Military men are familiar with the lives and deeds of great soldiers; lovers of art and literature know something of the careers of their favorites; but as a rule the engineer knows little or nothing about the lives of the great ornaments of his profession, the splendid heroes of peace who have done much more than the soldier and the artist to create the world of to-day. The reason for this is that engineering biographies are very scarce, and in this connection the new Britannica fills a positive gap in the engineer’s library. There are considerably more than 100 biographies of great engineers, living and dead, written in the most interesting fashion by authoritative contributors. Among these articles are Watt, James (Vol. 28, p. 414) by Professor Ewing; Arkwright, Sir Richard (Vol. 2, p. 556); Stephenson, George (Vol. 25, p. 888); Bessemer, Sir Henry (Vol. 3, p. 823); Whitworth, Sir Joseph (Vol. 28, p. 616); Rennie, John (Vol. 23, p. 101); Lesseps, Ferdinand de (Vol. 16, p. 494) by Henri G. S. A. de Blowitz; Eads, James B. (Vol. 8, p. 789); Edison, Thomas A. (Vol. 8, p. 946); Ericsson, John (Vol. 9, p. 740); Maxim, Sir Hiram (Vol. 17, p. 918); Roebling, John A. (Vol. 23, p. 450); Siemens, Sir William (Vol. 25, p. 47) by Professor Ewing; Telford, Thomas (Vol. 26, p. 573); McAdam, John L. (Vol. 17, p. 190), and Trevithick, Richard (Vol. 27, p. 256).

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL ARTICLES IN THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA OF SPECIAL INTEREST TO ENGINEERS

CHAPTER XXI
FOR PRINTERS, BINDERS AND PAPER-MAKERS AND ALL WHO LOVE BOOKS

From Manuscript to Book

Supply and Demand Interacting

“An author, even an immortal genius, is, from the economic point of view, a producer of raw material,” says the Britannica article Publishing, and from the educational point of view, his product, until it has undergone the industrial and commercial processes of reduplication and distribution, is as undeveloped as the seed lying hidden in the winter soil. The history of civilization might, indeed, be divided into four stages: the period before writing; the period before printing, when libraries of manuscripts were almost exclusively the property of kings and priests; the period of costly, hand-printed books; and the period of the power-press, which began less than a hundred years ago. Of these four periods, the first is almost unimaginable. You are sometimes brought into contact with absolutely illiterate people. But they live in shadow, not in total darkness; they get the diffused light of our age of culture. The second period, the era of books in manuscript we can, however, to some extent reconstruct; and by one fantastic supposition we can even bring it into the focus of our 20th century. Let it be assumed that for some reason the printing of the new Britannica had been enjoined by the law courts, but that the original typoscript was available for consultation—say in a public library at New York or Chicago. Instead of your 29 volumes, weighing only 80 lbs. and occupying only about two cubic feet of space, the walls of a large room would be lined with partitioned shelves on which the 300,000 typed sheets and the 7,000 illustrations, on cardboard, would be ranged. What a mob of students there would be, waiting their turns to read the 40,000 articles, what a mass of notebooks would be filled each day! The impossibility of accomplishing, without the use of printing, all that the Britannica does, will present itself very forcibly to your mind, in another aspect, if you try to imagine 1,500 separate audiences, assembled each day to listen to lectures by the 1,500 contributors to the book. Any attempt to imagine the Britannica doing its work in any way but the way in which it does makes you realize, too, that if it were not for modern methods of spreading knowledge, there would be no such system of assembling and co-ordinating knowledge as finds its fullest development in the Britannica. It is not only for commercial reasons that the demand must be sufficient to justify the supply; the 1,500 specialists who laid aside their usual work in order to write these articles would never have combined their efforts if this vast public of all educated English speaking people were not to have been enabled to avail themselves of the result.

The industrial arts which make it possible to produce books swiftly and to sell them at low prices are obviously subjects of interest not only to those who do the producing and selling, but to all who profit by the use of books. And, as the articles mentioned in this chapter show, these arts are in themselves among the most ingenious and curious of all processes; so that in a double sense they merit the attention of everyone to whom the chapters on Literature in this Guide would appeal. As the warp of cloth carries the weft, so the raw material of printers’ paper and printers’ ink carries the “raw material” of the writer’s thoughts.

The article on Paper (Vol. 20, p. 725) is equivalent to 35 pages of this Guide and is illustrated with 15 diagrams. The article is divided into three parts: History, by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, director of the British Museum; Manufacture, by J. W. Wyatt, author of The Art of Making Paper; and India Paper, by W. E. Garrett Fisher.

History of Paper