History of the Encyclopædia Britannica

However, English-composed encyclopedias appeared in the 18th century, beginning with Lexicon technicum, or A Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences by John Harris (two volumes, published 1704 and 1710, respectively), which contained articles by such contributors as Isaac Newton.

Needing an editor, the two chose a 28-year-old scholar named William Smellie who was offered 200 pounds sterling to produce the encyclopedia in 100 parts (called "numbers" and equivalent to thick pamphlets), which were later bound into three volumes.

Previous English encyclopedias had generally listed related terms separately in their alphabetical order, rather like a modern technical dictionary, an approach that the Britannica's' management described as "dismembering the sciences".

Although this edition has been faulted for its imperfect scholarship, Smellie argued that the Britannica should be given the benefit of the doubt: With regard to errors in general, whether falling under the denomination of mental, typographical or accidental, we are conscious of being able to point out a greater number than any critic whatever.

For example, "Chemistry" goes into great detail on an obsolete system of what would now be called alchemy, in which earth, air, water and fire are named elements containing various amounts of phlogiston.

The second edition also reports a cure for tuberculosis: He chose a spot of ground on which no plants had been sown, and there he made a hole large and deep enough to admit the patient up to the chin.

In this situation the patient suffered to remain till he began to shiver or felt himself uneasy...The patient was then taken out, and, after being wrapped in a linen cloth, was placed upon a mattress, and two hours afterwards his whole body was rubbed with the ointment composed of the leaves of the solanum nigrum and hog's lard.and a somewhat melancholy article on "Love" that persisted in the Britannica for nearly a century (until its ninth edition): As the force of love prevails, sighs grow deeper; a tremor affects the heart and pulse; the countenance is alternately pale and red; the voice is suppressed in the sauces; the eyes grow dim; cold sweats break out; sleep absents itself, at least until the morning; the secretions become disturbed; and a loss of appetite, a hectic fever, melancholy, or perhaps madness, if not death, constitutes the sad catastrophe.Like the first edition, the second was sold in sections by subscription at the printing shop of Colin MacFarquhar.

Volume 10, published in 1783 after the Revolutionary War was over, gives in the entry for Virginia: "Virginia, late one of the British colonies, now one of the United States of North America..."[12] but the entry in Volume 2 for Boston, published in 1778, states: "Boston, the capital of New England in North America, ....The following is a description of this capital before the commencement of the present American war.

And the attempting to enforce this by other acts of Parliament, penalties, and at last by military power, gave rise, as is well known, to the present revolt of our colonies.A 204-page appendix, written in 1784, is found at the end of Vol.

In the Supplement to the Third Edition, Gleig called him "the Father of Your People, and enlightened Patron of Arts, Sciences and Literature", and expressed: ...that, by the Wisdom of Your Councils, and the Vigour of Your Fleets and Armies, Your MAJESTY may be enabled soon to restore Peace to Europe; that You may again have leisure to extend Your Royal Care to the Improvement of Arts, and the Advancement of Knowledge; that You May Reign long over a Free, Happy and a Loyal People...The third edition is also famous for its bold article on "Motion", which erroneously rejects Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation.

He seems to have been swayed by William Jones' Essay on the First Principles of Natural Philosophy (1762), which in turn was based on John Hutchinson's MA thesis, Moses' Principia, which was written in 1724 but rejected by Oxford University.

Some of the plates have very minor revisions, but they are all basically Bell's work from the fourth or earlier editions, and these new names were probably added for business reasons involving copyright royalties.

To edit the supplement, Constable hired Macvey Napier, who recruited other eminent contributors such as Sir Humphry Davy, Jean-Baptiste Biot, James Mill, William Hazlitt, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus.

Unfortunately, Constable went bankrupt on 19 January 1826 and the rights to the Britannica were sold on auction; they were eventually bought on 16 July 1828 for 6,150 pounds sterling by a partnership of four men: Adam Black (a publisher), Alexander Wight (a banker), Abram Thomson (a bookbinder) and Thomas Allen, the proprietor of the Caledonian Mercury.

Compared to the eighth edition, the ninth was far more luxurious, with thick boards and high-quality leather bindings, premier paper, and a production which took full advantage of the technological advances in printing in the years between the 1850s and 1870s.

The spy would steal the proofreader's copies and send them by fastest mail to the United States, allowing Stoddart to publish his version simultaneously with the Britannica and at nearly half the price ($5 versus $9 per volume).

There may be differences of opinion about the morality of republishing a work here that is copyrighted abroad; but the public policy of this country, as respects the subject, is in favor of such replication...It is supposed to have an influence upon the advance of learning and intelligence.Another successful infringer was Henry G. Allen, who developed a photographic reproduction method for the Britannica and charged only half as much as Stoddart ($2.50 per volume).

[citation needed] Although the crass marketing was criticized as inappropriate to the Britannica's history and scholarship, the unprecedented profits delighted the manager of The Times, Charles Frederic Moberly Bell,[10] who assessed Hooper as "a ranker who loved to be accepted as a gentleman.

The following quote, written in 1926, captures the mood[33] Who that is old enough does not remember the "campaign" of 1903, the insidious payment by instalments, the sets dumped at your door, bookcase and all, on receipt of a guinea, the scholarships, the competition questions, the reply-paid telegrams pursuing you to the innermost sanctuary of your home ("From my bath I curse you", one man wired back!

Its illustrious contributors are legion, including Baden Baden-Powell writing on kite-flying; Arthur Eddington on astronomy; Edmund Gosse on literature and Donald Tovey on music.

[10] Perhaps because of this, the Britannica encountered financial difficulties, whereupon it was licensed to Sears Roebuck and Co. of Chicago, who issued a physically smaller but complete version known as the "handy edition," with each volume almost pocket-sized.

Although this was not much of an increase over the 10th edition (which named 37 female contributors out of 1,800 in total), it was heralded publicly as a major advance in recognizing the contributions of women in learned circles.

The CEO of Sears Roebuck, philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, was devoted to the mission of the Britannica and bought its rights on 24 February 1920 from his friend Horace Everett Hooper for $1.25 million.

It was very different from the 11th edition, having fewer volumes and simpler articles, continuing the business strategy of popularizing the Britannica for the American mass market at the expense of its scholarship.

Rosenwald died in 1932, and General Robert E. Wood took over; Cox was removed as publisher and the Secretary-Treasurer of Sears, Elkan Harrison Powell, was installed as the new President of the Britannica.

[38] E. H. Powell identified and fixed a key vulnerability of Britannica, namely, that its sales (and, hence, the company's income) fluctuated strongly over the life-cycle of an edition.

The story of this offer was recounted at the bicentennial banquet of the Encyclopædia Britannica[40] It was after lunch on the afternoon of December 9, 1941 that General Robert E. Wood, Chairman of Sears, Roebuck and William Benton, then vice-president of the University of Chicago, were discussing the attack on Pearl Harbor which had occurred two days earlier.

Beginning in the early 1960s, the failings of the 14th edition began to be collated and published by physicist Harvey Einbinder, culminating in his highly critical 390-page book, The Myth of the Britannica (1964).

More generally, Adler felt that the Britannica should not merely serve as a reference work, but also aspire to be a categorization of omne scibile (everything knowable), to fulfill Francis Bacon's grand conception of epistemology.

Safra introduced severe price-cutting measures to try to compete with Encarta, even offering the entire reference free of charge for a time (around 18 months, from October 1999 to March 2001) on the Internet.