You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  The chemicals appear in alphabetical order, though Merck’s Index wrestled with the problem of inconsistent nomenclature. It used the system adopted by the Chemical Society in England but also included many older, common names, with cross-references: “But, whichever the ‘odd names’ thus received may be,—the substance in question is invariably listed under a proper chemical name also, and is, as a rule, detailed and priced there!”7 There was also a strange mix of metric and imperial units, and a list of abbreviations in the back explained that “gm” refers to “gramme[s] (=15.42328—or, about 15½—grains),” and “cm” means “centimetre[s] (=0.3937—or, about 4/10—of an inch).”

  Turning the pages of the Index provides an education in the cutting edge of the chemical sciences a century and a quarter ago. Various acids occupy the first eight pages; pure caffeine could be had for $8 per ounce; $1.75 would buy fifteen grams of pure gold. Aspirin was not offered; the name was still a trademark owned by Bayer. But “acid, salicylic” was available for anywhere from 75¢ to $3.00 a pound, depending on process.

  While all of these things appear in chemical catalogs today, other offerings remind us that this was a different era, including essential spirits of prunes and “Blood, bullock’s, (Sanguis Tauri [Bovis]), dry, powdered.” Most surprising to modern eyes is the list of narcotics available to anyone who wanted them. What are now known as controlled substances were not controlled then. In the United States, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 started to require labeling information about ten “addictive” or “dangerous” substances, including alcohol and opium. The first edition of Merck’s Index includes cannabinon (a resin made from cannabis flowers); later editions include other forms of cannabis. Fully eighteen varieties of cocaine could be had for the asking, along with eleven forms of codeine, thirty-two forms of morphine, and one that mixed codeine and morphine together. Laudanum—opium dissolved in alcohol, a favorite treatment for pretty much any malady—cost $1.50 a pound. The International Opium Convention did not convene until 1912; before that, opium could be had legally without so much as a doctor’s prescription, and an advertisement in the back offered METCALF’S COCA WINE FROM FRESH COCA LEAVES. Even more nervous-making are all the poisons offered for sale. A pound of hemlock would set one back four bits. Curare could be had for 25¢ per 15 grams, arsenic trioxide (“arsenious acid”) for a dollar a pound, strychnine for two dollars per eighth-ounce vial, and pure potassium cyanide for four dollars a pound. For two dollars an ounce, one could get “Ouabain … an aqueous extract from whose root and bark forms the arrow-poison of the East-African Comalis,” which could be used as a “heart-poison.” (Pharmaceutical companies still sell many of these “addictive” and “dangerous” compounds, but the regulatory paperwork required is daunting.)

  The first Merck’s Index is in reality a 170-page advertisement, but it was useful in its way; it collected all the chemicals and medicines any physician or pharmacist might need. It impressed early reviewers with the range of medicines on offer, as well as the background information it compiled. “This work is essentially a price list,” wrote one review, “covering the whole range of drugs and compounds used in medicine, and it will be of value to the large body of physicians who have to dispense their own medicines, and to many others who like to know the cost of the drugs which they use or order. Incidentally it contains a great deal of useful knowledge about the drugs employed.”8 Over time its commercial purpose shifted: as the Index grew in subsequent editions, the organizing principle was not “chemicals offered for sale by Merck” but chemicals, period.

  The Merck Index spawned a related Merck’s Manual in 1899, properly Merck’s Manual of the Materia Medica: Together with a Summary of Therapeutic Indications and a Classification of Medicaments: A Ready-Reference Pocket Book for the Practicing Physician. It opened by justifying the need for another manual: “Memory is treacherous… . When the best remedy is wanted, … it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to recall the whole array of available remedies so as to pick out the best.” And so the Manual—part 1 covering “a descriptive survey, in one alphabetic series, of the entire Materia Medica,” part 2 “a summary of Therapeutic Indications for the employment of remedies, arranged according to the Pathologic Conditions to be combated,” and part 3 “a Classification of Medicaments in accordance with their Physiologic Actions”—was there to offer a comprehensive list of the medicines on offer.9 It remains in use today as the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, among the bestselling medical books in history.

  Merck & Co. has had its ups and downs. In 1917, the U.S. government seized all the American assets of the German-based Merck—a chemical company operated by the enemy during a time of war—and turned it into an independent American company. A century later, the wounds have still not healed: in March 2010, the German company Merck KGaA sued Facebook for allowing the American Merck & Co. to claim the name “Merck” on the social networking site. But today the American Merck is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world—with its merger with Shering-Plough in 2009, it became the second largest.

  The Index and the Manual are still thriving, though they are mostly used online today. A review of the fourteenth edition in 2007 began, “Over time, certain reference books achieve such an outstanding reputation that any review of a new edition is almost unnecessary. Such is true of The Merck Index.”10 The entries, called “monographs,” in the current Merck Index are more systematic than in the early editions, and include a CAS registry number, by which the Chemical Abstracts Service assigns a unique number to every known chemical substance; all the names, synonyms, and trade names that might appear in the chemical literature; a chemical formula and structural formula; the molecular weight of the substance; physical properties such as density and melting and boiling points; the therapeutic category; citations to the scientific literature; and so on. Especially important is advice on the potential hazards of each chemical listed. The companion, the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, is in its nineteenth edition, at an overwhelming thirty-five hundred pages, and now represents the collected knowledge of three hundred contributors. A Merck Manual of Medical Information, Home Edition, is aimed at lay folk, available both in print and online.

  A slim 116-page pamphlet issued by the Chemical Rubber Company, known in the trade as The Rubber Handbook, hardly sounds like a promising work of scholarship, especially since its intention did not go beyond selling rubber and related chemicals. But it mutated into The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, a work essential to everyone working in the laboratory sciences for the better part of the last century.

  A Handbook of Chemistry and Physics: A Ready-Reference Pocket Book of Chemical and Physical Data appeared in 1913. This was not even a list of products offered for sale, like Merck’s Index; it was instead primarily a means of keeping the name of the Chemical Rubber Company in front of practicing scientists, much in the same way that companies give out pens and calendars bearing their names and logos. It is a list of miscellaneous information that a lab scientist might need to keep at hand. The work was “carefully selected by W[illiam] R[eed] Veazey, Ph.D., Chemistry Department, Case School of Applied Science,” supported by “more than a thousand members of high standing in the Chemical and Physical profession.”11

  The contents are impressively heterogeneous. The Handbook opened with a table of “International Atomic Weights,” according to the latest cutting-edge standards of 1911: all eighty-one elements then known were listed with their chemical symbols and atomic weights to two decimal places. (Astatine, francium, hafnium, promethium, protactinium, rhenium, technetium, and all the transruanic elements were not discovered until after the first Handbook was published, and what is now known as nobium was then columbium.) Then, without transition, came a page of a dozen “Antidotes of Poisons”: “Hydrocyanic Acid.—Hydrogen peroxide internal, and artificial respiration, breathing ammonia or chlorine from chlorinated lime, ferrous sulphate followed by potassium carbonate, emetics, wa
rmth.”12 Then appeared, with just as little warning, “Vapor Tension of Water in Millimeters of Mercury –2° to +36°C.” Scattered throughout the guide were lists of fusible alloys, comparisons of wire gauges, density of water at temperatures from 0° to 36° in tenth-degree intervals, with figures given to six decimal places, and other miscellanea. More than two and a half pages were devoted to “One Hundred Completed Chemical Equations,” such as “3Hg(No3)2 + 6FeSO4 = 2Fe(NO3)3 + 2Fe2(SO4)3 + 3Hg.”

  The sheer range of material is striking, and the Handbook was frank about its randomness: one section was headed simply MISCELLANEOUS DATA AND FORMULAE. Some of it was clearly written for novices, some for experts. The section on FUNDAMENTAL CHEMICAL THEORIES, for instance, with entries such as “The Atomic Theory.—All elementary forms of matter are composed of very small unit quantities called atoms,” contained information obvious to anyone working in the field, but students still needed the reminder. Likewise the guide to the metric system—by 1913 the standard throughout Europe, but still novel to American scientists, so the Handbook included tables converting feet, gallons, and troy ounces to meters, liters, and grams. Professional chemists, on the other hand, benefited more from a section, one of the longest in the book, headed GRAVIMETRIC FACTORS AND THEIR LOGARITHMS.

  TITLE: Handbook of Chemistry and Physics: A Ready-Reference Pocket-Book of Chemical and Physical Data: Compiled from the Most Recent Authoritative Sources and Published by the Chemical Rubber Company, Cleveland, Ohio

  COMPILER: William R. Veazey (1883–1958)

  ORGANIZATION: Miscellaneous

  PUBLISHED: 1913

  PAGES: 116

  TOTAL WORDS: 40,000

  SIZE: 6¾″ × 4¼″ (17 × 11 cm)

  AREA: 23 ft2 (2.16 m2)

  PRICE: $2

  LATEST EDITION: 95th ed., 2014

  A list of PHYSICAL CONSTANTS OF INORGANIC COMPOUNDS—solubility, molecular weight, specific gravity, melting and boiling points for 651 compounds from acetic acid to zinc sulphide blende—was just the sort of information a chemist would want to have nearby. The Handbook also offered some unexpected information: it ventured into nutritional science, as with “Functions and Uses of Food in the Body” (“Protein.—Builds and repairs tissue”) and a table of the amount of protein, fat, carbohydrates, ash, water, and calories in a few dozen foods: “Candy stick … Herring, smoked … Lard … Parsnip.” Formulas for converting temperatures among the Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Réaumur scales were useful then. Likewise the table of BASICITY OF ACIDS WITH VARIOUS INDICATORS—the modern notion of pH had been developed as recently as 1909 and would not be common among scientists for another decade. Toward the end is a section on TEXT BOOKS, MANUALS AND REFERENCE BOOKS, providing standard citations such as Lodge’s Elementary Mechanics and Bottone’s Electrical Instrument Making.

  “We shall feel amply rewarded for our effort and expense,” wrote W. R. Veazey in 1913, “if this volume proves to be of use and convenience to the profession.”13 They have indeed been amply rewarded. The Nobel laureate Linus Pauling summed up the importance of the Handbook: “People who have interviewed me have commented on the extensive knowledge that I have about the properties of substances. I attribute this knowledge in part to the fact that I possessed the Rubber Handbook.” Sixty years after the first edition appeared, the Chemical Rubber Company stopped making chemicals and rubber, but they continued issuing the manual, which had become more important than their entire manufacturing business. A review of the seventy-fifth edition (1994) calls the CRC Handbook “a classic must for scientists in all areas,”14 and CRC Press, now part of Taylor & Francis, continues to issue new editions of the CRC Handbook, which is now in its ninetieth edition. The CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae went through a major change in 1991, when most of the functions available on pocket calculators were nixed to make room for more useful material.

  The Handbook is no longer a book but a franchise, with a tremendous suite of related books: the CRC Handbook of Laboratory Safety, the CRC Handbook of Tables for Probability and Statistics, the CRC Handbook of Environmental Control, the CRC Handbook of Radiation Measurement and Protection, the CRC Handbook of Antibiotic Compounds, the CRC Handbook of Animal Models for the Rheumatic Diseases, the CRC Handbook of Imunoblotting of Proteins, the CRC Handbook of Lubrication, the CRC Handbook of Avian Body Masses … the list goes on and on. But even these dozens of tables available from CRC are just a small selection of the information modern scientists need to keep at hand. The range of tables available to the scientist at the end of the twentieth century was gigantic: a 214-page reference book called Handbooks and Tables in Science and Technology is needed just to list the other reference books.15

  The science historian Lynn Thorndike’s claim—“Encyclopedias are perhaps the most important monuments of the history of science and of civilization”16—may sound like hyperbole. Surely legendary works of scholarship like Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Einstein’s famous papers of 1905 are the real monuments of science. But it takes nothing away from the towering geniuses of science to remember that the day-to-day operations in the laboratory and in the classroom owe much to the practical works that have sat on every lab bench for generations. Otto Lueger’s Lexikon der gesamten Technik (1894) was updated through the twentieth century, and we continue generating gigantic reference works such as the Human Genome Project (2003), the effort to identify and catalog the billions of base pairs that make up human DNA. Works like the Merck Index and the CRC Handbook rarely get their due in the history of scientific endeavor; they are taken for granted, treated as part of the background of scientific discovery rather than part of the story itself. That assumption should change.

  CHAPTER 23 ½

  AT NO EXTRA COST!

  The Business of Reference Books

  “Information,” according to the slogan, “wants to be free.” But compiling that information is work, and the people who do it expect to be paid, though very few have gotten rich in the process. It has always been difficult to break even. Johnson’s Dictionary was published by booksellers working together in an ad-hoc consortium, a “conger,” that allowed all of them to minimize risk. They paid Johnson £1,575—maybe around £200,000 or $300,000 today—and they covered the costs of printing and distribution. They planned to break even if they sold a thousand sets for £4 10s., but that was several months’ wages for a day laborer. Sales were disappointing. After a few months the booksellers tried to sell the Dictionary in pieces: 165 parts, one a week, at sixpence each (which came out to the same £4 10s. as the original). The results were no better. The Dictionary had received strong notices, and those in the know recognized it as a major work—but it seemed to be a commercial flop.

  At that point the idea for an abridged edition came up. Johnson took his hefty Dictionary and tightened up the definitions, trimmed the etymologies, and stripped out the 115,000 quotations—the very feature that made it such a lexicographical milestone. The result was two much smaller volumes, octavos instead of folios, called A Dictionary of the English Language … Abstracted from the Folio Edition. Finally the publishers had something that made money. Over Johnson’s lifetime, the folio Dictionary sold about five thousand copies, compared to thirty-five thousand of the abridged editions.1 To history, “Johnson’s Dictionary” is the monumental work of 1755, but to the large majority of its actual users, “Johnson’s Dictionary” did not have a single quotation. When Becky Sharp threw a copy of Johnson’s “dixonary” out the carriage window in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, it was no doubt the little one.

  The pattern has been much followed over the centuries. The big unabridged dictionaries take years of work and almost never earn back their expenses. This is true even of monuments like the Oxford English Dictionary—its editor’s biographer wrote, “Looked at from a business angle the Dictionary was clearly a failure.”2 Publishers would go broke if they had to depend on sales of flagship products. Oxford Universi
ty Press and Merriam-Webster make their money where Johnson’s publishers did: selling abridged versions of their flagship dictionaries to a large audience.3

  Encyclopedias are, if anything, an even harder sell. In the 1770s Charles-Joseph Panckoucke confidently began compiling his own Encyclopédie méthodique as an answer to the Encyclopédie, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested he would break even with between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand advance subscriptions. When he was ready to start writing, he tallied up his subscribers and found a grand total of just one hundred sixty-two.4 Clearly, more aggressive salesmanship was required. “The industry believes encyclopedias are sold and not bought,” said the editor of the American Library Association’s Reference Books Bulletin. “You must have representation from a salesman.”5

  And so salesmen were called in. Through most of the twentieth century, as many as 90 percent of American encyclopedias were sold door to door.6 Salesmen (and, on occasion, saleswomen) knocked on the doors in suburban neighborhoods and extolled the virtues of their wares—a compendium of knowledge that would enlighten, entertain, and even impress the neighbors by making the room look classy. The ritual was scripted, starting with the “opener,” or initial sales pitch, with reference to local satisfied customers; moving to the “spread,” which involved opening sample volumes and pamphlets around the room; and ending with the “close,” which was supposed to end with a check in the salesman’s pocket.7 Children were the real target. What about Tommy’s book report in Mrs. Davis’s class? Where else will he be able to find the population of Guatemala or the chemical formula of formaldehyde? The pitch might continue that the fifteen-volume Britannica Junior might be sufficient, but to excel in school, the deluxe reference package was better choice: the twenty-four-volume encyclopedia, the Britannica World Atlas, the World Language Dictionary, and the Book of the Year, updated—at no extra cost!—every year for a decade!8