World brain

World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–38. Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the World Brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent "World Encyclopaedia" that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.

In the wake of the first World War, Wells believed that people needed to become more educated and conversent with events and knowledge that surrounded them. In order to do this he offered the idea of the knowledge system of the World Brain that all humans could have access to. The Wellsian dream of a World Brain was first expressed in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Weekly Evening Meeting, Friday, 20 November 1936. He began with his motivation:

He wished the world to be such a whole "as coherent and consistent as possible". He wished that wise world citizens would ensure world peace. He was a communalist and contextualist and ended his lecture as follows:

(Lecture delivered in America, October and November 1937)

This lecture lays out Wells's vision for "a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared". Wells thought that technological advances such as microfilm could be used towards this end so that "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica".

(Contribution to the new Encyclopédie Française, August 1937)

In this essay, Wells explains how then-current encyclopaedias failed to adapt to both the growing increase in recorded knowledge and the expansion of people requiring information that was accurate and readily accessible. He asserted that these 19th-century encyclopaedias continued to follow the 18th-century pattern, organisation and scale. "Our contemporary encyclopedias are still in the coach-and-horse phase of development," he argued, "rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane."

Wells saw the potential for world-altering impacts this technology could bring. He felt that the creation of the encyclopaedia could bring about the peaceful days of the past, "with a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose, and of a commonwealth such as now we hardly dream of".

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