Tony Bowe Asks Bill Bowe about His Encyclopaedia Britannica Years
In this installment of Tony Bowe’s conversations with his cousin, Bill Bowe traces Encyclopaedia Britannica from its founding in Scotland in 1768 to Chicago, where Sears Roebuck brought it in the late 1920s — and recalls how the University of Chicago’s trustees declined the company when Sears offered it to them during the Second World War, opening the door for William Benton to buy it.
Bill arrived at Britannica as General Counsel in 1986, when the company was owned by the William Benton Foundation, whose sole beneficiary was the University of Chicago and of which Bill was Secretary. The Foundation sold Britannica in 1996 to the Swiss investor Jaqui Safra.
The conversation then turns to the Digital Age and the arrival of the personal computer: Britannica’s breakthrough computer interface of 1989, the central part Charles Van Doren played in the company’s first online venture in the early 1980s, the 1989 patent filing on the Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia multimedia search system and the litigation that followed — and, at the end of it all, the last print set in 2012.
