Ephraim Chambers

Ephraim Chambers (c. 1680 in Kendal, † May 15 1740 in Islington (now London) ) was an English writer. He was the editor and mostly also the author of one of the first encyclopedic dictionary of arts and sciences. According to him, the popular English Dictionary Chambers Dictionary is named.

Life

Chambers was born in Kendal, Westmorland, and attended the Heversham Grammar School. He graduated from 1714 to 1721 an apprenticeship as a globe - maker with John Senex ( 1678-1740 ) a cartographers and engraver from London. Chambers summed up already as a craft apprentice the plan to his Cyclopaedia, or to universal dictionary of arts and sciences, which first appeared in London in 2 volumes and geography and history excluded. He published it in 1728; it is regarded as one of the first English-language encyclopedias. After the start of the Cyclopaedia, he left John Senex and devoted himself entirely to the encyclopedia project. He took lodgings in Gray's Inn, where he remained for the rest of his life. Chambers was in the monasteries of buried Westminster Abbey.

Chambers was recognized, he was appointed a member of the Royal Society of London, and he lived to see three editions of his book.

He was also on the part Litterary magazines and on the abbreviated translation of the memoirs of the Academy of Sciences in Paris: Philosophical history and memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris ( 1742, 5 vols ).

The Cyclopaedia based on John Harris ' Lexicon technicum of 1704 and was in turn modeled and only basis for Diderot and d' Alembert created by the Encyclopédie.

Chambers died 1740 in Canonbury House in Islington.

In view of the difficulties which then had to overcome Chambers in the alphabetical compilation of all the objects of human knowledge, his merit is to not hit low. ( Meyers)

Works (selection)

• Online edition of the Cyclopaedia: Chamber 's Cyclopaedia, digitized and made ​​available online to University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.