Who Created the Encyclopedia?

Non-Medium members can read the full story here.

Quick Take on the Story:

• We read encyclopedias to study various topics, and this article explores who created them, why they were needed, and how they evolved across civilizations, with a main focus on Europe and other countries.
• The idea of an encyclopedia dates back thousands of years, with scholars from many different eras contributing to its development.
• Britannica restructured the encyclopedia and received contributions from some of the most notable figures of the 20th century.
• Digital encyclopedias have transformed the way of organising knowledge.

Today, with AI and search engines, finding information takes seconds. Questions regarding a process, a forgotten person, an organism, the physics or mathematics behind a machine can be answered with a few keystrokes. Yet behind this simplicity lies centuries of ambition. Long before the internet existed, scholars were searching for a way to organize scattered knowledge into a single collection.

That ambition gave rise to the Encyclopedia, which eventually gained a reputation for bringing all human knowledge together in a single place. It emerged over centuries through the…