Schaffhausen
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Schaffhausen. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
shaf-how'zen, a city of Switzerland, the capital of a canton of the same name. It is situated on an eminence overhanging the Rhine. The population is about 15,000. There are manufactures of cotton and woolen goods and carriages, as well as distilleries, breweries, and other industries. The city is celebrated for its quaint architecture. A massive cathedral of the basilica pattern, dating from 1052, contains a celebrated parish bell bearing the date of 1486. It bears the following inscription: "Vivos voco; mortuos plango; fulgura frango" (I call the living; I lament the dead; I rend the lightning). The latter phrase has reference to an early belief that the bell of a church warded off bolts of lightning. The inscription suggested Schiller's celebrated Song of the Bell and Long-fellow"s Golden Legend. An old castle built in 1564 stands on a height commanding the town. It has the form of a round tower several stories high. The walls are sixteen feet in thickness. Instead of a stair-way, they contain a winding, inclined plane like the thread of a screw. Three miles below the city are the celebrated Falls of Schaffhausen. The Rhine, about 125 yards wide here, leaps a distance of about seventy feet, falling in three successive cascades. A vast volume of emerald green water descends with a roar like Niagara, throwing up a blinding cloud of spray. One of Ruskin's finest word paintings describes this celebrated waterfall.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
capital of the Swiss canton of the same name, on the Rhine, 25 miles N. W. of Constance, and 23 miles from Zurich. It is a place of antiquity, and has a large parish church, an academy, town library, town hall, and market house. The manufactures are machinery, iron and steel products, textiles, yarns, watches, etc. The wine raised in the neighborhood is exported. Two bridges here, thrown across the Rhine, form a channel of communication between this town and the rest of Switzerland. The Falls of Schaffhausen form a cataract of the Rhine, 2 miles from the town, with a descent of about 60 feet. It is one of the most striking waterfalls in Europe.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's put the population at "about 15,000" in 1910; the city now holds roughly 36,000 people, with about 85,000 in the canton. The biggest break with these accounts came on 1 April 1944, when American bombers, off course over neutral Switzerland, struck Schaffhausen and killed about forty people, wrecking part of the old town and the Allerheiligen museum's collections. The Munot, the round castle of 1564 with its screw-shaped ramp in place of a stair, survives and its bell is still rung nightly at nine. The Rhine Falls that both entries admire are unaltered and now draw well over a million visitors a year, though a hydroelectric plant was built downstream at Rheinau in the 1950s over strong public objection.
Written for this edition, 2026.