James Tytler

A group of historiographers wrote about him: A social outcast, Tytler did much hack work for low pay and rarely if ever emerged from poverty.

But ... he deserves to be remembered as a man of many talents – as a political and religious controversialist, scholar, journalist, poet, song writer, musician, balloonist, pharmacist, surgeon and printer.

In addition ... he was an outstanding encyclopedist whose editorship of the second edition earns him a notable place in the history of encyclopedias.Tytler was born in Fern, Forfarshire, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister.

[6] He declined to practise medicine but instead opened a pharmacy in Leith, near Edinburgh, which was a financial failure, leaving him in debt.

In 1793 he was charged with sedition for publishing a pamphlet championing the Rights of Man, but fled Scotland prior to his trial, travelling first to Belfast, and then in 1795 to the United States.

He was paid less than his predecessor, William Smellie, and it is possible he was engaged because one of the Britannica's publishers, Andrew Bell, had been assisted by Tytler on another work.

[17] Tytler contributed some long treatises to the third edition (1788–1797), and may have been its first editor before he left Edinburgh in March 1788, the month before the first number was published.

[22] On the ship to America in 1795 Tytler wrote a pamphlet Rising the sun in the west, or the Origin and progress of liberty, in which he denounced the elites of the Old World.

Disappointed with the Scottish and Irish, he praised the Americans and the French for fighting against superstition and tyranny (despite the suppression of religion in revolutionary France).

Two days later he managed to reach a height of not more than 300 feet, travelling for half a mile between Green House on the northern edge of what is now Holyrood Park to the nearby village of Restalrig.

[25] Tytler was overshadowed by Lunardi—the self-styled "Daredevil Aeronaut"—who carried out five sensational flights in Scotland, creating a ballooning fad and inspiring ladies' fashions in skirts and hats.