In 1937, H.G. Wells predicted Wikipedia. But he thought it’d lead to world peace.

In 1937, novelist and writer H.G Wells laid out a vision for something truly utopian. He called it the “Permanent World Encyclopaedia.”

“A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting this index of human knowledge and keeping it up to date,” he wrote in an essay for the Encyclopédie Française, later published in the book World Brain. “[It] will be made accessible to every individual...It need not be concentrated in any one single place...It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa.”

78 years later, Wells’ prediction has basically come true. He called it the “Permanent World Encyclopaedia”; we call it Wikipedia. (Alternately, you could also just consider his idea to be manifest in the internet as a whole.)

Sure, it’s far from a perfect representation of human knowledge (among other things, Wikipedia articles dramatically over-represent Europe and North America and under-represent the rest of the world). But Wikipedia is still a perpetually-updated, remarkably comprehensive encyclopedia that’s been built by volunteers, is free for anyone to use, and can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection.

For someone to have predicted it in the 1930s — before the invention of the microprocessor — is, by any measure, astounding.

When it comes to the particulars, though, Wells’ vision was somewhat less accurate. Absent computers and the internet, he thought all this information would be stored and replicated over and over on the then-novel medium of microfilm, and studied in projection rooms in libraries around the world.

He also made a much bigger miscalculation: he thought that everyone having access to the same history and set of facts would lead to a universal ideology that would lead, inevitably, to harmony. “Quietly and sanely this new encyclopaedia will, not so much overcome these archaic discords, as deprive them, steadily but imperceptibly, of their present reality,” Wells wrote. “Its creation is a way to world peace.”

This is probably an unrealistic, utopian vision. War is becoming less common, but people tend to interpret information in ways that fit their existing biases and ideology. Having access to the same set of facts, in other words, doesn’t necessarily lead to the end of conflict.

Still, this concept is only a little more utopian than the idea of us all having perpetual free access to a store of all the world’s knowledge in the first place. We live in the future, and it’s pretty amazing.