The Swedish scientist is more often credited with another invention: binomial nomenclature, the latinized two-part name assigned to every species. Before Linnaeus, rambling descriptions were used to identify plants and animals. A tomato, for example, was a mouthful: Solanum caule inermi herbaceo foliis pinnatis incisis. After Linnaeus, the round fruit became Solanum lycopersicum. Thanks to his landmark study, Systema Naturae, naturalists had a universal language, which organized the natural world into the nested hierarchies still used today—species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom.

In 18th-century Europe, Linnaeus became a household name. “Tell him I know no greater man on earth,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau of his Swedish idol. Like other savants of his day, Rousseau saw the study of plants as a moral pursuit, a virtuous escape into nature. Germany’s man of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, confessed that after Shakespeare and Spinoza, no one had influenced him more than Linnaeus. “God created—Linnaeus arranged,” went the adage.

But despite his meteoric success, Linnaeus had a problem. The man who made order from nature’s chaos did not have a good management system for his own work. His methods for sorting and storing information about the natural world couldn’t keep up with the flood of it he was producing. Linnaeus’s appearance only added to an aura of disorder. Stunned visitors described the prince of botany as a “markedly unshaven” man in “dusty shoes and stockings.” Writing about himself, Linnaeus was even less charitable: “Brow furrowed. A low wart on the right cheek and another on the right side of the nose. Teeth bad, worm-eaten.”

Worms aside, the real issue vexing Sweden’s top scientist was how to manage a data deluge. He had started out collecting plants in the woods of his native southern Sweden. But as his profile grew, so did his research and writing, and the number of students under his wing. Achieving scientific renown of their own, Linnaeus’s students sent him specimens from their travels in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, West Africa, and China. According to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, most botanists of the era employed a team to manage their affairs that would keep track of correspondence and categorize specimens. But not Linnaeus, “who preferred to work alone.” Starting in the 1750s, he complained in letters to friends of feeling overworked and overwhelmed. Burnout, it turns out, isn’t a modern condition.

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Linnaeus’s predicament wasn’t new, either. In her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, the historian Ann Blair explains that since the Renaissance, “the discovery of new worlds, the recovery of ancient texts, and the proliferation of printed books” unleashed an avalanche of information. The rise of far-flung networks of correspondents only added to this circulation of knowledge. Summarizing, sorting, and searching new material wasn’t easy, especially given the available tools and technologies. Printed books needed buyers. And while notebooks kept information in one place, finding a detail buried inside one was another story. Finishing an academic dissertation wasn’t just a test of erudition or persistence; dealing with the material itself—recording, searching, retrieving it—was a logistical nightmare.