Education: From A to Zygote

It was a formidable gift that His Britannic Majesty’s ambassador brought to His Imperial Majesty, the Shah of Persia, that day in 1804. The ambassador had carried it over thousands of miles, from England, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the Persian Gulf to Teheran. But the gift was apparently worth the bother. The Shah was so delighted with it that he gave himself a new title in its honor: “Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Actually, by the time the Shah got his set, there were already hundreds of lords & masters of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (including George III and George Washington*), and since then, hundreds of thousands more have been added. Sets have found their way into cottages and castles, to Little America with Admiral Byrd, to Labrador with Sir Wilfred Grenfell, to homes, schools and libraries all over the world. In its 182 years, “EB” has become almost a synonym for knowledge, a roving storehouse of facts that anyone can go to, and that can speak with authority on almost any subject, from A to Zygote, that mankind has ever thought of.

Asses’ Milk. Last week, at its headquarters in Chicago’s Civic Opera Building, EB was getting ready to celebrate a milestone in its history: its 50th year under U.S. ownership. Meanwhile, the 1951 printing (prices: $239.95 & up) had just gone to press, with 38 million words, 17,600 illustrations, and 41,200 articles from 4,060 contributors. But in spite of all this, EB’s editorial board could hardly pause for breath. “You may be just about completed with 1951,” says Editor Walter Yust of his job. “But then you’ve already started on 1952 and have to begin to think about ’53 and ’54. There’s no relief of finishing . . .”

For EB itself, there has never been any relief of finishing. Its first edition appeared in 1768 in Edinburgh: three volumes put out by a “society of gentlemen.” To these gentlemen, California was “a large country of the West Indies,” a toothache could be cured by “laxatives of manna and cassia dissolved in asses’ milk,” and tobacco could dry up the brain to “a little black lump.” Later, as knowledge grew and changed, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had to grow and change with it.

By the fifth edition, the editors could talk about the Rosetta stone; by the eighth, about anesthesia; by the tenth, about appendicitis. As it added subjects, EB also added writers, and such notables as Sir Walter Scott on chivalry and Lord Macaulay on Samuel Johnson were among its authors. Gradually, U.S. scholars also began to contribute (the first, in the 18505: onetime President Edward Everett of Harvard). As U.S. sales increased, Americans began to take a hand in the editing too. Finally, in 1901, two high-powered Americans, Horace E. Hooper and Walter M. Jackson, bought out EB entirely.

No Mail Order. Today, EB is one of the most prosperous properties ($2,000,000 net in royalty revenues since 1943) of the University of Chicago. It became such seven years ago, when ex-Adman William Benton, now Democratic Senator from Connecticut, maneuvered its transfer from Sears, Roebuck & Co. (“Do you think it appropriate that a mail-order house should own the encyclopaedia?” he had asked). Benton still heads EB’s board of directors, while Chicago’s retiring Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins still presides over its board of editors. The top editing job belongs to wiry Editor Walter Yust.

A onetime literary editor on the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Walter Yust, 56, is used to deadlines, and his deadlines never stop coming. Every year, he puts out a whole new printing of the Britannica. He must decide which articles he thinks need rewriting, and what new subjects need be added.

Once he has decided, he submits his ideas to a permanent set of advisers on any of four university campuses—Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge and London. His advisers in turn recommend a top authority to write the piece Yust wants—at EB’s traditional 2¢ a word.

For each new printing, anywhere from 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 words have to be written. Some articles can become obsolete almost overnight (e.g., as late as 1946, EB said that uranium’s “chief use is in the ceramic industry”). Other articles merely need touching up. But every article is reexamined at least once a decade.

Over the years, EB has assembled a formidable array of authors. Lord Macaulay is still there with his article on Sam Johnson; so is Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, with his piece on Mary, Queen of Scots. Einstein has written on spacetime, and H. L. Mencken on Americanism; Shaw wrote on socialism, Trotsky on Lenin. But Editor Yust sometimes travels far from the world of doctorates and Nobel Prizes. For his expert on nightclubs, he picked the Stork Club’s Sherman Billingsley; for boxing, Gene Tunney; for rodeo, Cowboy “Foghorn” Clancy.

EB offers its readers more than a mere 24 volumes of knowledge. Any owner of a set is entitled to ask EB any 50 questions in ten years that he cares to, and readers send in queries at the rate of 35,000 a year—from “Who is the Unknown Soldier?” to “What color was Eve’s hair?” Some readers also like to try to catch EB in error, but relatively few have done so in Walter Yust’s 20 years. With some of the world’s top experts on call, and with the constant revision that leaves “no relief of finishing,” Editor Yust believes EB to be the most accurate storehouse of facts in the world. “I won’t believe we’re wrong,” says he, “until you really prove it to me. You get that way here.”

* Who owned a pirated third edition, published in Philadelphia.