Mortimer J. Adler, a precocious student (and later critic) of philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University, had also been attracted to the University of Chicago in the 1930s. Hutchins had found appointments for him in philosophy and psychology and [...]

Benton had been recruited to the University of Chicago in 1937 by his fellow student in the Yale College Class of 1924, then Chicago’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins was one of the 20th century’s most prominent intellects and [...]

Paralleling this whole development of the computer, encyclopedists at Encyclopaedia Britannica had been thinking long and hard about the proper structure of a modern encyclopedia and how it might be conjoined with an appropriate human/machine interface adapted to the [...]

In the twentieth century, encyclopedists were not the only people to worry about how to facilitate access to an ever-growing sum of knowledge. The problem arising from the information explosion of modern times was also noticed by those who [...]

Who would have guessed that at the end of the 20th century it would be a company founded in Scotland in 1768 that would invent a key part of the mechanics that would let people intuitively navigate the electronic [...]

The three-volume First Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica paid homage to its classical roots in two conspicuous ways. One was a departure from the conventional spelling of encyclopedia. The use of the æ ligature preserved an ancient bequest of [...]

Although a print publisher throughout its long life, Encyclopaedia Britannica had been keeping abreast of computer developments closely. When the first CD-ROM (for Compact Disc-Read Only Memory) storage discs came out in 1985, Britannica had just put the finishing [...]