In Our Time - The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 1

Episode Date: January 4, 2010

As part of the BBC's year of science programming, Melvyn Bragg looks at the history of the oldest scientific learned society of them all: the Royal Society. Melvyn travels to Wadham College, Oxford, where under the shadow of the English Civil War, the young Christopher Wren and friends experimented in the garden of their inspirational college warden, John Wilkins. Back in London, as Charles II is brought to the throne from exile, the new Society is formally founded one night in Gresham College. When London burns six years later, it is two of the key early Fellows of the Society who are charged with its rebuilding. And, as Melvyn finds out, in the secret observatory in The Monument to the fire, it is science which flavours their plans.

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 programme. I'm here at the Royal Society on London's Mall, overlooking St James Park, two royal palaces, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

Here with the assembled fellows of Britain's oldest and most prestigious learned society, where they're celebrating a birthday. In 1660, a group of like-minded men decided to form a club for the promoting physico-mathematico-experimental learning, something we might now call science, but which in 1660 was a rather novel

and controversial type of philosophy. The president of the Royal Society, Lord Rees, has just come in, and proceedings for this special day are about to begin. Ladies and gentlemen, may I welcome you all to the... the Society for its anniversary day. The Royal Society was founded in 1660 under the patronage

of King Charles II and he presented the Mace which lies here in front of us to signify this is a formal meeting of the Society. The Mace is made of silver and on its upper end there are embossed figures of a rose, a harp, a thistle and a Fleur-de-Lee, representing England, Ireland, Scotland and France. The Mace is very like those in the houses of Parliament Big, silver, a richly gilt club. Since we were founded in 1660, this is a special year. This is a special meeting as it marks the beginning of our 350th anniversary year, during which we are having a variety of special events and celebrations.

Bolstered by a royal charter, the fellows went on to create and perform a distinguished and crucially influential combination of roles in the nation's intellectual life, as advisor, benefactor, investigator, debating club, administrator, arbiter, diplomat, patron, servant, publisher and populariser of all things science. This week, from Monday to Thursday,

I'll be examining what they were up to and what they thought they were up to and discussing how that dazzling pantheon of restoration thought has managed to survive and adapt for 350 years. Fellows have included Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. Royal Society had a Foreign Secretary before that post was created for our government. And this year alone, three fellows of the Royal Society have gained Nobel Prizes. The international reach of the Royal Society is quite extraordinary.

There are almost 800 events happening all over the world this year. I've been on the committee which has helped organise and institute them. and the worldwide response has been breathtaking. And our story this week, the story of Royal Society, in its role in British Science, doesn't begin in London, but in my old college, Watham College, in Oxford. That was founded 400 years ago this year, and it was therefore a relatively young college around 1650

when a group of inquisitive young gentlemen would meet in the fellow's garden to conduct scientific experiments. Here on the lawn, I'm standing where they built clockwork flying machines and developed the first mechanical sea drill, amongst many other wonderful objects. They were doing this in a period of extreme social and political disturbance. In 1642, the English Civil War had begun, dividing families and communities, and splitting the establishment.

Under Cromwell's Commonwealth, there were purges of the universities to oust royalist sympathisers. Some academic careers were aborted. For others, it was an opportunity for rapid promotion. One man to benefit was John Wilkins, who became warden of Wadham College in 1640. Intellectually brilliant, he was a Cromwellian.

He married Cromwell's widowed sister, but he also managed to secure the favour and friendships of royalists, many of whom had done work which would be influential in the formation of the society. Inspired by a new type of knowledge, experimental philosophy, he started a club at Wadham for gentlemen who shared his interest, and he succeeded in attracting many of the most gifted young natural philosophers of his time. The Dyrish John Evelyn on visiting Oxford in July 1655, for mentions dropping in at Wadham College.

We all dined at that most obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins at Wadham, who was the first who showed me the transparent apiaries. He had also contrived a hollow statue, which gave a voice and uttered words, by a long and concealed pipe which went to its mouth, whilst one spake through it at a good distance, and which at first was very surprising.

These transparent beehives and the talking statue You were somewhere very close to where we're standing now, Alan Chapman. You're a historian of size and a member of this college. Can you tell us a little more about John Wilkins? He was an astonishing figure, a man of enormous ingenuity, personal charm, immense erudition. He became Warden of Wadham at the age of 34. At the age of 24, 10 years before, he'd actually written a book on how one might fly to the moon, the nature of contrivance and machine,

and he was part of a whole culture which was fascinated by self-acting devices. How did he manage politically being connected to Cromwell so closely to land up such a position in what had been a royalist stronghold? Well, it was an extraordinarily persuasive figure. He was 34 when he became warden, and in April 1648, when he was intruded, he was literally forced into the college by the parliamentary establishment.

So the expectation was, you should have got a hard-lying Puritan here. Instead, what Wadden got was a man of immense, immense breadth of spirit, candor, ingenuity, tolerance, warmth, who actually boosted the college's undergraduate intake as royalist families and families who were not themselves Puritan were willing to entrust their sons to him. I'm also joined by Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science

at Cambridge University. Can you give us some idea whom Wilkins gathered round him here at Wadham College? Yes, it was a very impressive group. I think two things matter most to a, the story of the roots of the Royal Society. One is, Wilkins was very keen on what we might call collective work. He was very clear that progress in knowledge relied on group activities. And secondly, it happened that in Oxford from the late 1640s onwards,

one had an extraordinarily impressive, active group of men across the disciplines. No doubt the most famous now would include the young Christopher for Wren. He was one of the leading mathematicians of Oxford, a superb astronomer, and a designer of extremely ingenious devices. So about how many men would there be here, Alan? When you look at the original list mentioned, probably about 10 altogether, but of course they would have had many friends in other colleges. You would have had, of course, the young Robert Hook brought in. Now, Hook was a figure, really a contemporary of Wren's. Hook was at Christchurch, Ren was here at Wadham. they formed a relationship here that was to last to the end of both of their lives.

And it was a friendly one, it was about astronomy, about mathematics, about anatomy, about architecture, and of course the young Robert Boyle, an Irish aristocrat, invited by Wilkins not to become a member of the university, but to simply reside in the high street and set up a laboratory there and to join the group of friends. To take advantage of this location, we're next to the College Chapel, and there are a couple of iron sundial known ones sticking out from there. Were they part of the experiments? There's a pair of dials on the chapel botras facing south. The bottom one, which is a very simple dial.

I suspect probably dates from quite early on in the college as a simple timepiece. But then, in 1670, Wren gave a clock, a very new state-of-the-art pendulum clock to the college. Now, that was much more accurate than earlier clocks. And I think the upper dial may, no point, may have been devised for actually regulating the clock. There's a possibility. Samichavis, sometimes said the Royal Society should be known as Wadham's gift to the world. Is there any truth in that?

I think that's a wild exaggeration. Though were it true, Wadham should be very proud. There were a host of other organisations, not just in Oxford. Indeed, of course, not just in Britain. It's very important to remember that many of these young, bright intellectuals had also travelled. They'd been in Paris, in northern Italy. Some of them had learned at first hand their new philosophy from the new masters who'd arisen in Florence and Paris

and the German lands in Amsterdam in the 1640s. But more importantly than that, I think one has to remember that in order to pursue the new philosophy, you had to be urbane. That's to say, you needed an enormous amount of infrastructure. So that, for example, one of the things that Oxford offered were printers, stationers. And many of these young scholars and virtuosi printed their works either here or shipped

them down to London for publication. And publication was a crucial part of natural knowledge. So was the ability to acquire hardware. So when one's talking about the new philosophy, you're always talking, it seems to me, about machines, engines, pumps, microscopes, telescopes, sun dials, new forms of measuring instrument. And although that's always private and informal, it relies on increasingly robust networks between places like Oxford and notably the capital, London, where from at least the 1630s and 40s at Gresham College and in the emerging civil society of Republican London, you begin to see a host of groups which can be compared with the Wadham Club. As well as the formal institutions of Oxford Learning, there were other

less formal places to come and discuss ideas. We're in one now, just as noisy, I presume, as it was in the 1650s and it's claimed that it's been serving coffee here since then. Simon Schaffer, why is the Royal Society such an important institution in British culture and in world culture? It seems to me that the 21st century will be dominated by the great problem of how to reconcile the sciences, which are perhaps the most powerful cultural force in modernity, with the demands of social and political accountability and order. And the Royal Society's attempt at that solution. It has a lot to teach us about how those crucial relationships should be set up. I'm also joined again by Alan. These coffee houses, and there are several of these in

Oxford, our Chapman, of the period, of the time that we're discussing, pre the formal beginning of the Royal Society, were called Penny Universities. Did they merit that appellation? Was that a bit self-vaunting? It's a fairly good idea, because often that was the price of a cup of coffee, you see. But on the other hand, bearing it in money, it was a lot more expensive than ale, and hence it was a bit like today going somewhere for double whiskies, which is pretty pricey. But the whole idea was, with a great wonder of coffee,

is that you could drink it all day long and never fall over. Now, of course, the alehouse, the wine shop, you'd collapse. You got merrier and more active. You read Hook's diary of his coffee shop jaunt, his coffee shop crawls, where they get wilder and whiter in their discussions, and ultimately start mentioning slept not when they went to bed. But the coffee houses started really out of the apothecaries, because it was the apothecris in Oxford who sold exotic perfumery, things like that,

found that you could boil them down, boil the beans down, sell the juice, and the university loved it. This coffee shop that we're in now, which goes back at least to the middle of the 17th century, is next to University College in the High Street. University College, one of the founding colleges of the university, famous for its medieval philosophy. Medievalism was just leaving Oxford at the end of the 16th, early 17th century, and one of the men who broke through that was Francis Bacon.

How was he influential in leading to the formation of the raw society? but more importantly leading to the idea of the new, Salamshire. I think Bacon's role is fundamental, and the fathers of the Royal Society looked to Bacon as an extraordinarily useful precedent. Why so, since he was a corrupt lawyer who'd been busted for taking bribes, whose moral life was none of the finest.

Bacon had arranged the publication of a string of works that made three claims which were indispensable for propagandists for the new state. science. First of all, the claim that knowledge is power. That's to say that if you understood the world, you could act more powerfully in it, and that the most reliable form of knowledge that would give you this power was knowledge of nature. Secondly, by producing phenomena never seen before, in other words, doing what we would now call experiments, knowledge could at last advance. And finally, that this would be best achieved by hardware.

But I think there's also something absolutely fascinating about the role of experiment in all this. This was a group of people who were, amongst other things, fascinated by their own bodies. They did a vast number of experiments on themselves. It's no coincidence, for example, that one of the most celebrated early experiments of the Royal Society was the first recorded transfusion of blood, the blood of a sheep, into a... coffee and pub habituay called Arthur Coga. Did he survive? He survived.

And when he was asked, when Coga was asked why he'd let himself go through this experiment, an experiment he went through in a state of almost complete inebriation, he said, because there is a symbolic resemblance between the blood of the lamb and the blood of Christ. Oxford wasn't the only city measured out with coffee shops. They were also springing up in Restoration London. and places where friends could meet, discuss and dispute informally. But if you wanted a more formal approach to learning, you could always attend lectures at Gresham College.

Founded by the Elizabethan philanthropist Sir Thomas Gresham, lectures at the college were given by distinguished professors, and they were free. For 100 years on, the college is still providing free public lectures. But Gresham College wasn't only a centre of learning. Because of the people it attracted, it became a catalyst for the formation of the Royal Society. The original premises of the college are long gone.

But the hall we're in now dates from the 14th century and serves as the current home of the college. Now here in Barnard's Inn Hall in Hoban, I'm still with Alan Chapman. Alan, why does Gresham come into the story here? Well, Gresham was all of the great educational foundations of the 17th century. Sir Thomas Gresham was a great city merchant who founded the Royal Exchange. He left no children, and when his wife passed away, their great house in Bishopsgate was to be given to the Mercer's Company

and the city of London as a great academic foundation. I have called it Britain's first institution of adult education. It had seven professors paid for by a liberal endowment and anyone could walk in off the street and listen to lectures on astronomy, geometry, rhetoric, and this meant that you had a tremendous resource. Now, because of the city and the city's fascination with science and trade and business, there was a naturally strong scientific bent to it.

and Gresham had become a sort of intellectual focus, especially of a scientific kind, and in many ways in 1658, 1659, it was the obvious place to hold a scientific meeting. And this was where Christopher Wren came, he was Professor of Astronomy from 1657, and after one of his lectures, he called his friends together, or they were there, and they accompanied him, and that's where we begin. This is really where it starts, because very, very central to the whole nature of the Royal Society is a group of friends. It was basically a very similar pattern constitutionally to an Oxford or Cambridge Fellowship

and they simply rather like a group of friends just meet in Wren's rooms afterwards as a resident professor. There they hold their first meetings of what becomes the Royal Society. We're joined here by Lisa Jardine, Centina Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University

of London. Can I just get the character of this meeting even more finally described if possible between the two of you. Starting with you Lisa Jardine. We're in London at a time of great perturbation. The king's been executed just a few years before. Royalists have fled to the country estates or staying in some royalist towns, certainly not in London, and yet a lot of royalists are engaged in what we eventually will call science. So what was his audience? Were they all men who had gone along with Cromwell? Were that who he was talking to?

Were they already themselves studying what we now call science? There are a very mixed bunch the group who first meet at Gresham College, a fascinating mixed bunch. At least two of them, Murray and Bruce, have been abroad. Murray in Maastricht and Bruce for some of the time in Bremen, so they have

been away, they are royalists. They're drifting back because the regime is becoming less suffocating. There are then people who have gone along with the Commonwealth regime, including John Wilst's

Wilkins, absolutely pivotal figure from Wadham, who has very carefully trimmed to the Commonwealth side and will trim back again to the royalist side. And then there are young men like Wren who come from very royalist backgrounds, but have had to adjust themselves. Are we talking about this stage about a group who had a purpose or is it just for pass el-the-ton? I mean, that was a thing to do one night and that's what they did. They certainly had a purpose, but of course a lot of them would have varied to some degree in their interests. Obviously, you would have had many. you would have had astronomers, you would have had people interested in geomagnetism, in geography. But I think central to it, they all shared an idea that science had moved faster in the previous

hundred years than it had ever moved since the days of the ancient Greeks. They didn't put that down to any kind of backwardness of the past, but rather the invention of key new instruments, the telescope, the barometer, which enabled you to look a little bit deeper into nature than before. And hence nature became more and more one. wonderful the way in which you started to look at it through these new instruments. We have the entry from their first journal book, Is Jardine, and they're quite specific about what they want to do. They want to found a college for the promoting of physico-mathematico-experimental learning. What did that mean then?

Experimental is the blue touch paper there. You're going to look at nature with your hands, not something that gentlemen had done in the time of Sir Francis Bacon. Other people did your experiments then. The physical world. And mathematical, tremendously important for that group, and actually tremendously important for the development of science. Science would not have moved forward as fast as it did in the 17th century if it had not been mathematicised, obviously,

with Isaac Newton being the cornerstone of that development. So they met, and quite soon, remarkably soon, one way now, they got a charter. How did they manage that? There were some very influential people at that first meeting. The most influential was Sir Robert Murray, who was the first courtier to Charles II when Charles returned. Murray drove that group forward.

In fact, he was its non-elected first president. He chaired the early meetings, and Murray carried the enterprise towards the court of the returning Charles II, and that was the great bonus of having these great gents there. What was the advantage of having a charter, Al? The charter gave you a legal formation, It enabled you to publish.

It gave you a standing within the nation. It clearly showed that the king was interested and sympathetic. And I think the real central thing is in that age, which is very much concerned with constitutional authority, and moving away again from a period of intensely speculative, difficult government, constant change under the period of the Parliament, it gave you a sort of foundation, it gave you bottom, it gave you a sort of reality that was there.

A Charter did give this group a reality as an entity, but the interesting thing about it is that the first few pages of it, in fact, about the first four pages of it, are all about property and trade. They're all about this being an organisation that will generate income, that will amass lands, that will produce revenue, and that is very attractive to Charles II.

Remember, the Crown comes back, absolutely broke. This is an organisation that gets some of its dignity from the promise that it will produce the intellectual property that would generate the wealth that is needed by the restored monarchy. A promise that was not fulfilled. A promise that was disastrously not fulfilled,

and Charles II himself said grumpily that they spend all of their time talking about nothing and weighing of air. But let's talk about something that they also got then, which was the right to publish. How important and how rare was that? Well, of course, traditionally, you needed an authority, an imprimatur to publish. I mean, since the Bible in 1611, is under royal authority.

The prayer book is under royal authority. So you didn't have a free press. Now, there had been experiments with the free press, of course, under the Cromwellian period, but even Milton himself, although defending the free press, had later come down against it. And the idea, therefore, of having a right to publish, a sort of carte blanche, without having to submit them to some kind of government or royal agent, was a tremendous advantage.

It meant that you could publish quickly, you didn't have to submit a manuscript for it to go through censorship processes, and it showed you were deeply, deeply respected, and that's part of the tremendous authority of the society. And I think one of the central things about it, it produced not only the hope of new wealth, but it produced vast new data. Because I think we today, living in an age,

we were just accustomed to science, churning out new data all the time, I think we just don't appreciate how radical new discovery actually was. And the attempt to use that new discovery, perhaps for commerce. The hope, for instance, that the work on dual magnetism would make it much easier to sail through the Northwest Passage or to sell to China. The hope, for instance, that new experiments in, let's say, shipbuilding would enable a ship to keep the ocean for vastly longer periods without the bottom going rotten and falling off. Then it was this immense vision of the power of knowledge, the power of new knowledge.

and of course publishing made it possible as well to get out there and to hopefully sort of snowball this knowledge revolution as you might call it. Can you tell us, Lizzie Jardine, what you think the significance is of Oldenberg starting in 1665 the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society? Well, it's not very fashionable to say this, but if I were looking for the stimulus for the entire Royal Society, it would be Henry Oldenberg. Henry Oldenberg, a man who drifted into the Royal Society. He comes from Bremen.

It's not quite clear what he was doing in London, and he may well have been a spy at some point, but he's a man with an obsession, with documentation, record-keeping, correspondence. He's one of those textual obsessives that organisations depend on if they're going to have a lasting record. And it is Oldenberg who decides

that what this organisation needs is a publication. The Academy Wael de Ciance in Paris has a publication. He will start a publication and since the Royal Society with a refrain we will keep returning to has absolutely no money, he will pay for it. So he not only edits the philosophical transactions which are the enduring record of everything that takes place of any interest and the data that needs recording from every meeting but he

funds it, he proof-corrects it. It is he his journal. And it's today the oldest continuously published scientific journal that there is. What did it do for the Royal Society then, though? We're getting it going in the 60s. It worked in parallel with the correspondence network, which was also under

Oldenburg's Aegis, to disseminate what went on in this funny little group of like-minded gents in a very unstable world in Britain, disseminate it throughout Europe and actually to the United States very quickly. It disseminated everything they did. And by the mid-1660s, very early issues of the Phil Trans,

you get people writing from elsewhere in Europe saying, could you send me the first 20 pages of the philosophical transactions? Sometimes they can't afford the postage on the whole thing. But the bit they want, just like a scientific journal today, they will have mailed to them. So tell us what they did. They got together, they got going,

they've got a charter, they've got the right to publish, where are they then as a group and what were they up to? One of the central things with them was to put all knowledge to the test. Again, it's instrumentation. Allegedly John Wilkins brought from Oxford to Cambridge and then into London an 80-foot refracting telescope so that it could see the planetary details more importantly. Then you have Christopher Wren making drawings for the king through the microscope. Hook, of course, carries them on and produces micrographia.

And one of the central things I'd suggest, it's this interest that the universe is held together by invisible forces, by light, by weight, by magnetism, and it's trying to unfathom what are these forces. How can they be codified? And perhaps how can they be used for new inventions? So it's physiology, about blood circulation, it's about astronomy, magnetism. It's about a whole range of subjects which in the past had always appeared rather vague. but they're trying to get to the bottom of them and actually give them what they're called a philosophical or a scientific foundation. What were they actually doing? They meet once a week in the late afternoon and then they go on to dinner afterwards. There is after 1662 always an experiment done for them by the curator of experiments,

the young Robert Hook who had been an employee of Robert Boyle and was, as it was, ceded to the Royal Society to do experiments for them. He would do things he would do. experiments with microscopes. So he would prepare slides, and then the gentleman would look at them, and he would show them astounding things. He was a sensational microscopist. They would indeed look through long telescopes at the heavens. They would go out into the yard at Gresham College, where they had a long telescope set up. All of this generated an atmosphere of excitement about hands-on experimental work with nature. All of it encouraged a kind of debate and discussion, which is exactly what we associate with the new science. One of the fascinating things about this for an amateur like myself is that, like other great changes in intellectual history, whether we're talking about 5th century Athens or Florence in the Renaissance, a very few people of great caliber are involved. It seems to take very few,

and you think there's a certain sense in which the fewer, the better on some occasions, or the better the fewer. as long as it's not one. The really defining quality of a group like the Royal Society is that they can bounce their ideas off one another. You're right that very few people make enormous change, but it's grouped together that they do that. The isolated great man can maybe light the touch paper, but it's the group.

And that's true even with Newton. The great man isolated in his ivory tower can do the mathematics, That's lighting the touch paper, expanding that into the inverse square law and gravity, that takes the group. Very soon enough they had been formed, the Royal Society had been given its charter and got underway, with great speed, even though we're talking about weekly meetings, about a comparative small group of people, and intensity of experimentation on all manner of things, not delivering what King Charles wanted them to deliver, which was wonderful ideas that made him and England rich. There was the fire of London.

It was a dramatic event in itself, but let's confine its consequences to the influence it had on the Royal Society. September 1666. Historic accidents, the Royal Society was extremely keen to be the first to get to Charles II with a plan for the rebuilding of London. Christopher Wren, ever eager,

and with very easy access to the king, took his own personal plan to the king to the huge annoyance of the Council of the Royal Society, two days ahead of there being ready to take their plan. Yet again, the Royal Society was slow in the uptake. Actually, Wren's plan wasn't used for the rebuilding of London, but there was a sense, I think, that the Court would look to the Royal Society,

and indeed the City of London would look to the Royal Society, for particular help in this calamity. What sort of helped the Royal Society give in the end? Well, in the first case, it vacated its buildings and gave them to the Corporation of London. So the Royal Society decamped to Arendel House down on the Strand, and the Corporation of London moved into Gresham College. Now, Robert Hook lived in Gresham College and also ran the Royal Society, if you'd like to say, on a practical level.

So you get cheek by Jowell, commerce and the Royal Society really for the first time, and I think that's of enormous importance. One thing where I would mention about the nature of the impact of the fire, I wouldn't say to say that the fire actually brought science into the city because bearing in mind, of course, yes, new St Paul's, although they didn't decide to rebuild St Paul's as a new church until virtually 10 years after the fire. And yes, there were new city churches.

But apart from that, all of the hopes, as you, of course, realized with Wren, to bring a new city all fell completely flat because New London grew up literally on the grid. plant of old London. So in that sense, the Royal Society did not take advantage of this enormous event, wasn't really called on, and instead of having a prototype Houseman's Paris, we got the same higgledy-piggledy. Let's not confuse two things here, right? The rebuilding of London is a profoundly scientific endeavour. The city has been raised to the ground deliciously the democratic drive of the Corporation of London

means that Royalist Wren cannot, like Albert's sphere, try to impose a grandiose scheme on a city where property holders desperately wanted their own property back. But what you do do is you develop new materials for road building, new materials for building, enormous amount of activity around the building regulations, exactly how the buildings will be structured, how they will be roofed. I call that

the march of science. And I think that that does involve the Royal Society. It is those men with their practical sense of applying all of that knowledge that they had hitherto been laughed at for not making use of. I think it

does get made use of in the rebuilding of London. I think there are two beautifully symbolic aspects of the fire of London. The first is that the fire stopped at the bottom of Bishop's Gate. It's swept across London. It took out the heart of the financial sector. Hook watched it approaching Gresham

College. There were men with buckets at the bottom of the street. The wind changed at the bottom of Bishop's Gate. So this extraordinary fact that all those records, all those copies of those publications, all those minutes of all those meetings, all that data, all those scientific instruments were almost providentially saved from the fire. So the first thing is that the Royal Society survived the fire incredibly. The second one

is that the fire ripped out the heart of London and left it as a potential for modernity. It was a tabularaza and as we see the great buildings of Wren and Hook come up

in that space. we see science installing itself in the potentials for using these great buildings of scientific instruments. It's almost a statement. It says the old city is gone and a new city is here and this is the opportunity for moving science forward. From exactly 220 feet above the north side of London Bridge at the top of the monument to the great fire, you can see Wren's most famous

architectural masterpiece in its impressive splendour. His great cathedral have sent Paul. But the monument, The monument itself, a sheer column surmounted by a golden crucible of fire, carries a somewhat hidden story of the intellectual partnership between Wren and Robert Hook. Lisa Jardine's led me down here and we're joined again by Simon Schaffer. I say down here because we're in a small chamber in the presence of a very noisy dehumidifier directly underneath the monument. There's a small circular opening in the center of the roof of this cellar which leads directly

to the top. Lisa Jardine, can you tell us about this place? The monument to the Great Fire is the preeminent example of the opportunity that the Great Fire gave for turning London into a scientific metropolis, because this is a scientific instrument. It's a Zenith telescope, a tube pointing to the fixed stars, and from this little laboratory in the basement, which has a fireplace and all mod-cons, for Robert Hook, its inventor,

from this chamber, you could, six months apart, view an identified fixed star out of the top of the telescope, no lenses needed, and thereby calculate the size of the Earth. Now, the problem was, actually, that the fixed stars are far further away than the 17th and 18th century understood, so that experiment doesn't work. Nevertheless, this was a scientific instrument built

to resolve a particular scientific problem. I'd just like the listeners to know the smallness of this place because it's quite exciting the smallness. It's tiny. It's circular. It gives it a charm. But the five of us are nudged up against each other as if we were hougamugger. But it has a domed roof.

Like everything that hook and wren did. Look at that little dome, nine foot above us. We are cramped. But visually, it's beautiful. And if we stand in the middle of this, as I am now doing, and nearly break our neck, you look straight up the 202 feet plus the extra here to that space at the top.

So he would sit here all night and make his notes. You have to go right to the top, open the doors, then you have to come all the way to the bottom again. That took me 15 minutes this morning. Then he settles down, and then he's here all night with his notebook and his candle observing. Simon, in some way, then the fire was rather a good thing for the Royal Society. They made the best of it.

They had to move their home. from devastated city of London, from Gresham College, westwards to Arindal House, bringing them both into, I think, more securely aristocratic quarters, sitting next to one of the city's best libraries, for example, and above all bringing them much nearer to Whitehall and their royal patron. And they stayed there for several years before eventually moving back to the rather squalid quarters that Gresham College was beginning to become. But much more importantly, I think, the rebuilding project represents a vision of what it would be like

were rational philosophy applied to public affairs. If you read the Great Latin inscription, hopefully translated into English, on the south face of the monument, it reads to our eyes perhaps mainly like a rather unfortunate and exaggerated estate agent's description, because it's about planning. It's about the application of rational men. measurement to the future of the city. And in that sense, it does represent one of those few opportunities in British history when it seemed plausible that an entire new form of rational vision would be imposed on public life. And although, as we say very often, the ambitions of the Royal Society were in very large measure not satisfied. This is an institution whose reach always succeeded its grasp. Nevertheless, the quality of the reach is magnificent.

Lisa. There's a beautiful sense in which what Simon's describing is actually exemplified in Robert Hook himself in this period. The fire of London destroys the heart of London. It stops at the bottom of Bishop's Gate. Gresham College is miraculously intact. The Corporation of London commandeers it, but Hook stays put. So Hook lives in the mercantile centre of the rebuilding of London. Meanwhile, the Toffs decamp to Arendall House, where they set up their rationally based speculative meetings. And Hook, we have it in his diary,

trundles a handcart with his scientific instruments on it, from Gresham College through the debris of destroyed London, to Arndall House, patiently sets up his telescope, conducts the experiment, dismantles them, puts them back on the handker, and goes back to where the business of science is going on with the members of the Corporation of London

and the instrument makers. Simon Chappell, this is a monument of the Great Fire, but it's also a monument to Wren and Hook. When Hook died in 1703, what sort of Royal Society did he leave behind him? I think he would have been, and we have evidence that he was frustrated by the way in which the society had developed.

We've spoken of a real tension between the curators of experiment, notably Robert Hook, and the virtuoso aristocrats. The Royal Society was in terrible financial straits. Its more elevated members were simply forgetting in rather deliberate ways to pay their dues. And the housing of the Royal Society at Gresham was now becoming something of an embarrassment.

The Royal Society was a tourist attraction for intellectual visitors to London in this period, and many of them were shot. that this world-famous institution was in such a bad state. So Hook's death has the air of a tragedy, extraordinarily rich and interesting manuscript notes for projects that he never quite had time to get round completing a frustrated life, but one which, let's not forget,

had kept the Royal Society going for decades, and without him it's impossible to imagine what kind of institution it would have been. I'm outside the monument now in the city of London, getting to work at half-fast 8 in the morning. The monument in one sense is a monument to the first generation of the Royal Society who were passing away at the end of the 17th century. The excitement of the initial years, the prodigious turnover of work by Hook and Oldenburg and others was in danger of fading. They were being squeezed out of their accommodation at Gresham College and couldn't afford to buy their own. But the death of Robert Hook marked a crucial turning point for the fellows,

for Hook's old enemy, the brilliant and famous Isaac Newton, was finally persuaded to become the new president. Join us tomorrow to see how the age of Newton ensured that the Royal Society found its place at the heart of British intellectual life, how it fed into the coming age of exploration and empire, and how it developed modern scientific practice that remains with us still. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast,

why not try others, such as material, world, where Quentin Cooper discusses everything from archaeology to zoology. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash podcasts.