The great EB

This spring marks the 100th anniversary of the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, generally considered the greatest manifestation of the "Great EB." In March 1911, a full-page ad in the New York Times heralded the 11th edition as "the sum of human knowledge—all that mankind has thought, done or achieved, all of the past experience of humanity that has survived the trial of time and the ordeal of service and is preserved as the useful knowledge of today" and declared that in its 29 volumes "all is included that is relevant and everything explained that is explainable."

Such claims on the part of any reference work, whether wiki-based or peer-reviewed, sound extravagant today. We are humbler now, less sanguine about our powers of comprehension, more sensitive to cultural bias. Yet there remains something awe-inspiring about the Great EB and the grand synthesis it represents. If there is folly in the attempt, perhaps it is a holy folly.

The first edition, published in three volumes in 1768, was Edinburgh's answer to the French Encyclopédie. The three Scots who conceived the plan—diminutive Andrew Bell, prudent Colin Macfarquhar and whisky-loving William Smellie (memorialized by Robert Burns for his "uncomb'd grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch'd / A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch'd"), and the "Society of Gentlemen" which supported their venture, were after something more Scottish in spirit than the jaded rationalism of the French encyclopédistes. They hoped to distill all the arts and sciences to their essentials, retaining everything that is useful and pleasing in the world of learning and compassing the practical as well as the high arts, from the mechanics of Noah's ark to the physiology of childbirth illustrated in meticulous (to some readers, obscene) detail.