All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

R

RULE BRITANNICA?

In the early 1960s, an American physicist named Harvey Einbinder took a break from his job advising defence contractors on missile projects to work on a series of television programmes designed to explain great breakthroughs in science to a general audience. Consulting Encyclopaedia Britannica for his show on Galileo, he read that he had once disproven an ancient theory of gravity by dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Not true, alas. Even when a biography of Galileo highlighted the error in 1935, it remained in Britannica for another thirty years.

And so Harvey Einbinder began to wonder: did the encyclopaedia contain many similar mistakes? Was it a catalogue of errors? He was alarmed by what he found. He brought his own knowledge to the entries on Heat, Vaporization and the Compton Effect, and discovered several flaws. Then he began a wider study, on the same principles as S.S. Van Dine’s assault Misinforming a Nation from 1919, and his 390-page The Myth of the Britannica (1964) was his influential bestselling result. There were many erroneous comments passing as indisputable fact. Equally problematic was his finding that many articles had not been amended for more than fifty years; some had not been changed since 1875. Opinions were outdated, and bigotry was rife. On the whole, societal attitudes towards many topics – the role of women, racial issues, sexual politics, censorship – had changed and liberalised, but on a great many issues Britannica still had its feet planted in Victorian soil. When new historical evidence came to light it was often ignored, Einbinder found, and there was a particular reluctance to amend those articles written by famous contributors.

Dr Einbinder chose for his survey the 1958 and 1963 printings, both updates of the fourteenth edition from 1929. If you had been one of the many purchasers of the 1963 printing in the United States (about 150,000 sets were sold annually in the early 1960s) you may have been convinced by the claims in its advertisements that it was ‘the most complete collection of facts and knowledge excitingly explained by leading authorities – learn about gardening, missiles, philosophy, science, just about any subject you’ve ever heard of and thousands you haven’t’. And you might have reason to feel both unsatisfied and misled if this turned out not to be the case.

Einbinder attacked his target with devilish pursuit. His study included a list of 666 articles, each occupying at least half a page in his two mid-century printings, that were unchanged from 1911 and in some cases 1889. Many were biographies – Hadrian, Henry Fielding, Goethe, Jonathan Swift, many King Henrys and Richards – and others considered major historical events without including any of the century’s new discoveries or interpretations: the Gunpowder Plot, the French Revolutionary Wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Battle of Waterloo. A twelve-page essay on the Renaissance by J.A. Symonds, grandiloquently composed, had lain virtually untouched for more than fifty years, even though modern scholarship had superseded many of its views.

Contemporary magazine advertisements from the 1960s considered the latest Britannica to be ‘the finest edition in 200 years’, with 36 million words written by 10,300 ‘of the world’s great authorities’. It claimed that 17,900 articles had been revised, although in some cases this just amounted to spelling corrections. Dr Einbinder found that some of these revisions inserted new errors, noting mistakes in a list of Beethoven’s quartets and the biographical details of Abraham.

The Myth of the Britannica had a lot of dastardly fun with animals, or what it called ‘fanciful zoology’. Historically, encyclopaedias have always had the biggest fun with animals, not least the mythical beasts to be found within Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia. But those are ancient classics; one might expect more from the middle of the twentieth century. But here is the camel, in which water is stored ‘chiefly in the hump’ (it isn’t – the hump is fatty tissue used as a source of food). The ‘voluntary suicide’ and ‘blind impulse’ that apparently causes hordes of lemmings to leap to their watery deaths is also a myth, still perpetuated: it is not blind impulse nor a death wish, it is rather overpopulation and a search for food. Similarly, wolves do not generally hunt in large packs, as Britannica attests, and birds happily and annually migrate, despite Britannica remaining doubtful of this activity.

Social issues that may directly impact the reader were also in need of an overhaul. The article on birth control, for example, reflected both a very conservative and chauvinistic attitude, and clearly a callous and obdurate one. In 1963, Britannica was still reporting that ‘the poorest and least successful families, commonly handicapped in health and education as well as economic resources, produce and rear more than their proportion of children.’ In a contrastingly absurd vein, ‘It is the successful members of the more industrialised and supposedly advanced populations who seem headed for extinction for lack of fruitful breeding.’

With regard to racial issues, discrimination was ever-present, often within subtle asides. In a not-so-subtle example, Dr Einbinder quotes the article on Lynching from his 1958 set, an entry unchanged since it first appeared in 1910.

After reconstruction, with the increase of Negro crimes, came an increase of lynchings, because of prejudice, the fact that for some time after reconstruction the governments were weak (especially in the districts where Negroes outnumbered whites), the fact that Negroes nearly always shielded criminals of their own race against whites, and because of the occurrence of the crime of rape by Negro men upon white women.

‘This passage does not rest on facts,’ Einbinder notes, ‘but is merely an attempt to justify Southern mob violence.’ The entry was written by a dean of Vanderbilt University, then a largely white Southern school. ‘Although the article was revised within the last decade to include recent statistics on lynching, the only change made in this biased passage was to alter its punctuation and capitalise the word “Negro”.’*

Harvey Einbinder’s revelations of 1964 strengthened the demand for an entirely new edition, and he claimed this was his intention. He conducted his investigation more in love than in anger: he had always relied upon Britannica as a trustworthy source, he said, and he emphasised it was still a valuable enterprise with much rigorous text; he just wanted all of it to be better, more current. He almost apologises for his scrutiny, suggesting it would be impossible for the editors of such an unwieldy institution to keep abreast of all the breakthroughs in the scientific journals or developments in natural history.

It would be another decade before the groundbreaking fifteenth edition was published with much fanfare in 1974, and we shall see how it endeavoured to sweep away almost everything that had gone before. But in the meantime, there was an awful lot of old stock that needed to be sold.