Discover the Mundaneum, an Early 20th-Century 'Internet' That Put the World's Knowledge on Millions of Index Cards
Reported byOpen Culture ↗·Sourced by Goodlede
Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine created the Mundaneum starting in 1895, a paper archive of over 15 million index cards designed to gather, classify, and centralize all human knowledge, now preserved as a museum in Mons, Belgium with an online catalog.
Le Corbusier's planned building for the Mundaneum was never constructed, and the original archive was scrapped after the Nazi invasion of 1940.
Goodlede runs a two-pass source check on every story: one pass finds it, a second skeptical pass re-verifies the claim and writes what it doesn’t prove. This is a source check, not an independent fact-check — confirm anything important at the link above.
Read the full story at Open Culture
Read original story ↗More good news, verified daily.
Goodlede covers positive developments across science, nature, rights, and human achievement — verified before they appear. No hype, no roundups, no PR wires.
© 2026 Wag Media, LLC
More from Goodlede