Michael Hart’s groundbreaking eBook has left his mark on the world.

      It all started with a printed copy of the United States Declaration of Independence. On July 4^th, 1971, a man named Michael Stern Hart came up with the ingenious idea to create an electronic book, or eBook. While attending the University of Illinois, the school had given Hart a user account meant for data processing. Little did they know, Hart had bigger plans. He decided to type the entire Declaration of Independence into his computer and attempt to mass email it to a numerous amount of people. However, computers back then were not built for this type of mass communication and to avoid the system crashing, Hart made the text available for people to download instead. This was the start of Project Gutenberg.

 Photo: Michael Hart never had a real stable job. He worked various odd jobs, such as managing Project Gutenberg, and never had any real office space except for the confines of his own home.

Using the computer network at the University of Illinois, Michael Hart started what was known as Project Gutenberg. 
     The university network consisted of a measly hundred users. It became Hart’s life work to transmit and distribute works of literature via computer networks. This was unheard of in those times and keep in mind, it was also two decades before the creation of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. In the lifespan of Hart’s own personal work, he had digitized a total of 313 literary works. Some of these works included entire books, like the Bible and Alice’sAdventures in Wonderland, as well as works of Homer and Shakespeare. Michael Hart’s work at the University of Illinois on Project Gutenberg had only begun.

Just sixteen years after Hart’s creation of Project Gutenberg, he broke down more boundaries with the help of the university’s PC User Group and a programmer by the name of Mark Zinzow. 
      Hart and his helpers were able to recruit volunteers and create an infrastructure of mirror sites and mailing lists for the project. This boosted the development and growth of Project Gutenberg significantly. By 2006, the serve had a total of 17,000 eBooks uploaded after the volunteers’ work. Today, Project Gutenberg is recognized as the earliest online literary project and holds over 42,000 free eBooks.

      Michael Hart was an extraordinary thinker with a vision to create a proficient way of sharing unlimited and free literature. In his own words, Hart created an environment for users that was “open access without proprietary displays, without the need for special software, and without the requirement for anything but the simplest of connections.” He was constantly thinking about the future, moving through life with so much ambition and an open mind. Michael Hart was a talented man with many aspirations in life, but there was never a time when money was one of them.

      
Perhaps, the most unusual aspect of Michael Hart’s life was that fact that a man with such a natural aptitude for technological innovation lived a very frugal and poor life. 
      Hart never made any money off of Project Gutenberg and although he wrote a handful of books, he never made a penny from them because they were all available free of charge on Project Gutenberg. He supported himself doing a number of odd jobs, one of them being an unpaid appointment at Illinois Benedictine College to solicit donations for Project Gutenberg. Hart was the epitome of a handy man. He fixed his own car and house, and built his own computers and stereos. He even took care of his own body with home remedies. “I know it sounds odd to most people, but I just never bought into the money system all that much,” Hart once said. 
     Rather than thinking about his own personal luxury, Hart embraced life through his friends, his work, and his vision. His dream was that someday, everyone would be able to have his or her own duplicate of the Project Gutenberg collection. Although he’s not alive to witness it, that dream has become a reality thanks to the advancements in technologies, such as computers, smartphones, and even portable eBook readers.