Liberty is perverted when 'freedom' and 'individualism' mean ignoring facts and science By Scott Deshefy In 1910, long before television’s unveiling at the 1938 World’s Fair, Belgian information expert, Paul Otlet, and Henri La Fontaine imagined a global repository and distribution point for sharing the world’s knowledge. Their vision evolved into the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (forerunner of UNESCO). In 1934, prescient of the World Wide Web, Otlet wrote about a “Radiated Library” connecting TV watchers to encyclopedic knowledge via telephone wires. The idea remained dormant until the 1960s, when J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist, proposed linking the world’s computers into a network for scientific exchange. In the heart of the Cold War, that intrigued U.S. militarists, who sought a communication system that could withstand a nuclear war. In 1969, Leonard Kleinrock, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn gave the Defense Department ARPANET, an Internet forerunner, which first connected computers at UCLA and Stanford, and then the Universities of California and Utah. After transmission control and internet protocols (TCP/IP) were ironed out, Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail in 1971.