This inference is supported by Smellies biographer, Robert Kerr, who claimed that Smellie devised the plan and wrote or compiled all the chief articles and recorded how he used to say jocularly that he had made a dictionary of arts and sciences with a pair of scissors.The Encyclopdia Britannica was first published in 1768, when it began to appear in Edinburgh, Scotland.Encyclopdia Britannica Early editions of the Encyclopdia Britannica.
Since its founding, the Encyclopdia Britannica has relied upon both outside experts and its own editors with various subject-area proficiencies to write its entries. Those entries are then fact-checked, edited, and copyedited by Britannica editors, a process intended to ensure that the articles meet Britannicas long-held standards for readability and accuracy. ![]() The following account sketches the development of the Encyclopdia Britannica from its Scottish beginnings to its established position as a major English-language work of reference with editorial offices in Chicago and thousands of contributors worldwide. On December 10, 1768, the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Evening Courant carried an advertisement announcing that This day is published the editions first part; it further pledged that the encyclopdia would provide Accurate Definitions and Explanations, of all the Terms as they occur in the Order of the Alphabet. The work was issued in parts from December 1768 to 1771 with double-columned pages. ![]() The title page begins as follows: Encyclopdia Britannica; OR, A DICTIONARY OF ARTS and SCIENCES, COMPILED UPON A NEW PLAN. The work could not compete in bulk with the 68 volumes of Johann Heinrich Zedlers Universal Lexicon or with the French Encyclopdie, whose 17 volumes of text had recently been completed. But it did challenge comparison with all previous dictionaries of arts and sciences, large or small, because of its new plan. Encyclopdia Britannica First edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica. Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Further, in the latter case, the reader wishing merely to learn the meaning of a technical term had to search through a long article before he could find the information he wanted. Encyclopedia Britannica Books For Sale Series As ShortThe new plan of the Encyclopdia Britannica consisted of including treatises on the arts (i.e., practical arts) and sciences in the same alphabetical series as short articles on technical terms and other subjects, with plentiful cross references from the one type of entry to the other. It was thus intended to satisfy two kinds of readers simultaneously: those wishing to study a subject seriously, who would work their way through the treatises; and those in search of quick reference material, who could instantly turn to what they wanted in its alphabetical order. Some of them, such as Anatomy at 165 pages, covered their subjects at much greater length than, as well as in different ways from, their counterparts in the Encyclopdie, though the shortest, Alligation and Watch and Clock Work, were only 2 pages long. A few of the articles without crossheads, such as Money at 15 pages and Mahometans at 17 pages, exceeded in length some of the treatises. Smoke, at 7 pages, instructed the mason on chimney making so that smoky rooms might be avoided. The vast majority of the other articles, however, were only a few lines long, some being hardly more than definitions. There were entries on cities, countries, and rivers and other geographical subjects, but there were no biographies. Watch and Clock Work figures from the first edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica, 176871. This (quoted from a letter to Smellie from Bell) implies that the new plan was Smellies idea.
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