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"Damnable Hubbub." Prestige of the Britannica grew with succeeding editions, and the editors easily enlisted the world's famous men as writers. Sir Walter Scott wrote on drama. Harvard President Edward Everett, the first American contributor, wrote a biography of Washington. Lord Rayleigh, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904, was commissioned to write on "Light." He missed his deadline, but the encyclopedia was being published volume by volume in alphabetical order, and his piece was rescheduled under "Optics"—and again as "Undulating Theory of Light." It finally got in under "Wave Theory of Light."
Most famous Britannica edition was the ninth, completed in 1889, with 25 volumes and 20,504 pages (v. the current Britannica's 24 volumes, 27,247 pages). Contributors included Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley, and Revolutionary Russian Prince Pëtr Alekseevich Kropotkin, who wrote his article on "Anarchism" while locked up in a French prison.
In 1897 Horace Hooper, a U.S. book salesman, appeared in Britain, began dealings that led to his buying the Britannica (in 1901). In 1898, he teamed with the Times of London in a hard-sell campaign to hawk the encyclopedia at cut rates with time payments and advertising. A howl arose over the raucous black-type hucksterism in the grey pages of the "Thunderer." Wrote one affronted M.P. to Hooper: "You have made a damnable hubbub, sir, and an assault upon my privacy with your American tactics." But in a few years, Hooper's whooping sold 100,000 sets of the Britannica, and earned the Times $540,000.
The Best There Is. A breach with the Times led the Britannica to sponsorship, for a short period, by Cambridge University. Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald took it to Chicago in 1920 when it was purchased by his firm, Sears, Roebuck & Co. In 1943 Sears turned over the Britannica to the University of Chicago, with William Benton, sometime adman (Benton & Bowles) and U.S. Senator, putting up $100,000 as working capital.
Buying cheap (2¢ a word for articles) and selling dear ($298 to $1,500 a set), the Britannica has since earned the university some $5,500,000. Its contributors include 43 Nobel Prizewinners. Editor-in-Chief Walter Yust and a staff of 150 keep a continuous watch on the timeliness of its 43,512 articles. Editor Yust, onetime Philadelphia literary critic, defends the Britannica against an array of complaints, including pro-British bias (although the encyclopedia has been U.S.-owned for half a century) and Americanization. A more serious objection sometimes heard: that the work is too scholarly for laymen, too elementary for scholars. But despite criticism, the encyclopedia's swarm of salesmen boast, with much justification: "When you buy the Britannica, you are getting the best there is"—all 38,258,426 words of it.