In Our Time - The Royal Society

Episode Date: March 23, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the formation of the Royal Society. In the 17th century the natural philosopher Francis Bacon heralded the new age of science. The frontispiece to his 1620 edition of the Instauratio Magna depicted a galleon travelling between the metaphorical Pillars of Hercules thought to lie at the Strait of Gibraltar and believed to mark the end of the known world. The image encapsulated Bacon's desire to sail beyond the limits set by Aristotle and the curriculum of the Ancient universities towards the new continent of science. Bacon imagined practical scientists engaged in a collaborative effort to expand knowledge of the natural world. But it was not until the turbulence of the Civil War and Commonwealth years had passed that such a group of scientists would gather together in London for this purpose, and form the Royal Society. Amongst its members were Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton, who explicitly rejected dogma and insisted on practical experimentation and observation. How was the Royal Society formed against a backdrop of religious and political strife? What was it about the way this group of men worked that allowed each individual to flourish in his own field? How successful was the Royal Society in disseminating the benefits of experimental science and what is its enduring legacy? With Stephen Pumfrey, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at the University of Lancaster; Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; Michael Hunter, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the natural philosopher Francis Bacon heralded the New Age of Science. The frontispiece of his 1620 edition of the Insta Ratio Magna depicted a galleon travelling between the metaphorical pillars of Hercules,

thought to lie in the strait of Gibraltar, and believed to mark the end of the known world. The image encapsulated Bacon's desire to sail beyond the limit set by Aristotle and the curriculum of the ancient universities towards the new continent of science. Bacon imagined practical scientists engaged in a collaborative effort

to expand knowledge of the natural world. But it wasn't until the turbulence of the Civil War and common law theorists had passed that such a group of scientists would gather together in London for this purpose and form what became the Royal Society. Among its early members were Robert Boyle, Robert Hook, Christopher Wren, and Isaac Newton, who rejected dogma and insisted on practical experimentation and observation.

How was the Royal Society formed against the backdrop of religious and political strife? What was it about the way these group of men worked that allowed each individual to flourish in his own field? And how successful was the Royal Society in disseminating the benefits of experimental science? With me to discuss the Royal Society, Alisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Stephen Pumfrey, senior lecturer in the history of science at the University of Lancaster, and Michael Hunter, Professor of History, at Birkbeck, University of London. Stephen Pumphrey, in 1626, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis was published.

Can you tell us about Bacon's vision of collaborative, institutional, experimental science that was to be so influential later in the century? Well, Bacon had a vision, which we could call in many ways as a forerunner of modern science. science. One of the aspects of that was that he thought that science should progress through the conducting of new experiments, new observations, and that these should be trusted rather than the tenets of ancient philosophers. And that appears in the Royal Society's motto, trust the word of no man, Nulius in Weber. He also has a vision of sciences inductive, that is to say, you must be extremely cautious about generalising until you've got as many facts as possible.

And again, the Royal Society committed itself to experimental philosophy, made it clear it didn't commit itself to any particular theory or overall philosophy. Another aspect, I think, is Bacon had a vision of a new motive for science. He was a very good turner of phrases, and his phrase in Latin was that science should be driven by negotium rather than otium, which really means that science should no longer be this of private, leisureed interests of contemplative individuals, but should be the business-like, organized. even state-directed pursuit of science in an applied direction to improve the human condition and so forth. So there was a new motivation which certainly again the Royal Society very much took up.

He also had religious motivations for this new vision. And one of them specifically was we think it seems that Bacon had millinarian tendencies. He seems to have thought that the new applied science, the improvement of the human condition, through medicines and so forth, would be a way. of restoring humankind's harmony with and dominion over nature that existed with Adam and Eve in the paradisic Garden of Eden before the fall. And that frontist piece that you mentioned actually has a little verse from the Bible at the bottom from Danigle which says many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased. You talked about the voyages of exploration. Here's Bacon hoping that knowledge

will be increased. And this is a verse which refers, or they thought refers to the last days. And that's something that the Royal Society didn't so much take up because those rather sort of specifically millinarian ideas were decidedly less popular in the restoration than he had been during the Cromwellian period. You've given it, you've thrown forward Bacon's ideas, as it were, 34 years of the formation of the Royal Society. Can you briefly look back? What was he opposed, is it too simplistic to say that he was saying Aristotle doesn't work anymore or we mustn't work like him anymore? No, I think that's almost okay. The only qualification we might make is that the Aristotelianism, as practice in the universities, was

considerably less empirical and founded upon experimental data-gatting. What is the nub of his argument with Aristotle, so we know where we are before we start this discussion? The nub of his objection to Aristotle or Aristotle as it dominated the 16th century is that this had ossified into a system of words and phrases and interconnected theories which everybody took to be true when in fact they weren't, and people were therefore seduced by the coherence of a discourse rather than the reality of the knowledge. So Francis Bacon, through this this pebble in the pond and it did ripple out. We have the civil war coming in and the Commonwealth 20 years of massive upheap.

But it did. And there was a group before the Royal Society who took that up. The Hartlib group. Can you, and the Oxford scientist too, can you just briefly tell us about the Hartlib group? Well, the Hartlib group were, and there were a very loose collection of people organized around this intelligence, Sir Samuel Hartlib, a German hot Protestant emigre, who found England, particularly under Cromwell, a congenial place to work. And they do take up this somewhat under...

underplayed millinarian notion in bacon. And for them very much, science of a new baconian kind was to be about the establishment of a godly commonwealth, of a state where people could live happily and harmoniously in good material conditions. And they put all of their efforts, a lot of their efforts into improving agriculture and husbandry and so forth as this notion of applied science to bring about, in many ways, the Second Coming of Christ. Cromwell's England would be the appropriate place for a godly Commonwealth and Christ's second coming. They weren't all motivated by that, but that was an

aspect of it, and by 1660, that becomes distinctly unfashionable. Samuel Hartley, the leader of the Circle, was one of the early founder members of the Royal Society, but he's a rather marginal figure, and that attitude of Baconism is a marginal one by 1660. So we can come to the founding of Royal Society

in 1660. We have the return of Charles II, we're at the end of the Commonwealth, we're only 10 years away from a terrible civil war with the unthinkable beheading of a king, the regicide, and yet this rather harmonious group comes together in 1660 in London, founded, as I said in Europe, after a lecture by Christopher Wren. Can you tell us why you think it came about at that particular time?

Well, we have to swing back to the 40s in Oxford. And it is the case, I think, very often, that conditions of war stimulate, scientific or the growth of knowledge. And this is a case in point. Between 1643 and 1646, Oxford was the royalist stronghold. It was actually besieged. It was actually a centre of action in a war.

And within Oxford were royalists who had graduated towards that centre. And they began to collaborate in the sort of experiments you can do in that situation. A lot of medical experiments with cadavers that are rescued, or cadapas from the conflict. A particular man, John Wilkins, who is at, in Oxford. Wadham College, becomes the warden of Wadham College in 1649,

draws into Oxford in the aftermath of the Civil War, a group which includes Robert Boyle, who he particularly he encountered outside Oxford, was so impressed with that he asked him to come to Oxford, William Petty, who is better known for measuring Ireland and doing a great survey of Ireland. Christopher Wren, who was actually recruited by Wilkins into Wadham College, Robert Hook, who is a young man at college in Oxford. And you get an actual ferment of activity, which is the kind of thing that Stephen was talking about of actually practical, hands-on experimental knowledge. Very exciting in Oxford.

And this is, as it were, to one side of the theories. It is, I think it is the great impetus to the scientific revolution because these people are obliged to be practical because they actually have no other means of outlet of their intellectual thinking. That is one argument that the drive for the Royal Society, if it came from this group in Oxford, you described very graphically. And you have the Puritanism, as Stephen said,

the religious element. If you must keep in mind, because it's a strong one, in another way with the Puritan. So it's playing in Oxford too, as well as it previously did 20 years earlier with Bacon. But then when the Royal Society came to be formed, it wasn't just that power group that came through, was it? It was the influences and the input came from another source. There was a Gresham group in London.

So in a way we have a London group who are, they are the Protestants, in my view. They are the people who are more in tune with the 10 years. of the Commonwealth. They've actually been working in London. 60 to 60. Exactly. The people that I was talking about are deliberately at some distance from London because they are not congenial to the regime. And you indeed have people like Sir Paul Neal with doing astronomy on his estate outside London because he's not allowed to leave his estate. He then becomes a founder member of the Royal Society.

So you've got two colliding religious groups. You've got, in fact, some quite high Anglicans who have been in Oxford, not all of them. Boyle is certainly not a high Anglican, but Hook, for instance, is. And then you have these much more congenially Protestant or Puritan figures in London, and that might explain why religion is actually ruled off the book in the early Royal Society. Just a final postcript, what you said before, moved to Michael Hunter. We are talking about not a group of, but a number of what could be called rich, wealthy gentleman, and amateurs around the country who are out of the battle

and want to be out of the Commonwealth's for various political reasons, are setting up laboratories in their own country houses and they come together when Charles I second comes back. Together with these groups like the heartlet groups. So it's wonderful, if you like, synthesis or synergy between two rather different temperamental groups. Michael Hunter, do you want to develop that? Do you see the political ecology of the time

and the religious drive, bringing these, helping to bring these people together in such a creative way. It is extraordinary, the range of people who one might have expected not to be able to talk to one another because of the political events that had preceded the foundation of the society. These are people who are vicious enemies, they'd been, families have been killing each other, they were dead on the battlefield just a few years before. We know how long civil wars can go on and here they are together, a lot of them. So can you develop that? That's fascinating.

Well, I think that there's a real commitment to the advancement of learning. to the Baconian project, which enables people to sink their differences, because they believe that it's worthwhile in its own right. And in some ways it didn't particularly matter, that I think they had sometimes somewhat different motivations because the terms of reference that were set by the scientific enterprise, and particularly I think by the programme laid out by Bacon, meant that there was a kind of method which they could join in

and the fact, as I say, that they were coming to it for different reasons was incidental to the fact that they could share on the intellectual goals. But there must have been magnetised to come. Was the magnetism the formation, obviously was, the formation of this society by the 12 men after the lecture by Iran? How did it get around? How did people say, oh, like we'd like to belong to that, even though we hate the people who are part of it?

I mean, there clearly were informal networks working, which had already been in existence and you've already heard a bit about those in the 1650s. Of course, people are coming back to England at this point. The group that hasn't yet figured in the groups who have been described by Lisa and Stephen are the people who have actually been in exile with the Royal Court who came back.

And so a further key component in the early Royal Society are people like the... Queen's Chancellor, Lord Brunker, who becomes the first president of the society, who's a prominent royal courtier. And also Sir Robert Murray, a Scottish politician who, again, I think he's very central to the society, who represent a sort of courtly interest, who'd been even closer to the king, even than these royalist figures who'd been having to live on their estates or whatever during the interregnum. Let's talk about the king for a moment.

When Charles II came back and this society was formed, he very quickly made it a royal society, he, as it were, leapt on it. Now, why was that? And that's an influence. What sort of influence was it? I mean, I think it's because of having these people at court who can go to the king and say, there's this new society you ought to be supporting it, that he gives it the sort of royal impromata that he does. I mean, it has to be said that Charles's enthusiasm was distinctly mixed. I mean, there are times when he's quite keen on the society, and then times when he really doesn't have much time for it, and even is heard mocking it at one point in the 1660. So he sort of blows hot and cold, and yet having the sort of royal imprimatur, I think, is very important to the society and is organized by these prominent courtiers who actually sort of go to the king and his close advisers and say, you know, this is what we need and can you help us? Can you give us an idea of the number of meetings they had, where they met, what they did at these meetings, just as a sort of practical thing.

We've had a few names thrown up, so maybe we've got enough names. More will come up as we could go. But where did they meet? Was it weekly, monthly? What did they do? They meet at Gresham College because it's a large and rather underused building in the centre of London, which a number of those associated with it have quite close connections with. So that makes a very good centre. Gresham College was in Bishop's Gate.

And so it was just on the edge of the city. They meet once a week. And basically they sort of do science once a week, you know, one afternoon a week through the 1660s. They do experiments. That was the idea to do, to actually, you know, create the scientific knowledge on the premises at the Royal Society.

And early on, there are a lot of experiments done, and they do actually have equipment that they are able to use. Boyle gives them one of his air pumps in May 1661, which was in a few months of the foundation of society. How do you qualify to get in in the Royal Society? If you're a sort of scientist working away in Northampton,

I mean, what do you say? I hear this is going on. It sounds wonderful. How do I get in? Well, initially, it's done, obviously if you start with a small group and you aspire to have a larger one, it's initially done by invitation. So the 12 people meet,

and they come up with a list of about 50 names who they think are going to be suitable and basically sort of work through those inviting them to join. And it's done by a kind of informal process of nomination thereafter that you have to be proposed. In fact, we know the names of the proposers, so there's quite interesting evidence of the sort of networks of influence and acquaintance which leads to the growth of the fellowship. And then clearly it's seen that there are going to be some eminent people who would be useful to have on side, as it were, so prominent courtiers and other people like that at Altape. But even the king himself get nominated and unelected as fellows.

You heard his own private laboratory, didn't it for a while, a chance, a second. But it can be seen, although he began to ridiculately. later on and he didn't deliver the goods he wanted. It can be seen as a smart political move by Charles the second. It cost him nothing. He brought together people from all arts and parts of what had been a, for 20 years, deeply striped-driven country, which is difficult to imagine so close to our own history. Can you tell us about some of the early projects that they gathered around? Because one of the interesting things seems to me, reading what you three have written, is that they were gathering around projects.

There were little cliques, but there wasn't a place. but what kept them together was the projects and the bigger project of science. Can you tell us about the project, Stephen? Yeah, I mean, I think because the Royal Society is the first scientific society, the first Royal Society, there's a bit of a problem trying to decide, you know, what are they going to do, what is the relation with the King, in what ways are they useful to the King? And I think that that Baconian vision of sort of useful science

in the service of society, even the state, is certainly one way in which they think that they can justify their royal patronage. And so although there are a lot of projects, like any sort of new and enthusiastic society, they immediately form themselves into lots of committees and think that they're going to change the world next year, there's a mechanical committee, a georgical committee for agriculture, none of which actually do very much work. But a lot of the projects do have this kind of practical focus, don't they? I mean, for example, you know, many of us know what we, and indeed Robert Hook would call Hook's Law of Springs,

of the relation between force and tension. and that's a very good theoretical scientific accomplishment. But he's doing it because of a project to invent a perfect spring-driven watch or chronometer in order to solve the longitude problem, to impress the Admiralty, perhaps to get a patent for himself. This is something which the Royal Society knew the Admiralty and indeed Charles II would have been very interested in. So these kind of considerations do drive quite all these practical projects,

but sometimes they go wrong in this kind of difficult negotiation. The catamaran. Oh, the catamaran. Yeah. Well, Lisa mentioned William Petty, and Petty had lots of interest. He had was interest in the air pump. I think it was to William Petty that the King laughed about his fellows wasting their time weighing the air.

But Petty also had an interest in what he called the philosophy of shipping, ship design, and that certainly was of interest to the king. And Petty basically invented the Catamaran. And the Royal Society could see its advances. This is the time of the Anglo-Dutch War. They decide to back it. A trial ship is built and raced at sea. It flies the Royal Society's flag.

It's called the experiment. There's real sort of backing for this. And in many ways, it works very well. It goes quite fast. It carries a big payload with a small draw. Unfortunately, it does tend to break apart and drown the crew, but that's another matter. And then someone tips Charles off that the catamaran allows big loads, big guns, for example, to be carried in shallow harbors. Now, what's the Dutch problem that the English haven't got?

They've got shallow harbours and we've got deep harbours. And at this point, everything goes cold. And in the minutes of the Royal Society, it's recorded that the matter of navigation being a state affair, it is not fit to be discoursed of by the Royal Society. So these projects and their relationship with the state are a very problematic area in this kind of first attempt to link science as a broader social ends. And there's a great moment that occurs for them. A terrible moment in some ways a great moment.

There's the Great Fire of London, Lisa Jardine, destroyed as everybody and this huge parts of the city. Did the Royal Society leap in and said, this is our moment, we can do things here? Well, listening to what Stephen says, you've heard that there was this aspiration to deliver something that would really pay off for the country. Remember, the country is virtually bankrupt.

In fact, goes bankrupt in 1672. And the catamaran was stopped. The air pump didn't deliver anything of particular financial interest. We are coming to the air pump later. The fire of London destroys the commercial, in September 1666, destroys the heart of the commercial heart of London. It is just that opportunity that you would expect the Royal Society to step into. And indeed, members of the Royal Society like Hook and Wren become the main drivers of the rebuilding of London.

Wren's plans for London were fantastic. Well, Wren did plan a kind of grandiose, Grand, I think. Well, grandiose was wrens because it was sort of centered. It was just like Paris is now. It was radial. It was demagogic, really. And actually his plan wasn't used.

They rebuilt on the streets of London, but of course his buildings dominated London. And Robert Hook was, in fact, the severe who laid out London. But the disaster for the Royal Society, the annoyance to the presidents, was that these two men launched on that enterprise in their own right and did not do it in the name of the Royal Society, and that becomes a big issue at the Royal Society. Nevertheless, in their own name, these men launched really serious initiatives for big science, big science being the monument to the Great Fire,

which is constructed as a Zenith telescope. It is an enormous, it's sort of Jodrell Bank-sized telescope, could only have been built on a tabular rasa of a burnt-out city is used, though not very successfully, for 20 odd years after it's built for scientific experiments. So it is literally a purpose-built scientific instrument. And in a way that stands for what science could achieve after the Great Fire, only because of the Great Fire. But alas, as Branca and other senior figures of the Royal Society wrung their hands about,

it was in the name of Wren and Hook per se, and the Royal Society got slightly sidelined. Was there any other advances in building technology after that day... Yes. Can you just give us one or two because I want to move on something else? Okay. The dome of St Paul's is built as a collaboration between engineer hook and architect Wren. The principles of arches on which that high throne dome is based are discussed at the Royal Society. Experimental models are shown. There is one of these wonderful broad discussions of the consequences of enlarging the small model that they've built to large scale. So that's a very good example of re-example of.

Royal Society input into the rebuilding of London. Michael Hunter, can we now move to the air pump? The invention of the air pump with Robert Boyle and Robert Hook, two of the central and emblematic figures of the early Royal Society became an important reference point in the early as of the Royal Society itself. Can you tell us what it did and why it was so important? Well, it was a vacuum chamber which you could manipulate, so basically you were able to discover the properties of air,

by seeing what happened when you removed it, I mean, putting it very simply. Of course, the actual creation of the air pump had preceded the Royal Society. This was a piece of equipment that Hook had created for Boyle in the final years of the Interregnum at Oxford. And Boyle's initial book, publishing the findings of the air pump, was produced, came out in the summer of 1660, some months before the Royal Society was founded. it. So in a way I think

that takes us back to the way in which the Royal Society was capitalising on this enthusiasm and activity that was already there. But it did immediately take this to its heart and it almost became symbolic of the Royal Society, the air pump, in

the official history of the Royal Society that its organisers thought was necessary quite early on in its history and ultimately came out in 1667, having been delayed by the plague and the fire. This is Thomas Spratt's history of the Royal Society. This has a frontist piece, which was designed by John Evelyn. And the air pump is shown,

sort of almost emblematically in that. And so it becomes, you know, quite central to the society's sort of corporate effort. And it's used as, you know, demonstrations are done on it for eminent visitors and the like. And so, you know, it becomes very central to the the Royal Society's corporate activity. We ought, maybe because we're talking so broadly to say that the air pump, when you evacuate this chamber, it's generally done with a small animal or bird inside it, and it's an experiment in respiration,

and you watch as the animal quietly dies. And that was regarded as an extremely interesting experiment to watch, but it is, of course, actually producing scientific data. So the air pump is a beautiful example of exactly what the Royal Society wanted, which was something spectacular that you could do. demonstrate with which also had a sort of payoff which people would go, oh my goodness, that. You could also say, Stephen, that the relationship between Boyle and Hook exemplified quite a lot about the Royal Society, the nature and the texture of it itself, didn't it, these two very different

men working together? Yes, you could. I mean, the Boyle Hook relationship is a very interesting one. Hook comes from really quite a poor family. His father's kind of church, poor curate on the Isle of White, a far-flung part of England. He relies upon some sort of scholarships to get through school in London and Oxford. Boyle is one of the richest men in England. They're clearly both. Is it Cork? Son of the Earl of Cork and the father of chemistry, as they are.

And yeah, they come together in Oxford. Hook is clearly a very gifted man, and particularly a very gifted experimenter and sort of builder of machines, designer of machines. So the Hook Boyle relationship was a kind of marriage made in heaven. Boyle's got the philosophical background, he's got the clout, he's got the money, he's got the natural philosophical expertise as well. And Hook also has this practical ability, and out of this collaboration comes the air pump. And Boyle clearly always had a tremendous respect for Hook as an intellect, as a natural philosopher.

But this wasn't always apparent to the outside world, because Hook is not rich. He needs a job. He's Boyle's servant. He becomes the official settled curator experiments at the Royal Society, which some people have seen as the first paid professional scientist. I myself see it more as a kind of job as an employee or as a servant. And indeed the minutes of the Royal Society record that when, more at the same time as Boyle donated the air pump,

Oldenberg, the Secretary, records his thanks to Boyle's obligingness for dispensing with Hook's service so that he can now come and serve the Royal Society. So Hook's in a difficult, marginal position there. Although I think as good an analogy as to think of him as a servant would be to think of him as a professional academic. I think the role of the curator of the Royal Society is in some ways more analogous to being an Oxford or Cambridge professor in the period than it is to being a kind of a technician. So I think one needs to be a little careful about how one categorises Hook at this point. And of course, Hook is a very himself, a very original and innovative natural philosopher.

and his book, Micrographia, which is the spectacular book, which demonstrates the findings of the microscope, is also an incredible exploration of all sorts of scientific theories that interested him, all of which he gives his theories of, and it almost represents a complete system of natural philosophy, as well as presenting the detailed findings of the microscope, which is what it's mainly remembered for in retrospect. But he specifically apologises to the Royal Society and the Frantus piece

for breaking their rules by going beyond their remit by including those theories. And it is licensed by the Royal Society. So in a way that it's the second publication, which actually is a Royal Society publication. Stephen, in his opening remarks, talked about the one of the things he said about Bacon was the belief in collaborative efforts. Now, where is that in this? Can you give us some examples of the...

We heard of a hook and boss, that's one example, but one or two others. In many ways, the best example, maybe the first publication of the Royal Society, which actually takes us back to the theme of useful science, which has already come up. And this is John Evelyn Silver, which is a popular book, which continues to be reprinted throughout Evelyn's lifetime, and is increasingly identified with Evelyn himself, but was, in fact, the result of collaborative work by the Royal Society, stimulated by the Navy commissioners who were worried about the supply of timber to the Navy.

but this leads to a great investigation of our wery culture in various shapes and forms by both fellows of the Royal Society and also other people who inform them. And all of this is brought together processed by Evelyn and published as a book, which seems to have been genuinely influential and important in inspiring reforestation and just sort of improving a national economy. And it is a highly collaborative effort. And if you wanted an example actually from within the bounds of the Royal Society, then it's a rather squeamish experiments with vivisection and on large dogs, looking at circulation of the blood, intravenous injection, blood transfusion, those are carried out by a group, petty, lower, hook, boil, Wren,

and they are really, it's teamwork. And I think that really if we wanted to, the legacy of the Royal Society is genuinely, teamwork. I mean, there's this tension between Hook and Boyle because Hook is paid by Boyle and that's right through this period is a tension. But when you get five men round a dissecting table with their, you know,

Wren contributes the silver syringe, Hook is brilliant at actually doing dissection, lower is overseeing the process and so on. You're actually getting modern team science and you're getting it in a way that you do not get it in France, you do not get it in Italy,

and I think that we forget sometimes that the weekly meetings with the stimulus of Robert Hook's experiment do something for the growth of knowledge, which is quite unique. Stephen, can you tell us how they disseminated this knowledge and information? References have been made to papers, but can you just bring that together so the listeners have some idea what the society is doing to get its work out there, work that Lisa has been talking about,

inclusion stuff and stuff. Well, as Michael said, the Royal Society was given by the King permission to print books, in a time of censorship was really quite a privilege. Oxford and Cambridge University presses weren't very pleased about it. They didn't make particularly good use of that, actually. In fact, by around 1686 to 7, the Royal Society sort of has the opportunity to back fund two publishing ventures, either Isaac Newton's Principia or Francis Willoughby's History of Fishes, and they make the wrong choice,

as the piles of remainder coppers in their attempts to pay people in unsold copies of the history of fishes turns out. So that's not actually perhaps the major way. The major way was through an organ called the Philosophical Transactions. It still exists as the House Journal of the Royal Society, and people have called it the first scientific journal. And I think in some ways that is the case. The Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, another German emigray, made sure that the very best experiments, the very best reports,

the best letters and work from other people were collated into this work and published. And as the fame of the Royal Society grew, he was able to include really quite outstanding work sent from foreign savant, foreign virtuosi as well. And so it became the major way of disseminating. However, just as Lisa said that

Hook and Wren went off by themselves to rebuild the city London, it's important to remember that the philosophical attractors is as much Oldenburg's kind of private money-making publishing venture as it is the official policy of the Royal Society. Michael Hunter. I was going to point out

I mean, the philosophical transactions grows out of Oldenberg's principal activity, which in a way he's best known for in retrospect, and this is as a great correspondent. From the early years of the Royal Society, he had set up the most amazing correspondence network there's almost ever been of incoming and outgoing letters reporting on scientific discoveries from all over Europe, all of which is reported to the Royal Society and discussed there, and he then composes a letter,

the sort of corporate wisdom of the Royal Society about the findings that have come forward and how they could be pursued, etc., etc. And the philosophical transactions in a sense is a kind of almost institutionalisation of that manuscript activity of writing letters that have preceded it. So obviously a much more efficient way

of disseminating information to a wide range of informants and interested parties all over Europe to publish in, you know, publish, a few hundred copies rather than to write it out individually by hand for each of your correspondence. But, you know, there's a close interrelationship there between the activity of correspondence and the origins of scientific journalism that Stevens described. I just want to have this point made briefly and then move on to Newton.

But you've been talking with great enthusiasm and enormous knowledge about this Royal Society which has an aura of such excellence and grandeur about it. and ripples through the centuries and started so much and did so much in practice. And yet at the time, as I understand what we wrote, it was subject to ceaseless hostility, ridicule, satire, and Lisa, can you fill it in or no? Well, to the extent it had been set up for commercial payoffs, it gave none. And that was very much, I think at court, that was the source of ridicule.

They're spending all their time on the weighing of air, plays like the virtuoso, which were just mocked the antics of the fellows. I think it was a straight misunderstanding, lack of understanding of what any of this, it simply didn't seem to them that there was any outcome that was of any value to the society. That was the main thing about it. And there was, I mean, they did do some fairly ridiculous things that we're not talking about. I mean, they did, amongst all this bona fide science we're talking about, actually if you read the correspondence, these wonderful volumes at the Royal Society,

which anybody can still go and see, there is an enormous amount of, about finding a two-headed calf or whether a particular charm will ward off snake bites. And a lot of stuff, we can superstition. Quite a bit of alchemy, quite a bit of superstition. And there must have been people who felt that this was really a waste of time, though not of money, because the king never put any money into it. And we could ask ourselves whether there would be more payoff if he had. Briefly.

And week after week sometimes there are all societies meetings look more like a kind of talking shop than an experimental workshop. I think there's also an element of a kind of humanistic critique underlying attacks like Shadberls in the Virtuoso. One of the characters in the Virtuezzo says that one criticizes the hero of the central figure of the Virtuoso himself at one point on the grounds that he spent seven years understanding all the several types of spiders but doesn't understand mankind. And I think, you know, there are resonances of the sort of humanity science divide that has existed ever since in those early attacks on the Royal Society, alongside, I think, the sort of pure ignorance that may be apparent from some of the comments that are made. And perhaps we should bring in the religious dimension again here, because if one is more concerned about kinds of spiders than mankind, some theologians, the orator at Oxford University of University of. example, made serious attacks upon the Royal Society because the view was, what could be argued, that if you spend your time doing experiments with matter rather than sort of discoursing about the soul, then you're going to think of the world in more material than spiritual terms.

And although the Royal Society is obviously not an atheistic institution, there were many people who felt that this new direction in science was seriously prejudicial to religion. I've got to bring in Newton now, and he brings everything together, because his relationship by the Royal Society, we have somebody who was at a time recognised, even in 1660s as the greatest or about to be the greatest English, world scientists and so and so forth. And he's an alchemist as we know

and he's deeply religious as we know and he has a very naughty relationship with the Royal Society of which eventually, after Hook's death, he becomes president and alters the whole thing. Now can you encapsulate Newton's engagement with the Royal Society for us all? Well, I think you did when you said after

hook's death he became president. This was no accident, I think. Yeah, I mean, it was tricky. Right from the beginning, in 1672... Because he was based at Camerite. He was based in Cambridge, yes, and in 1672, he communicated to Oldenburg at the Royal Society an early draft of his new theory of optics,

in which, as Newton typically thought in many ways, rightly so, he had to have experimentally proven his nature of light. And Oldenberg passes it around, and Hook replies that this is actually a rather good hypothesis, Isaac, and Newton goes ballistic, because for him this is demonstrable experimental proof, not another hypothesis. So relationships sour there.

There's another run in in the later 1670s when Hook and Newton are both moving towards an inverse square law of gravity and they both think that each other are stealing their work and so forth. And things go very, very badly. And it's for that reason that... Well, Newton ups and backs and backs to Cambridge, doesn't it really, that? And he won't come out of his lair until he sorted it out in his own way. Yeah.

I'm being very vernacular. Well, I mean, actually, by the 1690s, he's moved to London, he's a warden of the mid, but he's still not really involved. That's after he's published Principia. Oh, yes. After he's done, yeah. After his own. Yes.

And indeed, I mean, the Royal Society does have a sort of secondhand part into being the midwife of the prequiv. Because it's Edmund Halley who persuades and indeed, I think financially backs. And does publish. But again, he's doing it as much as an individual and friend as the emissary of the Royal Society. Right. Well, I mean, I'm just going to say something about Hook. I mean, it seems to be that the whole thing was all rather unfortunate because I think that when the initial findings from Cambridge, from Newton, came in,

Hook was given the job, actually, of commenting on them. And I think he was, you know, rather busy and was a bit offhand about it. And, you know, really didn't take it as seriously as he should have done. And in a sense, you know, that sort of, that was the sort of, everything else really sort of went wrong from then onwards. 30 years of standoff. And, you know, it's absolutely classic, isn't it, between great intellectuals? I mean, I'm sure that Michael is right, that Robert Hook gave it half his mind. He was patronising, he was the older man, and Newton went and sulked, roughly, for...

But there isn't much evidence that even when... Just a second. And we know you back, Hook, who Newton didn't go and sulked. Newton went and got on with his own work and produced one of the greatest books ever wrote. That's not sulking. But in asking whether, about the relationship with the Royal Society, he sulked vis-a-vis the all society. He went back and probably... If they're going to sort of dismiss his stuff,

he wrote in a manuscript that natural philosophy is a litigious lady and he wanted no more to do with her. But in fact, the trajectory is just a little bit more complicated than we've been saying. So there's in the 1670s there's this run in about light and about

Newton's demonstration of the true nature of light, which you know is really amazing. Then Newton, I think, does go and sulk for the remainder of the 1670s. And so when Huck actually becomes secretary of the Royal Society after Oldenburg's death just around 1680, he is commissioned by the Royal Society to write to Newton and saying, well, what have you been finding out?

And they have quite a reasonably amicable exchange of letters, in which, in fact, Hook almost certainly suggested key ideas to Newton, which helped to produce the Principia. And so then Halle and Newton are discussing the Principia in 1686, hook hears about it and says, I think I need a bit of acknowledgement here. And this is when Newton really goes to ballistic can actually go through the proofs deleting Hook's name in places where he had actually acknowledged as a degree of help.

And anyway, and so, as, well, the rest is history. When Newton became present in 1703, he really tried to impose his own, he did, impose his own personality and above all his own scientific method. He could be said to have coordinated or even invented the same. scientific method. Let's not go into that to the moment, but he developed it and he established it so powerfully that he became the method from then on. Can you tell us what effect that had on the Royal Society? He moved to London. He was the grand man now. He had this massive breakdown, but he'd finished his great work, although he still kept working. Can you tell

us what he did briefly, what he did for the Royal Society then? Well, for the period of his presidency, he did turn the Royal Society into as effective, if not more effective a body than it had ever been since its early years. It was in a pretty poor state in the 1690 under Hanslow. and I'm afraid it would return to a rather parlous stage in the middle of the 18th century. But during Newton's presidency, he reimposed a discipline of experiment. He recruited able experimenters to do experiments. There was good work, progressive work, programs conducted meeting by meeting.

It's true that he largely recruited experimenters and experiments to further his own natural philosophical theory. And so attractive principles like not just gravity, but electricity and magnetism and so forth, become the big topics at the Royal Society. Indeed, electrical science is pretty much established as a result of Newton and his collaborators' work. We'll have to stop there with electricity. Thank you to Lisa Jardine, Michael Hunter and Stephen Pumfrey. Thanks very much. And next week we'll be talking about the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, crowned on Christmas Day 800. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com. Radio 4.