A full three decades until a British computer scientist, 35-year-old named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, forever changing the way that humans share and consume information (translation: photos of the cat), a young, visionary Designer in Chicago created a device that he called, simply and evocative, a "box of knowledge".
As life magazine described the artifact to its readers in the edition of September 1962, in language very similar to that used by digital age proselytizers and skeptics of the technology today - knowledge box appeared be an invention which does not help our species intentionally self-destructive to obtain knowledge faster and easier that ever, which perhaps enables us at least delaying our extinction... or could only accelerate our inevitable death. You know, in any way. Whatever it is.
As the imagination of many men creates a fantastic new world, the danger is that each individual can soon found himself lost in it. You can be an expert in their special field - microbiology, perhaps, but otherwise remains ignorant. New teaching techniques and devices, therefore, requires much to put so much knowledge as possible, as soon as possible, in the brain of swimming.
Out of the imagination of a specialist, designer Ken Isaacs the Illinois Institute of Technology's 32-year-old has become a machine called a "knowledge box" hoping to help fill this need. Isaacs, looking from inside his strange cell invention [see slide #4 in the gallery], believes that the traditional classroom environment is how inadequate for the learning of a ball park. Inside the box of knowledge, alone and quiet, the student would see a quick procession of thoughts and ideas that are projected on the walls, ceiling and floor in a panoply of images, words and patterns of light, leaving the middle to conclude for yourself. It is a machine of visual impact that could represent, for example, a history of the Civil war in a single session, or easily give an astronaut expects a lesson in celestial navigation.
The knowledge box was dismantled and went into storage shortly after left the article in life. But cube of 12 feet, Isaacs wooden frames '-with its multiple projectors of slides fuego-manguera Visual data to the occupants, was rebuilt and put on display a few years ago, at the School of Sullivan galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago. By all accounts, the "rare cell ploy" was as rare and as impressive five decades later as it was when Isaacs first introduced to an unsuspecting world in 1962.
Robert W. Kelley - time & life Pictures/Getty ImagesKen Isaacs, 1962.
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