History of the Encyclopædia Britannica the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars, despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the "Propædia's" outline of all knowledge. In 1985, the "Britannica" responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the "Britannica" has fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the current 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million
The Runaway Skyscraper The Runaway Skyscraper "The Runaway Skyscraper" is a science fiction short story by American writer Murray Leinster, first appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of "Argosy" magazine. Although Leinster had been appearing regularly in "The Smart Set" and pulp magazines such as "Argosy" and "Short Stories" for three years, "The Runaway Skyscraper" was his first published science fiction story (or more accurately, scientific romance, since Hugo Gernsback had yet to coin the phrase "science fiction"). Gernsback would reprint the story in the third issue of his science fiction pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" in June 1926. "The Runaway Skyscraper" concerns