Elaborately planned, collaboratively structured, autonomously organized, and simultaneously state-funded large-scale projects are a product of the 19th century as an organizational form. They primarily emerged in non-university institutions, particularly academies. The study contrasts the prevailing narrative that large-scale research is a product of 20th-century natural science research. Through three examples of such "large-scale enterprises" (Latin inscription corpus, CIL; Acta Borussica; the so-called "schoolchildren study") that operate with the typical rhetoric of completeness and focus on the processing of mass data, the development of an organizational form is traced, whose pathways extend into today's landscape of project-based research.