Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention and Political Forces

Citation

McGuirk, K. (2007), "Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention and Political Forces", Online Information Review, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 251-252. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520710747329

Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine is more than a biography on a forgotten inventor. Buckland's research offers the historical context within which sophisticated ideas about information and information systems developed before the Second World War. He also pays tribute to a great inventor who has been long ignored in the writings on the origin of information science. Of special interest is the Microfilm Rapid Selector, a document retrieval device that played an important role in the development of documentation in the 1930s. It is attributed in many historical texts to Vannevar Bush, when in fact it had already been “anticipated by E. Goldberg of the Zeiss Company” as stated by Robert Fairthorne (1958). Emanuel Goldberg (late 1920s) referred to the device as a “Statistical Machine”, a document retrieval machine using microfilm for storage and pattern recognition for searching. Instead of being a technical account of Goldberg's inventions.

Buckland offers a glimpse into the remarkable life and times of an unusual individual. The book is painstakingly researched fact, but to Buckland's credit it reads like an historical novel. The adventurous life of Goldberg is closely linked to how his work and interactions with others have been interwoven with the intellectual and social history of the early phases of the development of documentation and information technology. Political and military pressures played a dominant role in what Goldberg could and could not do. Buckland investigates how the great achievements of such a famous man became almost completely erased from social memory.

Goldberg's story takes us from Tsarist Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, the First World War, the rise of Hitler's Third Reich, the Second World War, right through to the emergence of the State of Israel. It paints a vivid picture of how inventions and the history of inventions were affected by social and political pressures. The book is divided into 22 chapters that deals with Goldberg's roots, university studies, inventions, marriage, a sojourn into graphics and industrial design, war, microdots, sound movies, the Statistical Machine, his time in Paris and Palestine, aerial photography for the military, the Microfilm Rapid Selector, the period after his passing away, and Goldberg in retrospect. Valuable additions are a list of illustrations, preface, appendices, endnotes, bibliography of Goldberg's writings, general bibliography and an index. These are essential for those interested in pursuing a path into Goldberg's world. His influences included photography, copying camera, microfiche, radio (wireless), and even commercial products such as his refractometer for measuring the sugar content of juices.

The origin of this study was in Buckland's refusal to accept uncritical writings on the development of information systems, technologies and science. He shows us that sophisticated technological ideas are not the sole domain of the period following the Second World War. Brian Vickery, in his The Long Search for Information, emphasized the importance of understanding the historical roots of any discipline or subject field. This is well illustrated in Buckland's contribution, a definite recommendation for anyone interested in a more complete understanding of why and how things came about, and what the future holds.