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As a style of writing and a form of communication, the modern scientific report enables the creation, sharing and continuous updating of natural knowledge in such a manner that the idiosyncrasies of ordinary language are reduced to a minimum. This article examines how the standards for scientific reporting were 'born' in the seventeenth century and their legacy. The first part of the article reviews the existing literature on this topic. The second part outlines the key features of the scientific report and the common standards for scientific reporting. The third part presents detailed historical evidence to trace the emergence of these standards in seventeenth-century England. The final part discusses why the scientific report means so much for the progress of science, for understanding the history of science and science popularization, and even for the development of academia more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the scientific background of Daniel Defoe's The Storm (1704). This work is a collection of letters on the Great Storm, a tempest which battered the south of England on 26–27 November 1703 causing casualties in the thousands and extensive damage. Like other extreme natural phenomena, the Great Storm was interpreted by many as divine warning. This article argues that, differently to Defoe's other works on the Great Storm, The Storm reconciles the traditional religious reading of catastrophes with recent breakthroughs in empiricist philosophy and early meteorology. In its concluding section, the article offers a reassessment of Defoe's interest in scientific ideas in The Storm so as to include early‐eighteenth‐century empiricism and examines Defoe's ambivalent attitude towards them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twentieth-century historians of science emphasised the apparent connection between puritanism and experimental natural philosophy in mid-seventeenth-century England, but revisionist scholarship exposed the incorrect religious taxonomies undergirding this thesis. As both a staunch puritan and a well-connected figure in scientific networks, Ralph Austen provides an opportunity to re-examine the thesis. A horticulturalist, cider manufacturer and lay theologian based in Oxford from 1646 until his death in 1676, Austen was a friend and collaborator of Samuel Hartlib and Robert Boyle. He was also a pious puritan, steeped in Reformed divinity, and friends with premier Interregnum puritans, including John Owen. Austen's life and career demonstrate that Baconian aims to reform learning could happily go hand-in-hand with, and be inspired by, puritan ideals, though they hampered his reputation in post-Restoration natural-philosophical circles. At the same time, via Austen we learn that puritan theologians responded positively to Baconian ideas, something hitherto underrepresented in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the potential relationship between scientific success and lifespan, with a particular focus on whether serving as President of the Royal Society is associated with a longer lifespan. Previous research has indicated that higher social status can confer health benefits, but it remains unclear whether holding leadership positions within esteemed academic organizations has a similar effect. To mitigate confounding factors, this study established a counterfactual by identifying Royal Society Fellows who are comparable to the Presidents. The analysis indicates that being elected as President of the Royal Society is indeed linked to a longevity advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings attention to three manuscript letters by Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton in the Darmstaedter collection at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, two of which are published here for the first time. Of principal interest is a 1678 letter from Hooke to Newton, which concerns the controversy with Anthony Lucas over Newton's prism experiments and Hooke's disinclination 'to print transactions' on behalf of the Royal Society. A second Hooke letter, written to the French savant Nicolas Toinard in 1680, sends some astronomical observations together with English mathematician Robert Wood's book on a proposed calendrical reform. While the text of the third item, a 1706 letter by Newton welcoming its addressee into the Royal Society, has long been available in draft form, the Darmstaedter manuscript allows the recipient to be identified as a Savoyard diplomat, the Comte de Briançon, who can further be recognized as the intended addressee of another Newton letter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific journal publishing has become a lucrative enterprise, for commercial firms and (some) society publishers alike; but it was not always thus. The Royal Society is the publisher of the world's longest-running scientific journal, and for most of the history of the Philosophical Transactions, its publication was a severe drain on the Society's finances. This paper uses the rich archives of the Royal Society to investigate the economic transformation of journal publishing over the course of the twentieth century. It began the century as a scholarly mission activity heavily subsidized by the Society, but ended it as a valuable income stream. Never-before-seen data reveal three phases: the end of the philanthropic model of circulation; the transition to a sales-based commercial model amidst the post-war boom in subscriber numbers; and the challenges facing that new business model once subscriber numbers went into decline in the late twentieth century. The paper does not directly address the open access movement of the twenty-first century, but is essential reading to understand the financial background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on "popular errors," a genre where learned doctors addressed potential patients to disperse false belief about treatments. By the mid-seventeenth century, investigations into popular error informed the working methodology of natural philosophers, rather than just physicians. In 1646, Thomas Browne published Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a large volume on popular error. Despite Browne's formal training as a physician, this work examined only a few medical errors and instead aspired to be an encyclopedia of error. Pseudodoxia Epidemica was highly popular, running to six editions, and was known by the Fellows of the Royal Society. Influenced by Browne, alongside Bacon's theory of the idols, natural philosophic practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a focus on error that revised traditional attention to the discovery of knowledge. Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke proposed new ways to secure truth under the far-reaching influence of Bacon's refutations of "natural human reason" distorted by false idols, of syllogistic logic, and of "theories," his label for traditional philosophical systems that bias thought toward falsity. In three parts, this article traces the progression in early modern scientific approaches to handling error, and especially medical error – from physicians' efforts to identify and eradicate it through collaborative effort, to the striking tension in Browne's work between seeking to eliminate error while also showing a marked tolerance for it, to the Royal Society's Baconian objective of instrumentalizing error to find truth. Error emerges as its own epistemic category that serves as a driving force toward knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a prosopographical study of the British scientific elite, defined as Fellows of the Royal Society born since 1900, chemists were found to be distinctive in their social origins and schooling, being more likely than Fellows in other fields to come from relatively disadvantaged class backgrounds and to have attended state rather than private secondary schools. In thinking of possible explanations, we called to mind the student stereotype of 'the Northern chemist'. Could this give some indications of how it should come about that those chemists who enter the scientific elite—a small minority—tend to differ from other elite members in the ways in question? Our more detailed analyses of the biographies of elite chemists, comparing those of different class origins, point to the following conclusions. The Northern chemist was a male stereotype, and chemists prove to be more predominantly male than other members of the scientific elite. Young people, mainly male, often growing up in industrial areas of the North of England (or in Wales) and in families whose male members were in manual work, were particularly likely to develop an interest in chemistry rather than in other sciences, and it was in chemistry that state education gave them their greatest comparative advantage over those privately educated. Generalising from these analyses, we suggest that a larger pool was created in chemistry than in other scientific fields of people who were of relatively disadvantaged social origins and state educated, and that this difference was then maintained through into the social composition of the small number of chemists who eventually gained elite status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 1665, Thomas Sprat's efforts to defend the hospitality bestowed on Samuel Sorbière, when the French savant visited London, were published in his Letter containing some observations on Monsieur de Sorbier's voyage into England. This book, for which Sprat stopped work on his now more famous History of the Royal-Society, challenged Sorbière's account of how he had been 'entertained', insisting he 'be grateful for a good potage' and 'sound up his meat'. Experiments were, it seems, not to be depicted growing from nothing. This article thus situates Sprat's Letter amid convictions that the table was an apparently indispensable piece of experimental furniture. From the lavish banquets over which experiments were discussed, to feasts that were themselves experiments, it explores a learning seemingly nourished in rich settings of appetite and gratification. The offence caused by Sorbière's failure to acknowledge this commensality is placed in a context where, for better or worse, the character of experiment was on the table. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two pioneers of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were both nominated by Paul Dirac for election to the Royal Society in 1945. At first there was considerable opposition to Heisenberg's election from Max Born, Rudolf Peierls and Francis Simon. These three physicists were all refugees from Germany who had reservations about Heisenberg's activities in World War II. Born gave strong support to Schrödinger's nomination but this was not the case with Peierls and Simon. In time, the opposition became more muted and Schrödinger was elected a Foreign Member in 1949. Heisenberg's subsequent efforts to rebuild science in West Germany and in Europe after the war were welcomed, and he was eventually elected a Foreign Member in 1955. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1960s, amidst a period of considerable debate surrounding how civil science in Britain should be governed, British scientists—especially those associated with the Royal Society—and their counterparts in the People's Republic of China (PRC) began tentative exchange programmes. Although such unusual interactions between Cold War adversaries were enabled by claims that science was a universal and apolitical phenomenon, the ways in which institutional and individual participants were embroiled in these domestic debates illuminate how their ideological outlooks shaped their views on exchange and on the science they encountered. By focusing on three interrelated exchanges during this period—an individual scientist's visit to the PRC, a Royal Society delegation to China, and a larger research programme bringing junior Chinese researchers to Britain—I argue that participating British scientists' conceptualizations of 'scientific freedom' framed how they judged science in China, and the value of these exchanges; their observations and actions during these interactions reflected their views on domestic British debates over the governance of science. This study thereby sheds light on how the ideological attitudes of participants of science diplomacy shape its practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Royal Society established the Newton International Fellowships program in 2008 to attract early career researchers from around the world to the UK. The program has supported over 650 researchers from over 50 countries with £72.5 million in funding. Its objectives include attracting talented researchers to the UK, supporting high-quality research, providing training and career development opportunities, and fostering long-term relationships. The program was launched in 2008 and has since been a key component of the Royal Society's focus on international collaboration. Feedback from past fellows indicates that the program has had a positive impact on their careers. The papers in this theme issue celebrate the research conducted during the Newton International Fellowships program. The program will continue to be an important part of the Royal Society's grants and international programs. [Extracted from the article]

This paper is part of a larger project of investigating the reception of the Accademia dei Lincei at the Royal Society. Perhaps due to the Lincei's hesitancy to make more use of print, they constituted somewhat of a mystery for the subsequent generations of scientific communities. This is to say that the members of Royal Society were open to or perhaps even actively searching for knowledge related to the Lynxes. In this work, I trace this through a particular case-study in the transmission of knowledge: the arrival at the Royal Society of Federico Cesi and Francesto Stelluti's Trattato del Legno Fossile Minerale Nuovamente Scoperto [ Treatise on the Newly Discovered Mineral Fossil Wood ] (1637) and its accompanying lignum fossile specimen. I aim to show how Robert Hooke, early keeper of the Society's repository, diverged significantly from the initial sense of Cesi and Stelluti: if for the latter the specimen attested for a Renaissance-type continuous chain of being, the former appropriated it in his own theory of geomorphological change and 'petrifaction'. Throughout this article, I also reflect more broadly on other two related issues: 1. The status of the discipline of petrification during the early modern times; 2. The availability of Lincean sources in England and Europe – while pointing out that much more work needs to be done in order to properly chart the dissemination of the Lynxes's works. I conclude by indicating that the Lynxes played a key role in Hooke's genealogical argument on the right use of microscopy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a hitherto unpublished account of a magical séance conducted by the virtuoso Thomas Henshaw (1618–1700), later Fellow of the Royal Society, while travelling in Venice ca 1648. The episode had previously been known through an account of it given by Robert Boyle, but in Boyle's version its protagonist was unclear. It is now for the first time revealed as Henshaw on the basis of a further record of it among the papers of John Sharp, Archbishop of York (1645?–1714). The discrepancies between the 'new' version of the story and that given by Boyle are here elucidated and the opportunity is taken to outline the background to the séance in terms of the history of magic in early modern Venice. In addition, broader comments are included on the implications of the episode for attitudes towards alchemy and magic in the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No person proposed to the early Royal Society has a less certain biography than Giles Rawlins. A 'Mr. Rawlins' was proposed as a candidate for election on 26 December 1660 in a group of seven. The other members of this group were Robert Boyle, Henry Oldenburg, John Denham, Elias Ashmole, John Evelyn and Nathaniel Henshaw. But whereas these six other men are greater or lesser luminaries of the Society, Rawlins is a blank. R. E. W. Maddison in 1960 could only 'suggest' his likely identity; and Michael Hunter in The Royal Society and its Fellows (1982 and 1994) went no further than Maddison.1 Following my discovery in the National Library of Ireland of Rawlins's only autograph letter, it is possible for the first time to confirm his identity. Further, this discovery allows the reconstruction of the rest of Rawlins's life: his upbringing as the son of a minor diplomat; his work in the Interregnum as a cross-Channel royalist messenger; his consequent rise and reward in the Duke of York's household; and his death in one of the most notorious duels of the Restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explains the emergence of a new era in global science and politics through increasing scientific nationalism in the years leading up to World War I. Based upon original archival research, we examine how the cultural geopolitics of international scientific jubilees triggered a major change in the self-representation of Prussian and non-Prussian German universities from delivering individual congratulatory addresses to the demonstration of unity through one joint address and present. The analysis focuses on the first centenary of the Royal Frederick University in Kristiania and the quincentenary of the University of St Andrews, both held in 1911, before discussing how all 21 German universities agreed to convey their felicitations with one voice—as Universitates Germaniae—and one address—an inscribed bronze votive tablet—to the Royal Society in London on the occasion of its 250th anniversary as a chartered institution in 1912. We argue that in the context of growing imperial and economic rivalry between European nation-states, the politicization of these jubilees reinforced scientific nationalism and encouraged a unified appearance of German universities overseas, no less than 41 years after the constitution of the German Empire. By analysing changing material, practical, and imaginative resource ensembles in science and politics, we reveal how the geographical imagination of national unity materialized in the German universities' use of bronze tablets for conveying academic appreciation and geopolitical messages in London, and at the Groningen tercentenary in 1914, and thereby heralded a new era characterized by a national university system, an escalation of scientific nationalism, and global wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads the 'hints' provided by the President of the Royal Society Lord Morton to James Cook on his first Pacific voyage in 1768, first to show what they reveal about the contested views of technological advance as an index of progress in European thought in the later eighteenth century and, second, how that connection between technology and progress serves to entrench distinct differences between European and Indigenous identities in the colonial mind. Morton's 'hints' served as a kind of script that told the Europeans how to communicate their position as bearers of superior enlightened humanity. They functioned, therefore, as a technology of identity by ordering the behaviour of the European newcomers and curating their perceptions of the Indigenous people they encountered. Although the 'hints' were a self‐conscious expression of enlightened sensibilities, they remained a technology for the colonial projection of those sensibilities and for performance of European identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1840, James Prescott Joule submitted to the Royal Society a paper describing experimental research on the heat produced by electric currents in metallic conductors, and inferring that the effect was proportional to the resistance of the conductors and to the square of the intensity of the current. Only an abstract of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, although a full paper with a similar title was printed in the Philosophical Magazine in 1841. Several authors have assumed that the content of the 1841 publication was the same as the rejected 1840 paper; however, the unpublished manuscript has been found within the archives of the Royal Society and is published here for the first time, along with a detailed analysis and comparison with the 1841 paper. The unpublished version is much shorter, and is different in certain respects from the published article. A detailed comparison throws light on several shortcomings of the unpublished version. The present work also studies the assessment of Joule's paper by the Royal Society, and elucidates the roles of Peter Roget and Samuel Christie in this connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1665 and 1755 several members of the Royal Society collected eyewitness accounts of earthquakes, some of which were published in the Philosophical Transactions. While such observations have been recognized as crucial to early seismology in the nineteenth century, their impact on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy of earthquakes has received limited attention. This article suggests that growing inclusion of observations considerably challenged existing theories and epistemologies and was indispensable to the emergence of seismology in the second half of the eighteenth century. Initially, observations of earthquakes served two uses: the provision of particulars and the verification of other observations. By the eighteenth century, a new approach to empiricism was beginning to influence the collection of observations, focusing on information that could be compared and synthesized to chart the extent and varying intensities of earthquakes. This practice promoted a conception of subterranean, travelling earthquakes that could be measured by their intensity, and which were hypothesized to have some form of centre or origin. While seismology could develop on the basis of sound theoretical assumptions, these assumptions were heavily indebted to the methodological practice of eyewitness observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the sparse documentary evidence for the important mid-eighteenth-century mapmaker John Rocque, this article looks to examine the nature and development of the Huguenot's professional career through a closer consideration of a broader sampling of his output than has previously been the case. This entails an acknowledgement of the importance of his work as a decorative and topographical engraver, which predates his more famous city and county maps, as well as a sustained consideration of his last great original city plan, An Exact Survey of Dublin. This was Rocque's only house-by-house city map, one over which he had full control and that is more representative of his map making than the 24-sheet London map for which he is generally more famous. Rocque's move from estate surveyor to city mapmaker is considered in the light of the previously only partly explored input into the surveying methodology of the London map by the Royal Society's secretary Peter Davall. Attention is also drawn to two previously unpublished letters by Rocque to his nephew in Mannheim, written the year before Rocque went to Dublin in 1754, and which point to Rocque's expectations of his own demise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antony van Leeuwenhoek's entire output is contained in the hundreds of letters that he wrote from 1673 to 1723. This article discusses the content, features, and circumstances of the letters and their contemporary publishing history, especially in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions , as well as a brief history of the project begun in 1932 to publish a complete edition of Leeuwenhoek's letters in Dutch and English translation with linguistic, scientific, and historical annotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]