History of Encyclopædia Britannica and Britannica Online.
Taking a Great Legacy into the 21st Century!
Origins
The Encyclopædia Britannica was born in 18th-century Edinburgh amid the great intellectual ferment known as the Scottish Enlightenment. It was there and then that Adam Smith prepared The Wealth of Nations, Sir Walter Scott wrote novels, Robert Burns poetry, David Hume and Adam Ferguson philosophy, and James Boswell grew to manhood and attended the university.
According to one chronicler of the Britannica history, Edinburgh in the mid-1700s was "a city on the verge of a golden age, a centre of learning and a home of writers, thinkers, and philosophers, wags, wits and teachers."
The first edition of the Britannica was published one section at a time, in "fascicles", over a three-year period, beginning in 1768. The three-volume set was completed in 1771 and quickly sold out.
The Encyclopædia Britannica first arrived in the United States in the form of a pirated edition printed in Philadelphia in 1790 by Thomas Dobson. Owners of that set included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton.
Twentieth Century
The encyclopædia began to undergo continuous revision when the company's headquarters moved to Chicago in the mid-1930s, and starting in 1936 a new printing was published each year, incorporating the latest changes and updates. In 1938, the first edition of the Britannica Book of the Year appeared.The yearbook is still published today.
William Benton, a founder of the advertising agency Benton and Bowles and later a U.S. senator, became chairman of the Board and publisher. Under his leadership the company expanded by purchasing Compton's Encyclopædia, the dictionary publisher G. & C. Merriam (later Merriam-Webster, Inc.) and other properties.
Britannica also extended its publishing activities abroad during this period. Benton led the company until his death in 1973. The publishing landmarks of his era were Great Books of the Western World, a 54-volume collection published in 1952 (a second, revised edition, in 60 volumes, was issued in 1990); and the innovative fifteenth edition of the Britannica, in 30 volumes, in 1974. A major revision was published in 1985, bringing the size of the set to 32 volumes.
By the 1990s Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., had produced or was at work on encyclopædias and other educational materials in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Italy, France, Spain, Latin America, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere.
Britannica was an early leader in electronic publishing and new media. In 1981, under an agreement with Mead Data Central, the first digital version of the Encyclopædia Britannica was created for the Lexis-Nexis service. Britannica also created the first multimedia CD-ROM encyclopædia, Compton's MultiMedia Encyclopædia, in 1989.
In 1994 the company developed Britannica Online, the first encyclopædia for the Internet, which made the entire text of the Encyclopædia Britannica available worldwide. That year the first version of the Britannica on CD-ROM was also published.
