1866: H. G. Wells is born

On 21 September 1866, Herbert George Wells entered the world in Bromley, Kent. The son of a shopkeeper and a former domestic servant, he would become one of the most influential speculative writers of the modern era. While best remembered for scientific romances such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, Wells also produced a steady stream of essays and books that treated knowledge, communication and organised intelligence as engineering problems.

In 1936–38 he published the lectures and pamphlet that became World Brain. There he called for a “permanent world encyclopaedia” — a continuously updated, freely accessible, globally distributed repository of verified fact, abstracted and cross-referenced so that any citizen or specialist could draw upon the whole of human learning. He imagined microfilm, radio and nascent calculating machines as the technical substrate; the deeper idea was that civilisation itself required an externalised, collective memory that could outlive any single mind.

That vision travelled farther than Wells could have foreseen. Mid-century cyberneticians and information scientists cited the World Brain when arguing for large-scale documentation systems. Later, the architects of the early Web and of projects such as Wikipedia repeatedly invoked Wells as a prophetic ancestor. In contemporary artificial intelligence the same thread reappears: large language models are trained on planetary-scale text corpora; retrieval-augmented generation systems try to keep those models tethered to living knowledge bases; and research agendas in “world models” and lifelong learning echo Wells’s demand for an ever-revised, shared intelligence.

Wells was no computer scientist. Yet by insisting that the organisation of knowledge is a public, technical and moral task, he helped set the intellectual weather in which today’s AI systems are designed, debated and deployed. On his birthday we remember that the dream of a machine that knows — and that lets us know — is older, and more human, than the silicon that now pursues it.