Britannica's first edition was issued in 100 parts from 1768 to 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the brainchild of three Scotsmen. Co. In the 1940s it was bought by William Benton, retired co-founder of the advertising firm Benton and Bowles. In 1995 the company, which reportedly had been losing money for several years, was sold to an investment group led by Swiss businessman Jacob Safra for undisclosed terms by the William Benton Foundation, which operated at the University of Chicago. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, afraid of becoming just a dusty relic of the precomputer age, announced Tuesday that it was making its 32-volume set available free on the Internet. The move may have been inevitable in an era when students doing homework are more likely to get their information from a computer than from a book.
Free encyclopedias are only part of the lure of the new Web site.
It will also offer current information from newspapers, news agencies and 70 magazines as well as E-mail and financial market reports.