A Moment of Divine Inspiration Helped Melvil Dewey Bring Obsessive Order to the Infinitely Disorganized Stacks in the Library
Key takeaways
- An intense young scholar, Dewey felt at home among the books.
- Thus was born the classification system that now bears Dewey’s name.
- Born and raised in a devout Baptist family, he internalized his era’s ethos of religious reform.
An intense young scholar, Dewey felt at home among the books. There was only one problem: They were so disorganized that finding a given volume could prove impossible.
One spring Sunday in 1873, he made a breakthrough. He was sitting in the college chapel, listening to a long sermon from the college’s president. His mind wandered, and “the solution flashed over me so that I jumped in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka!’” The idea was beautifully simple: “Use decimals to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”
Thus was born the classification system that now bears Dewey’s name. His plan sought to tame the chaos created by an ever-growing number of books, and taught the world how to manage the exponential growth of knowledge that has defined the modern age.