwing casually formed ideas before you’. Instead, ‘I am bringing you my best.’

One of the earliest manifestations of his thinking, albeit not yet his best, surfaced in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind in 1932, in which he wrote of the need for an encyclopaedia produced by a Committee of Intellectual Co-operation. A photograph in the book shows the Central Reading Room of the British Museum Library; the caption is ‘A Cell of the World’s Brain’; the room is conspicuously deserted.

The section in the book devoted to encyclopaedias is useful for the survey of volumes already in existence, an opinionated potted history not dissimilar to this one, although much more potted. Wells charges through the bases: the Great Library at Alexandria (which he calls a Museum), Aristotle, Pliny’s Natural History. He praises Diderot and his ‘first encyclopaedia of power’, noting its cardinal importance in the intellectual movements of the time, not least the ideological content and impetus it leant the Revolution. ‘It released minds,’ he reasoned, and it set a precedent in recognising diversity of opinion.

He is less impressed with later editions of Britannica. He welcomes part of it, singling out recent entries on Architecture, Pottery and Porcelain. But he wanted more of a debating arena, ‘on general ideas such as the idea of property, or the creative possibilities of financial or political reorganization’. Wells wanted radicalisation of thought, in other words, something that ‘would reach down to direct the ideological side of human education’. Diderot’s venture aside, this wasn’t something modern encyclopaedias were generally proficient at, or desired to be.*

But this is where his early ideas for the World Encyclopaedia slotted in. It would not necessarily be alphabetical, he suggested, for this would constrain its desire for continual updates. It would be philosophical and factual, discursive and organic, consistently liberal rather than predominantly reactionary.

And so it was that a few years later Wells’s brief historical survey would rub up against the calamitously violent nature of the world, and germinate – or congeal, or coagulate – into his grand encyclopaedic scheme on the eve of war. ‘You see how such an Encyclopaedic organisation could spread like a nervous network, a system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious co-operating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity, informing without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny.’

It may appear, albeit fleetingly, as if Wells – like Paul Otlet before him – was planning the Internet. Or rather the ideal Internet, a force for intellectual good, guided only by the principled. He was closer, perhaps, to Wikipedia, and closer still to a child’s view of the world, with a child’s eternal optimism, and a masterfully naive solution to all our great dilemmas.

PYTHON, MONTY (a diversion …)

Eric Idle is at the door with malicious intent. He is smiling in that cheeky way he has, but don’t be fooled: he is after your family silver. The door to the flat is answered by a slightly nervous woman played by John Cleese. The sketch is from November 1969, the first BBC series of Monty Python, the episode entitled ‘Man’s Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the 20th Century’.

The woman asks the man what he wants. He says he’d like to come in and steal a few things. The woman is suspicious: ‘Are you an encyclopaedia salesman?’

No, the man repeats, he burgles people.

The woman is doubtful; she still thinks he may be an encyclopaedia salesman.

No, he insists, he’s really not.

The woman wonders whether if she lets him in he’ll then sell her a set of encyclopaedias.

He can’t make it any clearer: he’d simply like to come in and ransack her flat.

‘No encyclopaedias at all?’ she asks.

‘Correct – none at all.’

Still wary, she finally opens the door.

Once inside, the man says: ‘Mind you, I don’t know whether you’ve really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopaedias …’

The sketch shifts to Michael Palin sitting at a desk. That man, he announces, was a successful encyclopaedia salesman. But not all of them are quite so successful.

Cut to: a clip of a man falling from a tall building.

And now, Palin says, here are two more unsuccessful encyclopaedia salesmen.

Cut to: two more bodies falling from a tall building.

Palin: ‘I think there’s a lesson there for all of us.’

Palin took the lesson to heart. In the 1980s he published, with fellow Python Terry Jones, Dr Fegg’s Encyclopaedia of ALL World Knowledge, which, inevitably, had very little knowledge of the world at all. Dr Fegg was a salivating monstrosity with a blood-soaked axe. His principal source of education was Parkhurst prison, where he spent time for grievous bodily harm. The previous title of his encyclopaedia was Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls, but this updated edition contained a lot more misinformation. The entries were generally not to be found in other publications: Aladdin and His Terrible Problem; the Patagonian Shoe-Cleaning Rat; Do-It-Yourself Teeth. The Patagonian Shoe-Cleaning Rat was not a fearsome thing, but rather a sad one: ‘This rat lives by hiring itself out as a shoe brush. Once it goes bald its career is at an end, and it has to rely on what it can make out of selling Patagonian Rat’s Cheese (which understandably isn’t very popular).’

By contrast, there was a certain frisson of danger to be found in the entry Parlour Game: Pass the Bengal Tiger. This game requires seven boys, seven girls, chairs, wrapping paper, tiger. One plays by passing the wrapped tiger around until the music stops, at which point a child unwraps a layer of paper (good luck to you!), and the loser is the child holding the now completely enraged mammal during the final unwrapping.

* Another World Brain was conceived in Belgium in 1990, a far more conceptual notion than either Paul Otlet or H.G. Wells dared imagine, although it acknowledged the influence of both. The Principia Cybernetica, the child of Francis Heylighen, is based on the notion of evolutionary cybernetics, encompassing new networked forms of recorded knowledge, and lies outside the scope of this book. It remains an ongoing project, as does the Global Brain Institute in Brussels, and is well described by Alex Wright as an attempt to create ‘a grand synthesis of philosophical work … by breaking the entire spectrum of philosophical thought into “nodes” in the network. These “nodes” might include a chapter from a book, a paragraph from an essay, or even more narrowly targeted units of information.’ The plan, says Professor Heylighen, is to transform the Web ‘into an intelligent, adaptive, self-organising system of shared knowledge.’

* Wells couldn’t resist a dig at the airy specialists he saw as Britannica’s main contributors. ‘The rooms of these individuals are sometimes in the dignified colleges of universities, sometimes in carefully sought country retreats … These fundamental people are not very gregarious as a rule … some are negligently dressed and distraught in their bearing, but for the most part they look fairly well cared for.’ Wells found this species generally unobtrusive and ineffective. They were not sufficiently political, in other words, or forward thinking. ‘A single shipyard at work makes more noise than all the original thought of the world put together.’