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
Encyclopædia Britannica First Edition conceived of the "Britannica" as a conservative reaction to the French "Encyclopédie" of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which was widely viewed as heretical. The "Encyclopédie" had begun as a French translation of the popular English encyclopedia, "Cyclopaedia" published by Ephraim Chambers in 1728. Although later editions of Chambers' "Cyclopaedia" were still popular, and despite the commercial failure of other English encyclopedias, Macfarquhar and Bell were inspired by the intellectual ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment and thought the time ripe for a new encyclopedia "compiled upon a new plan". Needing an editor, the two chose a 28-year-old scholar named William Smellie