One of education's better ironies is that the broad, stately river of classified knowledge named Encyclopaedia Britannica began 190 years ago in a clear, sparkling rill of Scotch whisky. The tale of the encyclopedia's turbulent course from the Edinburgh workshop of hard-drinking Editor William Smellie to its present serene residence at the University of Chicago is told in The Great EB (University of Chicago Press; 339 pp.; $4.95) by Herman Kogan, drama critic and books editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.
In 1768 Europe's Enlightenment was in full vigor; Denis Diderot's French Encyclopedic had just come out, and Britain was ripe for an up-to-date compendium of all knowledge. The Britannica's founders were Colin Macfarquhar, a small-business man of Edinburgh, and Andrew Bell, an engraver of dog collars, who stood 4½ ft. tall, and had a nose so embarrassingly big that he used to mock his mockers with an even larger one of papier-mache. Smellie, their 28-year-old choice for editor, spieled long Latin poems when drunk, and was celebrated as "a veteran in wit, genius and bawdry."
By December 1768 the first two sections of the encyclopedia were ready, as pamphlets (cost: sixpence each on plain paper, eightpence for a fancy edition); with the income from them and backing obtained ahead of time from subscribers, succeeding sections and finally the first bound volume were published.
Whiskyfied Scholars. Two years later Smellie had written, or pasted together from such sources as Hume, Locke, Voltaire and Francis Bacon, the remaining two volumes. The 2,659-page set contained a long description of Noah's ark and a terse write-off of "Woman": "The female of man. See HOMO." It advised that tobacco could desiccate the brain to "a little black lump consisting of mere membranes." It was salted with 160 excellent engravings by Bell, including a handsome map of North America.
The Britannica sold more than 3,000 sets at £12 apiece, enough for Bell and Macfarquhar to plan a second edition. By 1777, when work started, Smellie had gone off (later to become a boozing buddy of Robert Burns), and the publishers replaced him with James Tytler, a scholar just as whiskyfied and twice as eccentric, being given to balloon ascensions. Editor Tytler stayed on the ground long enough to get out a ten-volume, 8,595-page encyclopedia by 1784.
Rather than retail quaint isolated facts, the encyclopedia's first edition had pioneered with complete and orderly treatises, e.g., an explicitly illustrated article on midwifery. The second introduced another innovation, biographies of famous living persons. But there were gaps, notably on the subject of the new United States of America. Although the Salem witch trials were discussed, the American Revolution was not; Boston was mentioned, but there were no articles on New York or Philadelphia. An enterprising American publishing pirate named Thomas Dobson corrected these slights when the third edition began to come out in 1787. Rewriting sections offensive to the U.S., and omitting the word "Britannica" as well as the dedication to George III, he hijacked and printed Encyclopaedia articles as fast as Bell and Macfarquhar could put them out. Plagiarism plagued the Britannica until passage by Congress of the international copyright law in 1891.