OTHER ARTICLES
WRITTEN BY H.G. WELLS
THE WAR THAT WILL
END WAR (1914)
The War That Will End War. 1914 (88ap). A pamphlet reprinting eleven newspaper articles
in which Wells views the war less as a great disaster than as a great
opportunity.
R.D. Mullen –
The Books and Principal Pamphlets of H.G. Wells : A
Chronological Survey
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/2/mullewells2bib.htm
1-11-08
Read “The War that will end
War” here (http://www.archive.org/stream/warthatwillendwa00welluoft
)
THE ELEMENTS OF
RECONSTRUCTION (1916)
In this webpage there is a big
amount of articles written by H.G. Wells in The Times during July and
August 1916. Unfortunately to be allowed to read and to have a look at them it
is need to have a registration, which I do not have. By clicking here you can
have a look at them and if you are interested pay and get a complete view. This articles are The Elements of Reconstruction.
First edition was published with a false name, he signed as
“D.P”. http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/searchByKeyword.arc?dateSearchType=range
Wikipedia, the Free
Encyclopedia
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells 1-11-08
You can read “The Elements of
Reconstruction” here (.PDF version) or here
A YEAR OF
PROPHESYING (1925)
A Year of Prophesying contains 55
articles that were originally published in newspapers in 1924. The book is
perhaps misnamed as there is not a great deal of prophesy contained within
them. Instead the articles cover a wide variety of then current subjects and do
much to explain the mood of the time. Several articles deal with Wells'
disappointment with the
A Year of
Prophesying – H.G. Wells
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~tdoyle/hgwells/Prophesying.shtml
3-11-08
R.D. Mullen- The
Books and Principal Pamphlets of H.G. Wells : A
Chronological Survey 3-11-08
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/2/mullewells2bib.htm
THE WAY THE WORLD
IS GOING (1928)
The Way the World is Going: Guesses
and Forecasts of the Years Ahead. 1928 (338ap). One address and 26 newspaper articles, of which the following are
perhaps of greatest interest.
The Way The World Is Going – H.G. Wells
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~tdoyle/hgwells/world_going.shtml
3-11-08
WORLD BRAIN (1938)
World Brain is the title of a book of essays by
English author H.G. Wells, written in 1938.
One essay titled "The Idea of a
Permanent World Encyclopaedia" first appeared in the new Encyclopédie française, August, 1937.
The essay "The Brain
Organization of the Modern World" lays out Wells' 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." (p.
49) Wells felt that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized 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." (p. 54)
World Brain –
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain
3-11-08
Here we have the contribution he did
to the Encyclopédie Française,
August, 1937
Contribution to the
new Encyclopédie Française,
August, 1937
It is probable that the idea of an encyclopaedia
may undergo very considerable extension and elaboration in the near future. Its
full possibilities have still to be realized. The encyclopaedias of the past
have sufficed for the needs of a cultivated minority. They were written “for
gentlemen by gentlemen” in a world wherein universal education was unthought of, and where the institutions of modern
democracy with universal suffrage, so necessary in many respects, so difficult
and dangerous in their working, had still to appear. Throughout the nineteenth
century encyclopaedias followed the eighteenth-century scale and pattern, in
spite both of a gigantic increase in recorded knowledge and of a still more
gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily
accessible information. At first this disproportion was scarcely noted, and its
consequences not at all. But many people now are coming to recognize that our
contemporary encyclopaedias are still in the coach-and-horses phase of
development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane.
Encyclopaedic enterprise has not kept pace with material progress. These
observers realize that modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic
reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct
and accessible assembly of fact and ideas than was ever possible before.
Concurrently with these realizations there is a
growing discontent with the part played by the universities, schools and
libraries in the intellectual life of mankind. Universities multiply, schools
of every grade and type increase, but they do not enlarge their scope to
anything like the urgent demands of this troubled and dangerous age. They do
not perform the task nor exercise the authority that might reasonably be attributed
to the thought and knowledge organization of the world. It is not, as it should
be, a case of larger and more powerful universities co-operating more and more
intimately, but of many more universities of the old type, mostly ill-endowed
and uncertainly endowed, keeping at the old educational level.
Both the assembling and the distribution of knowledge
in the world at present are extremely ineffective, and thinkers of the
forward-looking type whose ideas we are now considering, are beginning to
realize that the most hopeful line for the development of our racial
intelligence lies rather in the direction of creating a new world organ for the
collection, indexing, summarizing and release of knowledge, than in any further
tinkering with the highly conservative and resistant university system, local,
national and traditional in texture, which already exists. These innovators,
who may be dreamers today, but who hope to become very active organizers
tomorrow, project a unified, if not a centralized, world organ to “pull
the mind of the world together”, which will be not so much a rival to the
universities, as a supplementary and co-ordinating addition to their educational
activities – on a planetary scale.
The phrase “Permanent World Encyclopaedia”
conveys the gist of these ideas. As the core of such an institution would be a
world synthesis of bibliography and documentation with the indexed archives of
the world. A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting
this index of human knowledge and keeping it up to date. Concurrently, the
resources of micro-photography, as yet only in their infancy, will be creating
a concentrated visual record.
Few people as yet, outside the world of expert
librarians and museum curators and so forth, know how manageable well-ordered
facts can be made, however multitudinous, and how swiftly and completely even
the rarest visions and the most recondite matters can be recalled, once they
have been put in place in a well-ordered scheme of reference and reproduction.
The American microfilm experts, even now, are making facsimiles of the rarest
books, manuscripts, pictures and specimens, which can then be made easily
accessible upon the library creen. By means of the
microfilm, the rarest and most intricate documents and articles can be studied
now at first hand, simultaneously in a score of projection rooms. There is no
practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the
creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind. And not
simply an index; the direct reproduction of the thing itself can be summoned to
any properly prepared spot. A microfilm, coloured where necessary, occupying an
inch or so of space and weighing little more than a letter, can be duplicated
from the records and sent anywhere, and thrown enlarged upon the screen so that
the student may study it in every detail.
This in itself is a fact of tremendous significance.
It foreshadows a real intellectual unification of our race. The whole human
memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every
individual. And what is also of very great importance in this uncertain world
where destruction becomes continually more frequent and unpredictable, is this,
that photography affords now every facility for multiplying duplicates of this –
which we may call? – this new all-human
cerebrum. It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be
vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced
exactly and fully, in
This is no remote dream, no fantasy. It is a plain
statement of a contemporary state of affairs. It is on the level of practicable
fact. It is a matter of such manifest importance and desirability for science,
for the practical needs of mankind, for general education and the like, that it
is difficult not to believe that in quite the near future, this Permanent World
Encyclopaedia, so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and
possible influence, will not come into existence.
Its uses will be multiple and many of them will be
fairly obvious. Special sections of it, historical, technical, scientific,
artistic, e.g. will easily be reproduced for specific professional use. Based
upon it, a series of summaries of greater or less fullness and simplicity, for
the homes and studies of ordinary people, for the college and the school, can
be continually issued and revised. In the hands of competent editors, educational
directors and teachers, these condensations and abstracts incorporated in the
world educational system, will supply the humanity of the days before us, with
a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose and of a
commonweal such as now we hardly dare dream of. And its creation is a way to
world peace that can be followed without any very grave risk of collision with
the warring political forces and the vested institutional interests of today.
Quietly and sanely this new encyclopaedia will, not so much overcome these
archaic discords, as deprive them, steadily but imperceptibly, of their present
reality. A common ideology based on this Permanent World Encyclopaedia is a
possible means, to some it seems the only means, of dissolving human conflict
into unity.
This concisely is the sober, practical but essentially
colossal objective of those who are seeking to synthesize human mentality
today, through this natural and reasonable development of encyclopaedism into a
Permanent World Encyclopaedia.
World Brain: The
Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia
https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html
4-11-08
This page is a
local copy of the original created at the Swedish Origo project.
Academic year
2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Aina García Coll
aigari@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press