Encyclopdia Britannica Online history

The work was undertaken by James Tytler (1745–1804), a brilliant but penniless polymath described by the Scottish poet Robert Burns as “an obscure, tippling, but extraordinary body,” who was later outlawed for printing a seditious handbill and died at Salem, Mass.

An attempt to produce a German type of the Encyclopédie in 1778–1807 was, however, a failure.

The first volume of the complete edition was prefaced by a dedication to the king written by Bell before his death in 1809.

Reworking Renatus Gotthelf Löbel’s bankrupt encyclopaedia, he produced his first Konversations-Lexikon (1796–1811), thereby setting the pattern for at least half of all succeeding encyclopaedias throughout the western world.

On Bonar’s death in 1814, Constable bought his share in the third edition from his heirs for £4,500.

Realizing the inadequacy of simply reprinting the fourth edition, Constable at once began planning supplementary volumes, which started to appear at the end of 1815, the year that the fifth edition was completed.

Before the supplementary volumes were themselves completed in 1824, however, a sixth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica had been published.

The editor, James Millar (1762–1827), an Edinburgh physician and natural scientist, took pains to repair the deficiencies caused in the third edition by the untimely death of Macfarquhar.

Webster’s informative American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) was encyclopaedic in character, but he avoided the long entries for the more important subjects that were such a feature of Larousse.

Joseph Meyer’s Der grosse Conversations-Lexikon (1840–52) rectified this imbalance and was the first of a highly successful series that competed vigorously with Brockhaus for 100 years.

The first volume appeared just before Traill became president (December 1852) of the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians.

Beginning with the ninth edition in 1875, the range of topics were expanded by bringing in contributors from the literary field, social sciences and the scientific community.

Wei Song’s Yishi jishi (1888) had actually been compiled 65 years previously, but it paid far more attention to practical matters.

1889: Ninth edition of Britannica is completed and acclaimed as most scholarly to date.

More important was the famous Entsiklopedichesky slovar (“Encyclopaedic Dictionary”; 1895), which became known as “Granat” after the Granat Russian Bibliographical Institute that produced it.

Such marketing problems discouraged the Black family, which in 1897 agreed to turn over promotion of the Britannica to an American company led by Horace E. Hooper and Walter M. Jackson.

The date at which the Bronze Age began varied with regions; in Greece and China, for instance, it began, before 3000 BCE, whereas in Britain, it did not start until about 1900 BCE.

1901: Britannica is sold to American publishers Hooper and Jackson.

In the United States, the first edition of The New International Encyclopaedia was issued in 1902–04 and was subsequently supplemented by yearbooks.

The “Espasa,” the Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana (1905–33), like the Enciclopedia italiana, eschewed revision in favour of a series of sizable supplements.

A smaller encyclopaedia, the Salvat universal diccionario enciclopédico (first issued in 1907–13), was revised at frequent intervals.

A later edition (1910–48) of “Granat,” in 58 volumes, was not exported from the Soviet Union.

In 1915, Sears agreed to market a new and less expensive version of the eleventh edition for middle-class buyers.

In 1920, Sears bought Britannica outright, and after only three years of operation, Sears reported a loss of $1.8 million.

In the United States, the first edition of The New International Encyclopaedia was issued in 1902–04 and was subsequently supplemented by yearbooks. It has enjoyed growing success through its policy of following the continuous revision system, and yearbooks have supplemented it from 1923 onward.

There was also a series of editions of the much smaller Malaya sovetskaya entsiklopedya (“The Little Soviet Encyclopaedia”), first issued in 1928–31.

One of the most important of all encyclopaedias, the Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere, ed arti (1929–39), was famous for its lavish production, its superb illustrations, and its lengthy, scholarly, and well-documented articles.

After the death of Julius Rosenwald in 1932, the company replaced William Cox as president with Elkan H. 'Buck' Powell, a Sears secretary and treasurer.

The Encyclopédie française (begun 1935) was an outstanding collection of monographs by well-known scholars and specialists, arranged in classified form and available in loose-leaf binders, supplemented by a continuously revised index.

1938: Annually updated Britannica Book of the Year is introduced.

In 1941 a vice-president of the University of Chicago named William Benton suggested that Sears again try to interest the University in running the Britannica.

In 1943 Britannica branched into the world of film with the acquisition of ERPI, a division of Western Electric that owned the nation's largest collection of films for the classroom.

1950-90: New Products and Acquisitions

1952: 54-volume Great Books of the Western World series published.

Another major Spanish encyclopaedia, the Enciclopedia labor (first issued 1955–60), devoted one volume each to major subject areas, and an index volume provided the key to the total contents.

1957: Spanish-language Enciclopedia Borsa, first foreign edition, is introduced.

The final three volumes contain supplementary material, which includes not only updated information covering the years 1958–63 but also a chronological table of world history; a comprehensive list of Japanese cities, towns, and villages; and indexes of abbreviations and proper nouns.

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964.

Known first as Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc., the company became Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation in 1966 and eventually expanded into filmstrips, video, and laserdisc technology as well as conventional films and reference books for school markets.

1973: William Benton dies.

preparations for the radically new Fifteenth Edition that would appear in 1974.

Various industries elaborated upon the system until the first general standard was published in 1975.

In 1980, officials of the Greater Encyclopedia of China Publishing House and Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., announced an agreement under which the Micropædia of the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica would be translated into Chinese for distribution in China.

In 1981, under an agreement with Mead Data Central, the first digital version of the Encyclopædia Britannica was created for the LexisNexis service.

It was Britannica's first encyclopedia for children since 1984.

The 10-volume set for this project, The Concise Encyclopædia Britannica, was published serially in 1985–86.

The latter oversaw all of Britannica's foreign business, which by 1990 included offices in 130 countries and operating companies in 17 countries.

In 1993 Bezos married Mackenzie Tuttle, whom he had met at D.E. Shaw.

In 1994 he quit D.E. Shaw and moved to Seattle, Washington, to open a virtual bookstore.

It sold its first book in 1995.

In 1996, Britannica was sold to an investment group led by Jacob E. Safra, a Switzerland-based financier.

The first companies to create social networks based on Web technology were Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. It was launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize such sites: members could create profiles for themselves, maintain lists of friends, and contact one another through the site’s private messaging system.

In June 1998 it began selling CDs, and later that year it added videos.

In 1999 Bezos added auctions to the site and invested in other virtual stores.

Aside from Amazon, Bezos founded a spaceflight company, Blue Origin, in 2000.

She worked at the John G. Shedd Aquarium prior to joining the editorial staff at Britannica in 2001.

LinkedIn, business-oriented social networking Web site founded in 2002 and headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, product designer Allen Blue, marketing professional Konstantin Guericke, engineer Eric Ly, and engineer Jean-Luc Vaillant founded LinkedIn, and the Web site was launched in 2003.

She joined Encyclopaedia Britannica in 2004.

As more companies battled for Internet dollars, Bezos saw the need to diversify, and by 2005 Amazon offered a vast array of products, including consumer electronics, apparel, and hardware.

Amazon diversified even further in 2006 by introducing Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-computing service that eventually became the largest such service in the world.

In late 2007 Amazon released a new handheld reading device called the Kindle, a digital book reader with wireless Internet connectivity, enabling customers to purchase, download, read, and store a vast selection of books on demand.

Amazon announced in 2010 that sales of Kindle books had surpassed those of hardcover books.

That year LinkedIn had more than 15 million members, and by 2011 LinkedIn had more than 100 million members worldwide.

Bezos bought The Washington Post and affiliated publications for $250 million in 2013.

In 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for approximately $26 billion.

Before joining Encyclopædia Britannica in 2017, she worked at the Art Institute of Chicago and taught courses in art appreciation.

Bezos’s net worth was calculated in 2018 at $112 billion, making him the richest person in the world.

The couple announced in January 2019 that they were divorcing, and the following day the National Enquirer printed a story revealing that Bezos was having an affair with another woman.

In 2020 he had a net worth of more than $180 billion.