![]() "She would say, 'Oh, I have a headache.' And I would throw in, 'Oh, you know, the Bayer Aspirin Company patented heroin back in 1898.' And then she would be like, 'Well, that's a dollar!'" "And my wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. "I had all this knowledge, I kind of wanted to share it!" Jacobs said. He says the hardest part wasn't even reading all 44 million words it was trying to keep all those facts and figures to himself. Its useful, practical information also contained some guesses: a short article from 1768 spells California with two L's, and says it's a large country of the West Indies – "It is uncertain whether it be a peninsula or an island." The 1768 edition's entry for "Callifornia."įrom those humble and sometimes factually-challenged roots, grew a great tree of knowledge, considered by many to be the definitive resource of information over the years, all collected in one place.īut there were also challenging times for the company: the Great Depression of the 1930s, for example. So there they were, two guys with no formal training and one very drunk editor managed to write and publish the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in three volumes. "He was a very learned man," Pappas said, with (he added) a wonderful capacity for drinking. They also had an editor, William Smellie. ![]() Founded in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica was the brainchild of Colin Macfarquhar, a printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver.
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