Phipps
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Phipps. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
fips William (1651-1695), a governor of Massachusetts. He was born at Pemaquid, now Bristol, Maine, and died in London. In his youth he learned the ship-carpenter's trade. Later he learned to read and to write and engaged in trading. He married a Boston widow of wealth, and built himself a ship in which he made successful ventures. Learning of a sunken Spanish ship off the Bahamas, reputed to contain treasure, he went to England and obtained permission to search for the wreck. A first attempt was not successful. A second, undertaken with ships and funds provided by the Duke of Albemarle, resulted in the recovery of treasure to the value of $1,500,000. Phipps' share was $80,000. He was made a knight. In 1690 the colonial authorities made him commander of a fleet of eight vessels with which he captured Port Royal. A second expedition against Quebec was without result save the loss of nine ships. Through the influence of Increase Mather, the king appointed him governor of Massachusetts. One of his early official acts, if not his first, was the organization of a special court to try witches. When accusation was brought against Lady Phipps, he appears to have lost faith in the popular delusion and to have decided upon the termination of the witchcraft trials then disgracing the colony. Charges of arbitrary conduct having been made, he went to London to clear himself, and died there.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HENRY, an American manufacturer and philanthropist. Born in Philadelphia in 1839; educated in the public schools of Allegheny City, Pa. In the early years of his life he worked in stores in Pittsburgh and later became partner in a small iron mill. Some filaments years afterward he became associated with Andrew Carnegie in the steel busiplants with simple leaves, and ness and built up an enormous fortune. of North America. A Interested in the fight on tuberculosis he donated the Phipps Institution with approximately a million dollars to the University of Pennsylvania. To Johns Hopkins University he gave a psychiatric clinic and endowment for maintenance.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's placed Sir William Phips's treasure wreck "off the Bahamas"; it was in fact the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, lost on the Silver Bank north of Hispaniola, and modern salvors under Burt Webber relocated the site in 1978 and recovered more of its cargo. Aiton's also names Phips's organization of "a special court to try witches" — the Court of Oyer and Terminer of 1692 — and credits his wife's accusation with ending it; historians now stress Phips's own dissolution of the court and the counsel of Increase Mather, and treat the Lady Phips story as unproven, while Massachusetts has continued formally clearing the convicted, the last name in 2022. Henry Phipps, alive and "an American manufacturer and philanthropist" when Collier's wrote in 1921, died in 1930; his Phipps Houses, founded in New York in 1905, is still among the country's largest nonprofit housing developers, and the Bessemer family office he set up in 1907 became Bessemer Trust. His Phipps Institute for tuberculosis at Pennsylvania has long since been absorbed elsewhere, the disease having ceased to be the American killer it was in his lifetime, but the Phipps psychiatric clinic name endures at Johns Hopkins.
Written for this edition, 2026.