The Encyclopædia

---

I was home one evening in 1986 getting ready for a writing session when the doorbell rang. Suzanne Vega was singing Marlene on the Wall on the stereo and I turned it down before opening the door to a 50-year old stranger standing awkwardly in front of me in a jacket and a tie.

He was selling the Encyclopædia Britannica.

It was not clear to me how he knew that I was a budding editor but he was quick to point out that a young man of my profession needed reliable reference material.

The 15th edition of Britannica had been published a year earlier and with 33 volumes it boasted that it held “the sum of all human knowledge.”

Those were the days before the World Wide Web and Google. Searching for information meant spending hours in a library instead of simply firing up a browser.

I did have a computer back then, an Apple Macintosh Plus, which was sneered at by my colleagues who considered it just a toy. They all used Micom 2000 word processors to write.

The Apple Macintosh Plus micro-computer made a significant contribution to bringing computing to the masses, as long as they could afford the over $2,500 purchase price. Public domain photo provided by Apple Wiki.

Listening to the salesman I could not help but be seduced by the opportunity to have a vast amount of general information at my disposal in the comfort of my home. However the steep $1,800 price frightened me. I am not the kind of man to make a major purchase on impulse.

I told the salesman I would think about it and call him to let him know of my decision. He gave me his card and left disappointed. I then went back to writing my story regarding the structure of the new National Gallery of Canada which was under construction. To me it looked like the skeleton of a dinosaur.

From a distance and with some imagination the granite pillars of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa can look like the ribcage of a dinosaur's skeleton. The glass walls demonstrate that it is easier to achieve transparency in architecture than in politics.

The next day at work I told my friend Aaron about the surprise visit from the encyclopædia salesman and that I was hesitant to disburse such a large amount of money.

“You should buy it,” said Aaron. “Knowledge is priceless. Did you know that if you read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica the University of Oxford will give you a degree?”

“Is that true?”

“Of course it is, don’t you know anything? The Encyclopædia Britannica is a British institution! Frankly, I don’t know why I waste my time discussing with a peasant like you who does not understand the value of learning!”

Aaron’s argument made an impression on me and I decided to invest in perfecting my knowledge.

Of course, I know now that nobody ever received a free university degree by reading a complete encyclopædia.

I also learned that Encyclopædia Britannica is actually a Scottish institution (established in Edinburgh in the 18th century) and that by the mid-1980s it had been owned by American interests for over 60 years.

When I called back, the encyclopædia salesman was shocked that I had kept my word. I told him that, yes, I was ready for enlightenment and that I would buy the leather-bound gilt-edged onionskin edition.

At its peak, Encylopædia Britannica employed up to 2,300 door-to-door salesmen among which Empire of the Sun author J. G. Ballard and actor Woody Harrelson's father.

For years my encyclopædia sat proudly in one of my bookcases and although I did not read it from beginning to end, it gave me hours of intellectual satisfaction.

When my wife and I divorced in 2000, we sold the house and I prepared to move to a small apartment. Looking at all my belongings, I knew I needed to get rid of many of the things I had acquired over the years.

But before I moved, a friend came to visit from out of town and stayed at the house for a few days. To thank me for my hospitality, she gave me the Encyclopædia Britannica on CD-ROM, a $50 value. I thought this electronic version would be adequate for my newly restricted living quarters.

I packed my leather-bound encyclopædia and took it to a used bookstore where I was offered $25 for the complete set of 33 volumes. I felt insulted by this contempt of knowledge.

When I calmed down, I decided to entrust my literary treasure to a small library I knew in the countryside, close to the haunted house I once owned.

I drove there only to be turned down by the librarian who claimed she did not have the shelf space. I then offered it to a literacy organization which also rejected the donation.

I regretfully realized that my initial $1,800 investment in knowledge was actually worthless.

And then it struck me: I had been totally mistaken about this prized possession of mine. An encyclopædia is not knowledge, it’s merely information. Information becomes knowledge only once it’s processed. How many people have owned encyclopædias without ever reading them?

Now that the Discovery Channel was available for all to watch, my beautifully-bound encyclopaedia, was perceived as not only cumbersome but useless.

A week later, I was visiting my old friend Asaph Mikhailovich, a well-read man cursed with a crippling affliction. I told him how I had been trying to dispose of my encyclopædia. He quietly looked at me and said:

– You know, when I want to consult Britannica, I have to ride my wheelchair ten blocks to the public library.

Not anymore.

---

The Pressure Cooker

---

Version française

---

When I was four years old, my father brought home a pressure cooker. It was one of those “modern” devices aimed at taking some pressure off domestic life (excuse the pun or don’t) by cooking food faster.

This pressure cooker was made from cast aluminum by National Presto Industries, a company that also manufactures adult incontinence products. Notice the steam regulator cap sitting on top of the vent pipe at the centre of the lid. I cooked delicious Boston baked beans in this vessel in 45 minutes.

Cooking with pressure cookers is different from cooking with regular saucepans. A small amount of liquid – water or broth for example – must be heated to a boil in a sealed container. As the pressure builds up inside the vessel, the heat is turned down to let the food simmer while maintaining enough steam.

When the food is nearly cooked, the heat is turned off and cooking continues as pressure gradually abates. The pressure regulator capping the steam vent should not be removed while the pot is under pressure.

Also, if the cooker is overfilled, the steam vent over which sits the pressure regulator might become obstructed, causing the pressure to build up inside the cooker and force out the content through the pressure valve.

That’s what my father learned to his dismay when he first cooked a three-pound ham using too much beer as a cooking liquid. The whole ham escaped through the tiny pressure valve and splattered on the kitchen ceiling, making my mother very angry at the mess he created and fearful of using the apparatus.

Even though pressure cooking seemed modern in the early 60’s, it certainly was not a recent invention. Denis Papin (1647-1712), a French Huguenot, discovered it.

Tired of being picked on for his religious beliefs by the powers that be in France, he moved to England in 1675. In London, he met Robert Boyle (1627-1691), an Irish-English chemist who was experimenting with air pressure.

At the time, England was undergoing a tremendous scientific revolution. Francis Bacon’s scientific method was the rage amongst “natural philosophers” who were experimenting with practically anything. This led to a radical new way of looking at the causes and effects in the natural world which, people were discovering, was not what they thought it was.

We are not exactly sure how Denis Papin came to experiment with steam. However, I can certainly imagine him sitting in a pub, drinking cheap Spanish wine and listening to Robert Boyle pompously lecturing about air pressure. While Boyle was going on and on about his views on pneumatics, Papin was probably thinking that it was a bunch of hot air.

After all, air is immaterial, it cannot be seen or touched. Of course one can feel it as the wind blows but Papin perhaps thought scientists should focus on something more concrete.

At that moment, the innkeeper might have been preparing tea on the stove, a new beverage that was becoming popular in England. Taking a sip of his wine, looking at the saucepan of water on the stove, Denis Papin maybe thought ahead of Benjamin Franklin that “a watched pot never boils.” Boil.

Boyle was explaining that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to its pressure. Crazy Boyle. Boyle. Boil. Wait a minute! When water boils it turns to steam. Steam is a gas and unlike air, it can be seen!

This may not be what really happened but I do know that inspiration sometimes comes in strange ways.

Tea (Camellia sinensis) was a luxury item in the 18th century. It was heavily taxed by the British government which led to the famous Boston Tea Party where the gentle people of this New England town unloaded into the harbour three shiploads of this merchandise as a protest.

Anyway, in 1679, Denis Papin addressed the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge on the subject of a new invention he was creating: the “steam digester” which was the ancestor of the modern pressure cooker. Two years later, according to the legend, when Papin cooked a delicious stew to demonstrate the prototype he was presenting, the Royal Society was so impressed that it invited him to become a member.

In the 17th century the line between gastronomy and science was very thin.

After a few years, Papin moved to Germany and invented the piston steam engine. He returned to England many years later and unsuccessfully asked the Royal Society to reinstate him.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was the head of the Royal Society of London when Denis Papin tried to be reinstated. Newton probably refused deciding that fine cooking was an art rather than a science.

Denis Papin died destitute and relatively unknown, presumably in 1712, and was buried most likely in an unmarked pauper’s grave in London.

Given that so many inventors suffer the same ungrateful fate, it is surprising that anybody attempts to discover new things.

My father was not discouraged by his first experiment with a pressure cooker. Actually he cooked with it all his life, as I have. Used properly, a pressure cooker will produce tasty meals quickly, giving you more time to focus on other endeavours, like blogging.