Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist behind the first widely-used taxonomy of plants and animals, faced a problem modern biologists confront all the time: too much data. His solution was simple, says science historian Staffan Mueller-Wille: Linnaeus invented index cards.

“Although a seemingly mundane and simple innovation, Linnaeus’ use of index cards marks a major shift in how eighteenth-century naturalists thought about the order of nature,” says Mueller-Wille (press release).

He says Linnaeus first sorted his ideas onto individual sheets of paper so they could be shuffled, and years later shrank the size of his notepaper to make them easier to handle.

Mueller-Wille, of the University of Exeter, will be chatting about his ongoing research into how Linnaeus invented his famous taxonomy on 4 July at an outreach event organized by the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK.

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Mueller-Wille and colleague Sara Scharf published a working paper [pdf]on the topic with the London School of Economics in 2007.

Image: wikipedia