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2334 BC – 2279 BC: ( short chronology) Sargon of Akkad 's conquest of Mesopotamia. c. 2300 BC: Indus Valley civilisation (Harappan) flourishing in modern-day eastern Pakistan - western India. c. 2300 BC: Metals start to be used in Northern Europe. c. 2300 BC: Unetice culture emerges in the modern day Czech Republic.
The Encyclopædia Britannica ( Latin for 'British Encyclopædia') is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The encyclopaedia is maintained by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors.
- As of 2008[update], 4,411 named contributors
- Several; initial engravings by Andrew Bell
- General
- British English
- Historical Context
- Earliest editions
- A. and C. Black editions
- First American editions
- The Fifteenth Edition
- The Global Edition
- Development of Electronic Versions
- External Links
Encyclopedias of various types had been published since antiquity, beginning with the collected works of Aristotle and the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, the latter having 2493 articles in 37 books. Encyclopedias were published in Europe and China throughout the Middle Ages, such as the Satyricon of Martianus Minneus Felix Capella (early 5th c...
First edition, 1771
The Britannica was the idea of Colin Macfarquhar, a bookseller and printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver, both of Edinburgh. They conceived of the Britannica as a conservative reaction to the French Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which was widely viewed as heretical. Ironically, the Encyclopédie had begun as a French translation of the popular English encyclopedia, Cyclopaedia published by Ephraim Chambers in 1728. Although later editions of Chambers' Cyclopaedia were st...
Second edition, 1783, Supplement 1784
After the success of the first edition, a more ambitious second edition was begun in 1776, with the addition of history and biography articles. Smellie declined to be editor, principally because he objected to the addition of biography. Macfarquhar took over the role himself, aided by pharmacist James Tytler, M.A., who was known as an able writer and willing to work for a very low wage. Macfarquhar and Bell rescued Tytler from the debtors' sanctuary at Holyrood Palace, and employed him for se...
Third edition, 1797
The third edition was published from 1788 to 1797 in 300 weekly numbers (1 shilling apiece); these numbers were collected and sold unbound in 30 parts (10 shilling, sixpence each), and finally in 1797 they were bound in 18 volumes with 14,579 pages and 542 plates, and given title pages dated 1797 for all volumes. Macfarquhar again edited this edition up to "Mysteries" but died in 1793 (aged 48) of "mental exhaustion"; his work was taken over by George Gleig, later Bishop Gleig of Brechin (con...
Seventh edition, 1842
The 7th edition was begun in 1827 and published from March 1830 to January 1842, although all volumes have title pages dated 1842. It was a new work, not a revision of earlier editions, although some articles from earlier editions and supplements are used. It was sold to subscribers in monthly "parts" of around 133 pages each, at 6 shilling per part, with 6 parts combined into 800 page volumes for 36 shillings. The promise was made in the beginning that there would be 20 volumes, making the t...
Eighth edition, 1860
The 8th edition was published from 1853 to 1860, with title pages for each volume dated the year that volume was printed. It contained 21 numbered volumes, with 17,957 pages and 402 plates. The index, published in 1861, was 239 pages, and was either bound alone as an unnumbered 22nd volume, or was bound together with volume I, the dissertations volume. Four of these dissertations were carried over from the 7th edition, and two were new to the 8th. The five included in volume 1 of the 8th (185...
Ninth edition, 1875–1889
The landmark ninth edition, often called "the Scholar's Edition", was published from January 1875 to 1889 in 25 volumes, with volume 25 the index volume. Unlike the first two Black editions, there were no preliminary dissertations, the alphabetical listing beginning in volume 1. Up to 1880, the editor, and author of the Foreword, was Thomas Spencer Baynes—the first English-born editor after a series of Scots—and W. Robertson Smith afterwards. An intellectual prodigy who mastered advanced scie...
Tenth edition (supplement to the 9th), 1902-03
Again under the sponsorship of The Times of London, and with Adam & Charles Black in the UK, the new owners quickly produced an 11-volume supplement to the 9th edition; being 9 volumes of text, 25–33, a map volume, 34, which was 1 inch taller than the other volumes, and a new index, vol 35, also an inch taller than 25–33, which covered the first 33 volumes (the maps volume 34 had its own index). The editors were Hugh Chisholm, Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Arthur T. Hadley and Franklin Henry...
Eleventh edition, 1910
The renowned eleventh edition of Encyclopædia Britannica was begun in 1903, and published in 1910–1911 in 28 volumes, with a one-volume Index. Edited by Hugh Chisholm in London and by Franklin Henry Hooper in New York, the 11th edition was the first to be published substantially at one time, instead of volume by volume. 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 mus...
Twelfth and thirteenth editions
The poor sales of the war years brought the Britannica to the brink of bankruptcy. 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. In 1922, a 3-volume supplement to the eleventh edition was released that summarized the developments just before, during and after World War I; these three volumes, taken together with the eleventh edition of 19...
First version
Despite the policy of continuous revision, the 14th edition of the Britannica gradually became outdated. 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). Goaded into action, the Britannicabegan to work on a new edition, the current 15th. The 15th edition was produced over ten years at a cost of $32 million and released in 1974 in...
Second version
In 1985, the Britannica responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the Britannicahas fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million words from 1954 to the present and far less than 40%...
Britannica Global Edition was printed in 2009. It contained 30 volumes and 18,251 pages, with 8,500 photographs, maps, flags, and illustrations in smaller "compact" volumes. It contained over 40,000 articles written by scholars from across the world, including Nobel Prize winners. Unlike the 15th edition, it did not contain Macro- and Micropedia se...
In the 1980s, Microsoft approached Britannica to collaborate on a CD-ROM encyclopedia, but the offer was declined. Senior managers at Britannica were confident in their control of the market and that their healthy profits would continue. At this time complete sets of the encyclopedia were priced between $1,500 and $2,200, and the product was consid...
New York Timesarticle describing the Britannica's financial woes in 1995Complete hypertext of the Fourth edition at the Online Books PageEncyclopaedia Britannica is the oldest English-language general encyclopedia. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published in 1768, when it began to appear in Edinburgh, and its first digital version debuted in 1981. In 1994 Britannica released the first Internet-based encyclopedia, and Britannica.com was launched in 1999. Britannica relies on outside experts and its own editors to write ...
Britannica acquired Merriam-Webster in 1964 and Compton's Encyclopedia as well in the early 1960s. Benton died in 1973, before the fifteenth edition was published in 1974. The newly titled Britannica 3 was composed of a ten-volume Micropædia, a 19-volume Macropædia and a one-volume guide to the encyclopædia's use, called Propædia.
Encyclopædia Britannica - Digital Reference, Encyclopedia, Knowledge: Technological changes, beginning in the 1980s with the development and spread of the personal computer and disc technology and quickening in the 1990s and 2000s through the Internet and widespread diffusion of broadband access, radically altered the publishing world generally and the encyclopaedia business in particular. In ...
Photo includes 18-volume third edition of 1797 plus two-volume supplement dated 1803. The Encyclopædia Britannica Third Edition (1797) is an 18-volume reference work, an edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It was developed during the encyclopedia's earliest period as a two-man operation initiated by Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, in ...
