Stanton Champion

While visiting my parents for the holidays, I pulled down a random volume from their copy of the Encylpædia Britannica. My parents bought the complete set in 1992, and for the next several years The Britannica filled our minds with knowledge of far off places and historical people.

Today, the concept of a printed and bound encyclopedia seems so quaint with the likes of Google and Wikipedia filling our desire for learning. I can consult them everywhere from my computer at home to my iPhone while on the go. However, despite The Britannica’s size and lack of portability, it’s still generally relevant. It’s not like the life and times of King Henry VIII has changed all that much in the past 15 years. But what The Britannica gets wrong, it gets really wrong.

Science, medicine, and technology are areas where the printed Britannica fails completely — their carefully written articles are utterly worthless starting the moment the books are printed. To combat this decay, Britannica sends out an update book of sorts called The Science and Future Yearbook. Our copy arrived at the end of 1992, but even this update rapidly degenerated to garbage in a short period of time.

Consider their article on technology and telecommunications (pages 323-326 in the 1992 edition). The article begins by contemplating the future of fiber optics, and even predicts the difficulties of bringing fiber to the home. What the article calls the “fiber to the curb” problem we would call the “last mile” problem. However it all goes downhill from there when the article decides that fiber to the home really isn’t all that important anyway:

The question arose as to why fiber should be used for local service. After all, if a fiber — theoretically capable of transmitting hundreds of thousands of conversations — was to be used for only a singe conversation, or even two or three conversations, it might not be worth the effort to install it.

The article spends more time worrying about who will pay the utility bills for powering the equipment to convert fiber to copper on a neighborhood level, and then concludes that the only value of running fiber to homes is for television access. Even this, it concludes, may not offer an improvement over traditional coax cable. At no point does the word “Internet” appear.

Of course, the odd thing is that a true futurist would have seen some aspect of the rise of the Internet in 1992. The World Wide Web had been invented three years earlier in 1989 while dial-up services like Prodigy had been around since the mid 1980s. To completely miss the benefit of fiber optics was inexcusable for 1992, and without a doubt this failure demonstrates the fundamental problem with any kind of encyclopedia: Someone, somewhere, knows better than you.

This single truth shows the true value of Wikipedia, despite how many (including Britannica’s editors) claim otherwise. Self proclaimed experts just aren’t good enough, and there are very few fields, especially in science and technology, where a single expert can capture the broadest understanding of both current and future research. Quite honestly, The Britannica screwed up in 1992. Had Wikipedia existed, this article would have been shaped differently.

Let me conclude with another excerpt from later in the article where The Britannica sums up the predictions about cell phone networks:

The next generation of mobile systems was named the personal-communications network. In the PCN, the cells would likely be smaller, the sets smaller and less expensive, and the requirements for handoffs greater because of that diminished cell size. The exact role such a network would play had not yet to be determined. Skeptics doubted that it would have any significant effect on the world of telecommunications. Proponents suggested that sometime after the turn of the century a person would be assigned a telephone number at birth and that the number would remain with the assignee for life — wherever he or she might live.

It’s not a bad prediction in some ways, but like before it completely misses the rise of the mobile Internet or mobile digital media. The rest of the article is no better.