Encyclopædia Britannica

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Encyclopædia Britannica first appeared in Edinburgh between 1768 and 1771 as weekly instalments, assembled by a single compiler named William Smellie. Those instalments eventually bound together into three volumes. What began as a modest Scottish publishing venture would go on to print continuously for 245 years, outlasting every rival English-language encyclopaedia that came before it. It survived ownership changes, piracy on two continents, depression-era financial catastrophe, and the rise of the internet before finally ending its print run with a 32-volume set in 2010. How does a reference book born in Enlightenment Edinburgh become a global standard for knowledge, and what forces finally ended its life on paper?

• 2. Scottish Roots

  ›

  William Smellie compiled nearly all of the first edition himself, drawing heavily on Scottish sources, with only minor assistance from a contributor named James Anderson, who wrote the articles on "Dictionary," "Pneumatics," and "Smoke." Despite working at the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, neither Smellie nor James Tytler, who edited the second edition, recruited contributions from local luminaries. The title chosen was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, not the Encyclopaedia Scotorum, a deliberate choice that pointed toward a broader British identity rather than a specifically Scottish one.

  By the third edition the work was already becoming a symbol of Britishness, according to Arthur Herman's book How the Scots Invented the Modern World, which identifies the Britannica as one of the most enduring legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment. The organizational principle behind the whole enterprise was itself novel: two typographically distinct kinds of entry, articles and longer "treatises," arranged in a single alphabetical sequence. The idea may have drawn on Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal History of Arts and Sciences, which contained only treatises. That two-tier structure, in some form, persisted through the 10th edition.

  The first edition sold roughly 3,000 sets at £12 apiece. By the third edition, profits reached £42,000 on around 10,000 copies, though the work was pirated almost immediately by Thomas Dobson in Philadelphia. The chemist Joseph Black and the natural philosopher John Robison were among the 35 named contributors to the third edition, a sign that the encyclopaedia was beginning to recruit genuine scientific authority rather than relying on one generalist compiler.

• 3. The Scholar's Edition

  ›

  Thomas Spencer Baynes, the first English-born editor-in-chief, oversaw production of the 9th edition, published between 1875 and 1889. It became known as the "Scholar's Edition" and is regarded as the most scholarly of all Britannicas. James Clerk Maxwell and Thomas Huxley served as special advisors on science, and Maxwell himself contributed the article on electricity and magnetism. William Thomson, who became Lord Kelvin, wrote on heat. No biographies of living persons were included.

  The 9th edition sold approximately 10,000 sets directly through the Britannica and 45,000 authorized sets in the United States through Little, Brown in Boston and Scribners' Sons in New York, but it was also pirated on a massive scale: an estimated 500,000 pirated sets circulated in the United States. The 11th edition, published between 1910 and 1911, is considered another high point of scholarship and writing. Its owner, Horace Everett Hooper, lavished enormous effort on the project, and it sold around a million copies.

  By the time the 11th edition appeared, the encyclopaedia carried a dual dedication, to both the British monarch and the President of the United States. The 11th edition was "dedicated by Permission to His Majesty George the Fifth, King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, and to William Howard Taft, President of the United States of America." The order of the dedications would later shift to reflect changing relative power; by 1954, the President appeared before the monarch.

• 4. American Ownership

  ›

  An American partnership acquired the Britannica rights on the 9th of May 1901, bringing with it high-pressure door-to-door sales methods. Sears Roebuck managed the encyclopaedia for 18 years across two separate periods, from 1920 to 1923 and again from 1928 to 1943. In 1932, Elkan Harrison Powell, vice president of Sears, assumed the presidency of the Britannica company. By 1936, he began the policy of continuous revision, under which articles were updated on a rolling schedule rather than waiting for a full new edition.

  In 1943, Sears donated the Encyclopædia Britannica to the University of Chicago. William Benton, then a vice president of the university, provided the working capital and became chairman of the board. He managed the company until his death in 1973, establishing the Benton Foundation as the sole beneficiary of the University of Chicago's stake. By the late 20th century, division managers at the top of the sales organization were earning an average salary of $125,000 in 1958.

  The sales force itself was notorious for deceptive practices. The Britannica was sued several times by the American Federal Trade Commission, and on the 9th of March 1976 the US Federal Trade Commission entered a formal opinion and order enjoining the company from deceptive advertising practices in recruiting sales agents and deceptive practices in door-to-door sales presentations. The commission in the United States in 1971 was $120-200 per sale, a commission structure that encouraged high-pressure tactics and produced high turnover among salesmen.

• 5. Structure and Scale

  ›

  The 15th edition, introduced in 1974, reorganized the entire encyclopaedia into three distinct parts: the Micropædia, a 12-volume set of short articles intended for quick fact-checking; the Macropædia, a 17-volume set of long articles running from two pages up to 310 pages; and the Propædia, a single volume providing a hierarchical outline of all human knowledge. The absence of a separate index from the initial 1974 release provoked what the source describes as a "firestorm of criticism." A two-volume index was restored in 1985 and the structure was substantially reorganized.

  The 2007 Macropædia contained 699 in-depth articles with named contributors. The 2007 Micropædia held roughly 65,000 articles, about 97% of which were fewer than 750 words, carried no references, and listed no contributors. The longest single article in the Macropædia, at 310 pages, covers the United States; it was formed by merging previously separate articles on individual US states. Taken together, the Micro- and Macropædia comprise roughly 40 million words and 24,000 images.

  The Propædia's core is its "Outline of Knowledge," which aims to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge and was produced under the direction of Mortimer J. Adler, who served as chair of the Board of Editors from 1974 and directed editorial planning for the 15th edition from 1965. Libraries found the Outline was scarcely consulted in practice, and reviewers recommended it be dropped. Despite that, the Propædia also lists just under 4,000 advisors who were consulted for unsigned Micropædia articles.

• 6. Contributors and Critics

  ›

  The print version of the Britannica credits 4,411 contributors, among them Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, astronomer Carl Sagan, and surgeon Michael DeBakey. Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Leon Trotsky have all appeared among Britannica authors. Roughly 98% of contributors wrote only a single article; Christine Sutton of the University of Oxford stands out as an exceptionally prolific contributor, with 24 articles on particle physics.

  Criticism of contributors appeared early. In 1911, the historian George L. Burr wrote that one contributor ranged over "nearly the whole field of European history, political, social, ecclesiastical" with "a temerity almost appalling," faulting the encyclopaedia's reliance on editorial energy over ripe specialist learning. A more systematic attack came in Harvey Einbinder's 1964 book The Myth of the Britannica, which detailed the failings of the then-current 14th edition and is credited with provoking the 10-year effort that produced the 15th edition.

  The peak year for printed sales was 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold. By 1996 that figure had fallen to 40,000 sets annually. Only 12,000 sets of the 2010 final print edition were produced, of which 8,000 had sold by March 2012. By late April 2012 the remaining copies had sold out through Britannica's online store. Paul T. Armstrong, who began his career at the company in 1934 and served as treasurer, vice president, and chief financial officer before retiring in 1992, remains the longest-serving employee in the encyclopaedia's history.

• 7. The Wikipedia Challenge

  ›

  In 2005, the journal Nature chose articles from both the Britannica website and Wikipedia across a wide range of science topics and sent them to field experts for peer review. The experts compared articles side by side without knowing which came from which source. Nature received 42 usable reviews. The journal found eight serious errors in total, four from each site, plus many smaller factual errors, omissions, and misleading statements: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica, an average of 3.86 per article for Wikipedia against 2.92 for Britannica.

  Britannica called Nature's study flawed and misleading and demanded a prompt retraction, pointing out that two articles used in the study came from a Britannica yearbook rather than the encyclopaedia itself, and another two from Compton's Encyclopedia. Nature declined to retract, arguing that it had used whatever relevant material was available on the Britannica website. For the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia, a piece in the Telegraph falsely claimed that Britannica had gone bankrupt in 1996. In a January 2016 press release, Britannica called Wikipedia "an impressive achievement" but argued that critics should avoid false comparisons between two projects with fundamentally different models and purposes.

  The managing director of Britannica UK, interviewed in February 2009, put the distinction plainly: "They're a chisel, we're a drill, and you need to have the correct tool for the job." Former editor-in-chief Robert McHenry had written in 2004 that Wikipedia could not hope to rival the Britannica in accuracy, citing the lack of institutional vetting or certification for Wikipedia's contributors. The key structural difference between the two is that Wikipedia is not-for-profit, does not carry advertising, and is not connected with traditional publishing distribution networks.

• 8. End of Print, Start of Digital

  ›

  In March 2012, Britannica's president Jorge Cauz announced that the company would not produce any new print editions, with the 2010 15th edition being the last. The company would focus entirely on the online edition and other educational tools. Since 2016, the Britannica has been published exclusively online at Britannica.com.

  The digital transition had been underway for decades before the final announcement. The first CD-ROM edition was issued in 1994. In 1999, the online version was briefly made available free of charge, then returned to a subscription model in 2001. By a point in the early 21st century, roughly 60% of Encyclopædia Britannica's revenue came from online operations, of which around 15% came from subscriptions to the consumer version of the websites. On the 7th of June 2018, Britannica released a Google Chrome extension called "Britannica Insights," which displays information from Britannica Online whenever a user performs a Google Search.

  In 2020, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. released the Britannica All New Children's Encyclopedia: What We Know and What We Don't, its first encyclopaedia aimed at younger readers since 1984. The work was widely praised for returning to the print format. The title echoes the epistemic humility that William Smellie expressed in the introduction to the very first edition, where he wrote that the editors were conscious of being able to point out a greater number of errors than any critic could, and asked those acquainted with the difficulties of such an ambitious undertaking to make proper allowances.