THE ROYAL INSTITUTION

See Also: EXPLORATION; LEARNED SOCIETIES; THE MASS MEASURER; SIR ISAAC NEWTON; REFERENCE WORKS Roget's Thesaurus

During the Commonwealth Samuel Hartlib, a Prussian exile, tried to found a Royal Society-like body. The authorities were unreceptive to the concept. From 1648 to 1659 meetings to discuss natural philosophy were held in the rooms of John Wilkins, a cleric and former academic.¹ From 1659 these sessions took place at Gresham College in Broad Street, London. The following year the Society was formally instituted. In 1662 King Charles II granted the organisation a royal charter. From its inauguration members were elected by secret ballot.

Early in 1664 Pepys had a meeting with King Charles II. During it, the monarch made clear the way in which he regarded much of the work of the Society's members as being impractical, notably their weighing air (barometric pressure).² The Society's members gained a reputation for being inclined to dither. The Royal Society's first publication was John Evelyn's Sylva (1664), which called for more trees to be planted in order to make good the losses that had occurred during the previous two decades as a result of the Civil Wars and their aftermath. The following year the institution published the first edition of its Philosophical Transactions.³

The following year the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the City. Gresham College's building survived the conflagration. In the ensuing emergency, the City authorities took it over and the Society moved temporarily to Arundel House in the Strand. While it was based there, the 5^th Duke of Norfolk gave his library to the body. In 1673 it returned to its Broad Street home.

In his play The Virtuoso (1676) Thomas Shadwell wrote a satire of the Royal Society. The character Sir Nicholas Gimcrack became the archetype of the mad scientist. He had an interest in observational, refining, data accumulation projects not unlike those of Boyle and Hooke. Hooke saw the play. He did not like it and made clear his views in his diary. In Gulliver's Travels (1726) Jonathan Swift account of the Academy of Lagado spoofed the Society.

The Society sponsored a number of exploratory expeditions. In 1768-71 the navigator Captain James Cook and the gentleman-botanist Sir Joseph Banks sailed to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus.⁴ In 1778 Banks was elected as the President of the Royal Society. He retained the post until his death. This was not altogether a good thing for the progress of science. The baronet was of the opinion that the body should be a club for gentleman who were interested in science. This was a view that was shared by the likes of Thomas Young. In 1780 the Society relocated from Crane Court to Somerset House.

In 1830 Davies Gilbert, an anti-reform M.P., stood down as the Society s President. He proposed that the Duke of Sussex, a younger brother of King William IV, should succeed him rather than the distinguished astronomer John Herschel. The scientists, who were a minority among the Fellows, made plain their unhappiness at this proposal. Thereafter, the character of the membership slowly began to alter in their favour. Within three decades they were in the majority.

In 1845 the Society organised the explorer Sir John Franklin's expedition to try to find the North-West Passage that was supposed to exist to the north of Canada. The sailor did not return. In 1857 the Royal Society moved from Somerset House to Burlington House.

In 1906 Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) was awarded the Royal Society's Hughes Medal for her work on street lighting during the First World War. She was not allowed to become a member because she was married. In 1945 the Society admitted women as fellows. In the late 1960s it was still unusual for an industrial scientist to be elected to the Royal Society. In 1991 the reproductive biologist and developmental geneticist Anne McLaren became the first woman to serve as an officer of the Society; she was appointed to be its Foreign Secretary and Vice-President. In the mid-1990s barely one-in-twenty of the 1100 Fellows (F.R.S.s) was a woman. An accusation sometimes made against the Society is that it tends to be dominated by the golden triangle of British higher education. This is composed of the Universities of London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Location: 7 Carlton House Terrace, SW1Y 5AG (red, blue)

Crane Court, EC4A 2EJ (red, yellow)

Burlington House, 50 Piccadilly, W1J 0BD (orange, brown)

Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 1LA (orange, purple)

Website: www.royalsociety.org

¹. Wilkins had married Oliver Cromwell's daughter Robina in 1656. In 2007 it was revealed that in four-and-a-half pages Wilkins had lain out a decimal system.

². The first-known use of a mouse in a scientific experiment occurred in 1664 when Robert Hooke used one to study the effects of raised air pressure.

³. During the 1740s and 1750s (the novelist and) printer Samuel Richardson (c.1689-1761) printed Philosophical Transactions.

⁴. The astronomer Johannes Kepler had compiled tables that had led him to conclude that there would be a transit of Venus across the Sun on 6 December 1631. He died in 1630. The transit was not visible in Europe and there is no evidence that anyone saw it. In 1639 Jeremiah Horrocks, who did not possess any formal training in mathematics or astronomy, examined Kepler's tables. He concluded that the astronomer had made a mistake, that transits occurred in pairs that were separated at a distance of eight years, and that next one would be in a month's time. On 24 November 1639 he and his friend William Crabtree witnessed the second one.

Sir Joseph Banks

As a child Sir Joseph Banks developed a keen interest in botany. After coming down from the University of Oxford, he spent a period living with his mother in her home in Chelsea. This was located close to the Chelsea Physic Garden, where he spent much of his time. He took to moving in London's scientific circles. In 1767 he met the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander, who had trained under Linnaeus and who had been cataloguing the natural history items in the British Museum.

During the years 1768-1771 the two men were members of the scientific contingent on Captain James Cook's first great Pacific navigation. In 1773 Banks was effectively appointed as the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Under his leadership, a royal pleasure ground became scientific institution of global importance. Four years later the baronet took up residence at No. 32 Soho Square. There, he opened his library and collections to people who had a serious interest in science. The following year he was elected as the President of the Royal Society.

Location: 32 Soho Square, W1D 3JR (purple, red)

See Also: KEW GARDENS The Royal Botanic Gardens; MUSEUMS, DISAPPEARED & LATENT The Holophusikon

Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke worked as an assistant to Robert Boyle in Oxford. In 1662 the Royal Society appointed him as its unsalaried curator of experiments. Two years later funds were provided for a salary. His masterwork Micrographia (1665) described and illustrated the use of a microscope to study animate and inanimate objects. The book included the first use of the word cell to describe the small regular compartments that he had he observed in petrified wood. The work's great contribution to the development of science was that it was an example of the use of an empirical approach for the study of nature.

Following the Great Fire of London, Hooke had been appointed one of the three surveyors for the rebuilding of the City, which meant that there were alternative calls upon his time. However, Micrographia had helped to raise the Society's international profile. The Dutch scientists Jan Swammerdam and Regnier de Graaf used microscopes to examine the structure of ovaries. The two men concluded separately that ovaries played a role in reproduction but were unable to agree precisely on what this function was. The fellowship offered to referee the matter. In 1677 the Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek stated that he had used a single lens microscope to identify sperm within semen. This prompted Robert Hooke to switch to using a single lens microscope, abandoning the compound one he had employed up until then.

See Also: COLUMNS

The Smithsonian

James Smithson (d.1829) was an illegitimate son of the 1^st Duke of Northumberland. Originally, he bore the surname Macie, however, following the death of his mother, he assumed that of Smithson, which had been his father's original surname. At the age of 22, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was the body s youngest member at the time.

Smithson was a shrewd investor and amassed a fortune. He spent his intellectual life investigating the natural world. Under his will, the bulk of his wealth was left to found an institute of learning in the United States - this became The Smithsonian in Washington D.C.. He had never visited America.

In 2020 it was reported the Smithson and the Victorian & Albert Museum had abandoned their plan for the former to take space within the planned V.& A. East museum.

Location: 9 Bentinck Street, W1U 2EL (red, purple)

See Also: TOWNHOUSES, DISAPPEARED Northumberland House

Website: www.si.edu

David Backhouse 2024