The first edition included noted poems such as "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric," celebrating the beauty of the human body, physical health, and sexual passion.
Even the first edition included a man who consumed 24 raw eggs in 14 minutes and a woman legally married 14 times; in 1979, a man yodelled non-stop for ten and a quarter hours.
Its success lay in tapping into man's innate curiosity about the natural world around him: the first edition included details such as the brightest star in the heavens (the Dog Star) and the biggest spider's body (9cm long).The "Guinness Book of Records" also included human achievements.
Arranged alphabetically and "compiled upon a new plan in which the different Sciences and Arts are digested into distinct Treatises or Systems," the first edition included 40 treatises as well as short entries on technical terms and other subjects, with cross-references from the one type of entry to the other.
The first edition includes an article on Tata's takeover of steel giant Corus, interviews with Palaniappan Chidambaram, India's finance minister, and Ronojoy Dutta, the former CEO of Air Sahara and United Airlines, and an analysis of a new study by professors at Wharton and the Indian School of Business.
The 1839 first edition included statics, dynamics, gravitation, mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, hydrodynamics, acoustics, magnetism, electricity, atmospheric electricity, electrodynamics, thermoelectricity, bioelectricity, light, optics, and polarized light.
The Times's discussions of our gift have neglected to acknowledge the fact that Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Special Collections Room is already home to an important collection of music manuscripts and first editions, including works by Brahms and Stravinsky.
A free lance commercial artist and master calligrapher, his art work for Random House, Delacorte, Knopf, and many others graced the covers of many first editions, including Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood".
New subjects in the eighth edition included "Photography" by Sir David Brewster, "Ballot" and "Communism" by John Hill Burton, "Telegraph, Electric" by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), "Iron Bridges" by Robert Stephenson, "Crédit Mobilier" by Walter Bagehot, and "Ichthyology, Fossil," covering Louis Agassiz's system, by the editor.
According to Dictionary.com, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, included the term with essentially the same definition in 2000.
