From YouTube:
“Paul Otlet, a Belgian bibliographer, pacifist and entrepreneur imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an “electric telescope” connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet
“Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (/ɒtˈleɪ/; French: [ɔtle]; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a French-speaking Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called “documentation”.
In 1895, Otlet and La Fontaine also began the creation of a collection of index cards, meant to catalog facts, that came to be known as the “Repertoire Bibliographique Universel” (RBU), or the “Universal Bibliographic Repertory”. By the end of 1895 it had grown to 400,000 entries; later it would reach a height of over 15 million.
In 1896, Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending the requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Alex Wright has referred to the service as an “analog search engine“.[4] By 1912, this service responded to over 1,500 queries a year. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search.”
Henry J. Burnett 