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

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YESTERDAY

Throughout their editing work on Wikipedia, the wub and The Anome were aware of many principles – ground rules, foundational ethics, stylistic recommendations – that guided their contributions, and chief among them was the concept of neutrality. For the encyclopaedia to reflect knowledge rather than opinion, and to limit the time its writers and users spent in endless argument, Wikipedia strove for impartiality and objectivity. The Anome was thus discouraged from writing about ‘Thank You NHS’ as ‘heart-warming’, no matter how universally true this was considered to be.

All of Wikipedia’s hundreds of thousands of other active registered editors are expected to abide by two further policy cornerstones: verifiability and the notion of No Original Research. All material and quotation open to challenge must be attributed to a reliable, published source. The familiar ‘citation needed’ tag is a note from one editor to another that a linked source is absent and should be supplied, or in time the material will be removed. Wikipedia has several paragraphs devoted to what may or may not be regarded as a reliable source: published books, recognised journals, trusted newspapers and other media channels are generally acceptable, while social media and personal blogs are usually frowned upon.*

The concept of an encyclopaedia with No Original Research is something that many first-time editors and many first-time readers find hard to grasp. The rule insists that no facts, ideas or allegations may appear on Wikipedia’s main pages for which no reliable published sources exist. A source should exist for all material, even for statements that are unlikely to be challenged. So whenever The Anome or the wub created a new article or amended an old one, let’s say on Noah’s Ark or the ozone layer, they could only do so if they were based on writing or thinking that already existed. It was a distinct type of creativity, one rewarding affirmation more than pioneering or inceptive thought. It was the world as it was, rather than how it could be, which one might also assume might make it less of a venue for controversy or dispute.

But a problem remained. ‘I always advise people to check the sources,’ Peter Coombe (the wub) told me. It was not enough to have citations, because these too could be unreliable, or even fabricated. The fact checkers had to fact-check the fact checks. Which would naturally make the general reader wonder: how could one know what one knew?

On 15 October 1968, the guests sat down to velouté of Cornish crab, fillet of Dover sole in Cheshire sauce, quail in port wine aspic, a mint sorbet palate cleanser followed by noisette of Southdown lamb, and pears in Madeira. Encyclopaedia Britannica was 200 years old, and damned if there wasn’t going to be a party.

The 500 guests at the Guildhall in the City of London included Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the editor of The Times, the director of the British Museum, the Lord Mayor, the Lord High Commissioner, a great many masters and vice-chancellors of universities, representatives of forty press and broadcasting outlets, the directors of the Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum, controllers of BBC radio, deans of several cathedrals, high-ups at W.H. Smith, W. & G. Foyle and W. Heffer, poet Stephen Spender, novelist Anthony Powell, the chairman of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and two great-great-granddaughters and one great-great-grandson of Britannica’s first editor William Smellie.

The Queen sent a telegram with warmest congratulations and thanked the board of editors for her special anniversary edition (full morocco). Britannica’s chairman Senator William Benton gave a speech, as did its newly appointed editor-in-chief Sir William Haley. Everyone thanked everyone. There had been some rocky periods, everyone said, not least during wars and depressions, but the encyclopaedia pulled through and would always pull through. It was, as Dr Robert M. Hutchins, chairman of the board of editors, proclaimed, ‘the common expression, the common possession, and the common contribution of the English-speaking peoples. This institution, and this one alone, symbolises the joint effort of those peoples to engage on a world scale in the highest of all human activities, learning and teaching.’*

Everyone looked forward to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren celebrating Britannica’s 300th anniversary in 2068. The champagne was Charles Heidsieck 1959.

Six months earlier, an exhibition celebrating the same anniversary opened at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The items on display included many early editions of Britannica, and copies of its forerunners, including Historia naturalis (Pliny the Elder), Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville), Speculum historiale (Vincent de Beauvais), Francis Bacon’s classification of knowledge expounded in Instauratio magna, and Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia.

The show also displayed the typescript, with additions, of Leon Trotsky’s biography of Lenin for the thirteenth edition, written in 1925. Trotsky was paid $106, which he pocketed just before fleeing Moscow. ‘The article,’ an exhibition card explains, ‘is reasonably accurate and surprisingly dispassionate.’ Of particular interest elsewhere is a collection of letters from the archives, predominantly noteworthy for their narrow range of subject matter. Most are complaints from contributors about either the space allotted to them or the rate of pay. A few request a deadline extension to allow for the inclusion of an upcoming statute or conference. One reflects an editor’s desire for accuracy: having asked Nikola Tesla to confirm whether he was born on 9 or 10 July 1856, the inventor replied that he was born at midnight between the two.

No one in 1968 would have dared suggest that the exhibition would one day come to resemble a shrine. The meteorite in the sky wasn’t yet visible; Britannica’s entry on Economic Forecasting was too interested in existing markets to worry about the shrinking of computers or their inter-networking. And when the New York Times reviewed John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies in 1996, and saw in it a reassessment of the American Dream, surely no one at Britannica’s headquarters in Chicago who might have read the novel would have agreed with Clarence Wilmot’s assessment that all the information within an encyclopaedia ‘breaks your heart at the end, because it leaves you as alone and bewildered as you were not knowing anything’.

The very structure of the traditional encyclopaedia dooms itself. It can never know it all or show enough of what it knows. It can’t hope to keep up with important developments in the world, nor take back what it said about Hitler or slavery. And it can never answer the most searching questions about its own existence: are the people who read it from A–Z better able to understand the world than those who only read the preface? Does the present lowly cost of a fine set of Britannica or World Book or Brockhaus from 2005 – ten pounds or ten dollars or ten euros on eBay – mean that we no longer value things we held dear when the century was young? Is the information we receive today more or less reliable than the information we received in our childhood?

Knowledge is not general; it is specific, and only specifically useful at certain points and intervals. The hope of the ancients to capture everything between covers now seems as futile as counting the number of stars in the universe. Or, with hindsight, as futile as Britannica’s attempts in its twilight years to find a viable future: the 2011 Seiko ER8100 folding electronic ‘Britannica Concise’ with keyboard and grey-green screen, perhaps, or the 2012 Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD (with 82,000+ articles and Biography Bonus: Great Minds and Heroes & Villains).

Encyclopaedia Britannica is now just Britannica.com, and it’s not a bad place to hang out for a while. There is a lot of information one doesn’t need to pay for, and a neat home page displayed as a sort of historical newspaper, with stories on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War, a good array of quizzes and crosswords, and an ‘On This Day …’ column (featuring, on the day I last visited, an anniversary marking the date Dr Crippen murdered his wife). It is more democratic than its print version (in so far as it doesn’t distinguish between ownership in full morocco or half morocco), and when you get to the page for your annual premium subscription ($74.95 inclusive of what appears to be a permanent 30 per cent discount), you are reminded of the immense detail within and the 110 Nobel Prize winners and fifty Notable Sport Figures who contributed in the golden age. Importantly, the site emphasises its credentials regarding truth: ‘Facts matter more than ever, but they are becoming increasingly hard to find. Every Britannica article has been written by experts [and] vetted by fact-checkers.’ It didn’t actually say, ‘suck on that, Wikipedia,’ but it didn’t have to.

Besides, they were fighting different wars now. Compared to the 16.83 billion visits made to Wikipedia between March and May 2020, Britannica.com attracted 124.7 million. (Though tiny in comparison, the figure is far larger than the number of people who ever consulted its print edition.)

Towards the end of our alphabet, we confront one arresting paradox: we know more about our lack of knowledge today than at any previous time in history. Maybe that’s one of the things that keeps us going, the old hunting and gathering. A famous Map of Ignorance, constructed in the early 1980s by Ann Kerwin and Marlys Witte of the Arizona University Medical School, only heightened the value we place on learning. They applied it specifically to medicine, but it is fairly applicable to all fields of research.

Known Unknowns: All the things you know you don’t know

Unknown Unknowns: All the things you don’t know you

don’t know

Errors: All the things you think you know but don’t

Unknown Knowns: All the things you don’t know you know

Taboos: Dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge

Denials: All the things too painful to know, so you don’t

Dr Kerwin, a philosopher-in-residence at the medical school, was delighted to see her chart travel the world online, calling it ‘a cosmic swerve … a silly prompt for exploration and celebration of the fertile home territory of learning’. Her colleague Marlys Witte reasoned that unanswered questions are the raw material of knowledge, ‘and (current) knowledge is the raw material of (future) ignorance, i.e., answers and questions shift with time and the accumulation of answers.’

Or as the Danish polymath Piet Hein put it:

Knowing what

thou knowest not

is in a sense

omniscience.

The Germans have a nice name for the study of the cultures of ignorance: Nichtwissenskulturen. One reason I like it is because it forms a triumvirate with two other words Informationwissenschaft (the organisation of knowledge) and Wissensgeschichte (the study of the history of knowledge).

This book has not been a history of knowledge, but it has tracked how one aspect of our knowledge has been communicated, circumscribed and passed on. When I drove down to the outskirts of Cambridge to retrieve a pristine set of encyclopaedias at the beginning of this book, I was using elements of my knowledge of finance, markets, communication, cartography, risk and safety, travel and technology. Driving back with the set, I was adding knowledge to ignorance, and knowledge to knowledge, which, as Denis Diderot knew in 1751, is all one can ever hope learning to be:

The goal of an Encyclopédie is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the work of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race.

* In February 2021, I found the warning note amended to a page on George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier particularly arresting, although it was typical: ‘This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed.’

* All details from the commemorative booklet published by Britannica Encyclopaedia International, Ltd., and sent to all attendees a few weeks after the event.