I
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
Three new articles in the third edition of Britannica (1788–97) defined the far-seeing, near-seeing age in which it was published. Micrometer occupied nineteen pages, Microscope thirty-two and Telescope fifty.*
The entry for Microscope began simply enough: lenses, mirrors, Leeuwenhoek. We read of different makes – Withering’s ‘Portable Botanic’, Ellis’s ‘Aquatic’ – and what to look for: ‘The circulation of the blood may be easiest seen in the tails or fins of fishes, in the fine membranes between a frog’s toes, or best of all in the tail of a water-newt.’ Copper plates showed more than thirty types of lens and calibration tool: ‘Place your object either in the needle G, in the pliers H, on the object plate M, or in the hollow brass box O, as may be most convenient.’
The pace of science and technology was accompanied by a thirst to absorb and interpret it. The editors of the Britannica would never want for new findings, for ‘research’ was now the buzzword in specialist publications of the age. The cultural historian Peter Burke has identified several: Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains by the Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw (1768); Asiatic Researches, a journal from 1788; Recherches sur les principaux paits physiques (1794) and Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (1802) by the French naturalist and evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck; Researches, Chemical and Philosophical by the Cornish chemist Humphry Davy (1799); Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles by the French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier (1812).*
The ‘second age of discovery’ also announced big geographical finds – the West’s exploration of the South Seas, the interiors of Africa, North and South America, Siberia and Australia – filling in the ‘dark’ and blank spaces on the map and rendering them prime for plunder. As each new expedition enthralled members of the Royal Geographical Society in London and the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, so the explorers entrenched their reputations: David Livingstone, Alexander von Humboldt, Mungo Park, James Cook, Lewis and Clark. The hunger for discovery was accompanied by the desire to contain, own and exploit.
The encyclopaedia was part of this control. History and maps enshrined ownership; the mighty book was a reader’s mighty estate. Inevitably and immediately, an encyclopaedia became a part of the society it aimed to reflect. Britannica was itself a land to be exploited: once blank, the pages were now filled with new inky native wisdom (one early-twentieth century advertisement promoted pictorial ‘scenes in foreign lands, costumes of strange peoples’). For as long as Britain claimed an empire, the multi-volume encyclopaedia was colonialism in print. (Or, in an overworked term, knowledge was power.)
Scholarly archaeology, palaeontology and anthropology were also boosted in this sudden golden age, a period in which the notion of deep time itself was scrutinised. In 1750, the earth was widely considered to be only 6000 years old; geologists added millions to it. When astronomers joined the party, and the number turned to billions, the challenge for the encyclopaedist was to explain not only earthbound philosophy but our place in the universe. (And we think we live in an Information Age.)
To accommodate all these new findings and acquisitions at the end of the eighteenth century, the study of storage and the concept of the archive became academic disciplines of their own, as did the art of knowledge-gathering and the categorisation of new finds. The encyclopaedia again mirrored these developments in both concept and design, having struggled with similar dilemmas for decades.
In one sense the encyclopaedia had it easy: more information just meant more volumes. But where would you stop? When would a project designed to limit and encapsulate the growth of books itself know when to limit its expansion? Could something be too comprehensive? Would the Ökonmische Encyklopädie, printed in Germany from 1773 to 1858, eventually stretching to 242 volumes, be considered too ambitious for its own good?
The fact that it is not better known may provide the answer. The work was generally known as ‘the Krünitz’, after its founder (and editor of the first seventy-two volumes) Johann Georg Krünitz (glorious legend suggests he died while working on the entry Corpse). His was a grand general work, and much admired in its first years. But size wasn’t everything, and it failed to find a large enough inexhaustible readership, its reputation rapidly eclipsed by a modest never-ending little effort called the Brockhaus, of which we shall learn more shortly.
* Between the first two sat the mysterious plant Micropus, a ‘bastard cudweed, a genus of the polygamia neceffaria order … the receptacle is palcaceous; there is no pappus; the calyx is calyculated; there is no radius of the corolla.’
* See Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, Volume II, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2012).