Who invented note cards

British Society for the History of Science. Retrieved November 11, from www. It's among the most famous documents in English history, but its origins Print Email Share. Boy or Girl? Your message to the editors. Your email only if you want to be contacted back. Send Feedback.

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Teeth bad, worm-eaten. He had started out collecting plants in the woods of his native southern Sweden. But as his profile grew, so did his research and writing, and the number of students under his wing. The rise of far-flung networks of correspondents only added to this circulation of knowledge. Printed books needed buyers. And while notebooks kept information in one place, finding a detail buried inside one was another story. Many scholars, like the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle, preferred to work on loose sheets of paper that could be collated, rearranged, and reshuffled, says Blair.

But others came up with novel solutions. Readers would attach pieces of paper to metal hooks labeled by subject heading. Linnaeus experimented with a few filing systems. Later, they formed the backbone of the library system, allowing us to index vast sums of information and inadvertently creating many of the underlying ideas that allowed the Internet to flourish.

Organizing more than 12, animals, plants, and minerals is painstaking work. Imagine having to do it by hand, let alone typing it all into Microsoft Excel. That's what Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, did for his book Systema Naturae. Published in 13 editions from to , Systema Naturae classified and named organisms and minerals.

It gave scientists an understanding of which species were alike based on the number of shared categories. Before publishing his taxonomies, Linnaeus had to organize everything himself. But instead of writing his classifications in a book that could easily run out of space, he put each organism and mineral on its own piece of paper. That way, Linnaeus could have a file of everything he recorded. He could easily retrieve data on any organism and mineral and reposition any of them that may have been placed in the wrong spot.

Most importantly, new discoveries could always be added as he published new editions of Systema Naturae.

Similar in size to a playing card, this new tool called the index card would be used for one thing—classifying, or indexing, information. But about 30 years after publishing the first Systema Naturae , Linnaeus came up with another way to index his information : by putting all of the organisms and minerals on smaller, thicker pieces of paper. Similar in size to a playing card, this new tool would be used for one thing—classifying, or indexing, information.

For thousands of years, if you wanted to find the best and most comprehensive information about anything, you headed to a library. You just had to check two things first: whether the library had the information you're looking for, and, if so, where to find it.

These days we can get this information from our computers in seconds, but as recently as the s, online catalogs were new and mostly unavailable, and that meant combing through the card catalog to track down a book. Before libraries used cards, the catalogs were written in books, as if part of the collection. Preceding catalog books were etched tablets, which were used in ancient Babylon and Egypt. As time went on and collections grew, tablets and eventually the catalog books ran out of space for new entries.

They became cumbersome to rewrite. So in —about 30 years after Linnaeus' invention—librarians began resorting to cards for their catalogs.

The movement started in France during the French Revolution. As revolution raged in the streets, an evolution in library cataloging was also underway. The French libraries initially used playing cards.