L’Académie des Sciences

I’ve written a number of times on the Royal Society, Britain’s leading and oldest learned society, often via the medium of book reviews but also through a bit of data wrangling. This post concerns the Académie des Sciences, the French equivalent of the Royal Society. It has gone through several evolutions, and is has been one of five academies inside the Institut de France since its founding in 1795. As a physical scientist the names of many members of the Académie are familiar to me; names such as Coulomb, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Fourier, Fresnel, Poisson, Biot, Cassini, Carnot …    

The reason I’m interested in scientific societies is that, as a practitioner, I know they are part of the way science works – they are the conduit by which scientists* interact within a country and how they interact between countries. They are a guide to who’s hot and who’s not in science at a particular moment in time, with provisos for the politics of the time. As I have remarked before much of the “history” taught to scientists comes in the form of Decorative Anecdotes of Famous Scientists, this is my attempt to go beyond that narrow view.

The Académie des Sciences was founded in France in 1666 only a few years after the Royal Society which formally started in 1660. It appears to have grown from the group of correspondents and visitors to Marin Mersenne. In contrast to the Royal Society it was set up as a branch of government, directed by Jean-Baptiste Colbert who had proposed the idea to Louis XIV. The early Academy ran without any statutes until 1699 when it gained the Royal label. The Academy was based on two broad divisions of what were then described as mathematical sciences (astronomy, mathematics and physics) and “physical” sciences (anatomy, botany, zoology and chemistry) within these divisions were elected a number of academicians, and others of different grades. Numbers were strictly limited: in 1699 there were 70 members and even now there are only 236. Unlike the Royal Society, funded by member subscriptions, the Academy was funded by government – giving a number of generous pensions to senior academicians to conduct their scientific work.

The Academy avoided discussion of politics and religion, echoing the founding principles of the Royal Society, and was explicit in making links to foreign academics giving them the formal status of correspondent. This political neutrality was sustained through the French Revolution: although the Academy was dissolved for a few years at the height of the Terror and was subsequently reformed with essentially the same membership as before the revolution. Furthermore work on revising the French system of weights and measures carried on through the Revolution.

The Scholarly Societies Project has an overview of publications by- and about the Academy. The earliest scientific papers of the Academy appear in “Journal des Sçavans”, which commenced publication in 1665, shortly before the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society” and therefore the earliest scientific journal published in Europe. From 1699 a sequence of work is published in “Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences” until 1797.  Finally “Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences” has been published since 1835. Most of which are freely available as full-text digitized editions at Gallica (the French National Library).

The British government established the Longitude Prize in 1714, by act of parliament, to award the inventor of a simple and practical method for determining the longitude at sea. Subsequently Rouillé de Meslay invested a similar prize for the Academy, which commenced in 1720. This sequence of Academy prizes was awarded yearly to answer particular questions and alternated between subjects in the physical sciences and subjects in navigation and commerce. Those in commerce and navigation revolved around shipping: with questions on anchors, masts, marine currents and so forth. These prizes were open to all, not just members of the Academy. Subsequently the Academy became a clearing house for a whole range of prizes, these are described in more detail in “Les fondations de prix à l'Académie des sciences : 1714-1880” by E. Maindron.

In summary, although similar in their principles of supporting science, scientific communication and providing scientific support to the state and commerce the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences differ in their internal structure and relationship with the state. The Academy being more closely aligned and funded by the state, certainly in formal terms, and rather more limited in its membership.

In common with the Royal Society the membership records of the Académie are available to play with and in common with the Royal Society they are in the form of PDF files which are a real pain to convert back into nicely structured data. I could engage in a lengthy rant on the inequities of locking up nice data in a nasty read-only format but I won’t!

Footnotes

• Image is “Colbert présente à Louis XIV les membres de l'Académie Royale des Sciences crée en 1667” by Testelin Henri (1616-1695)
• *Yes, Becky, I know you don’t want me to use “scientist” in reference to people living before the term was first coined in the 19th century ;-)

References

MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive is the best English language resource I’ve found on the Académie des Sciences. Winners of the Grand Prix can also be found on this site.

Book review: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

This week I’ve been reading L.T.C. Rolt’s “Isambard Kingdom Brunel: The definitive biography of the engineer visionary, and Great Briton”. The book was written in 1957, it comes with a substantial foreword highlighting the unrivalled access that Rolt had to the Brunel family papers referring back to Samuel Smiles, an early biographer of the Victorian engineers, as an inspiration. It also contains a couple of provisos as to how current thinking differs from Rolt’s book, slightly in Rolt’s dismissal of one of Brunel’s contemporary critics and more substantially in his accusation that his business partner, John Scott Russell, was largely responsible for the enormous difficulties faced in the construction of the ship SS Great Eastern.

The book is divided into three parts: the first covering Brunel’s early life, marriage and training. The second his role in the Great Western Railway and the third in his ship building activities.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel lived 1806-59; he had a French father, Marc Brunel who had fled France following the Revolution and an English mother, Sophia Kingdom. Marc Brunel was a significant engineer in his own right, responsible for one of the earliest production lines (for sailing “block” manufacture). Before the age of sixteen the young Isambard was apprenticed to Henry Maundslay (in London) an engineer and Abraham-Louis Breguet (in Paris) a maker of chronometers, watches and scientific instruments – both men exceedingly highly regarded in their field.

Isambard’s first engineering job was as the onsite engineer for the Thames Tunnel which his father had designed, at the time Isambard was 20. The tunnelling was enabled by his father’s invention of the tunnelling shield, tunnelling seems a generous description of the process – really it was “building a brick tube slightly beneath (and sometimes not) the floor of the Thames River”. The whole enterprise was highly dangerous, with the Thames breaking through into the tunnel several times – killing a number of the tunnellers. The tunnel was not finished during Isambard’s tenure.

Following this experience Brunel started to put forward plans for engineering jobs around the country; one of his first designs was for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in 1831, at the time this came to nothing in part because of the Bristol Riots which had come about when the House of Lords voted down the Great Reform Act. Meanwhile he was also commissioned to act as engineer for what he called the “Great Western Railway”, linking London to Bristol – having surveyed an initial route. His plan was accepted and much of his initial work was in pushing an act through parliament to enable the building. It’s striking just how mobile Brunel was in his days of supervising the building of the Great Western Railway, in a time before railways and other rapid means of transport he was criss-crossing the 120 miles of the route at a staggering rate. He seems to have this in common with William Smith – maker of the first geological map of Great Britain.

The Great Western Railway ultimately extended into Devon and Cornwall, where Brunel constructed a series of timber viaducts. None of these remain in their original form, they were built at a time when cheap, very durable timber was available from the Baltic, subsequently supplies of timber were not so cheap, or durable and such structures became uneconomic and were replaced with brick or masonry. Also in the West Country Brunel constructed an “atmospheric railway” between Exeter and Newton Abbott. The engineering high points of the Great Western Railway were the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, and the Box Tunnel – outside Bath.

The final third of the book covers Brunel’s shipbuilding activities, the SS Great Western – the first purpose built trans-Atlantic steam ship, the SS Great Britain an early iron-hulled and propeller-driven trans-Atlantic passenger ship and finally the SS Great Eastern. The Great Eastern was accurately described as a leviathan – eventually completed in 1858, it was not surpassed in size or weight for 40 years. Its construction: delayed, over-budget, subject to protracted legal and commercial wrangling, accident prone, appears to have contributed to Brunel’s early death. Originally the ship was intended for the England-Australia route, its enormous size meant it should have been able to make the journey without re-fuelling with coal. Ultimately it was most successfully used as a cable-laying ship – laying the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, its large size meant it could carry a lot of cable and the combination of paddle and propeller drive meant it was exceedingly manoeuvrable.

One activity I was unaware of was Brunel’s part in designing, building and shipping a temporary hospital to the Crimea, at Renkioi, this task was completed in just five months from start to end.

A couple of things strike me about Brunel: firstly, the work he was doing was at the cutting edge of technology – when he planned the Great Western Railway the first passenger railway in the world had only just been built, the SS Great Britain was amongst the first propeller and iron-hulled ships, similarly the atmospheric railway – yet these were enterprises on a large scale. Secondly, the engineer was much more in the board room and in parliament arguing for enabling acts than is the case now. As a result of a fractious episode of “In our time” I flippantly suggested that Brunel built steam engines for fun, but reading this book – I don’t think he did, there’s little sense of joy, only driving ambition. I am still enormously in awe of Brunel. I am a sort of scientist who sees no great division between science and engineering, men like Brunel had a scientific approach to their work but also left a lasting, tangible mark on Britain not only in the things they physically built but the ideas and methods they introduced. I’ve attended a conference dinner on the SS Great Britain, where we toasted IKB rather than the queen.

As a memorial to Isambard Kingdom Brunel the Institute of Civil Engineers determined to complete the Clifton Suspension Bridge, shortly after his death. I think he would have liked it, both as a memorial and a thing of engineering beauty.

Further Reading: Analysing the paint on the Saltash Bridge (here and here) by Patrick Baty.

Book review: The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science

The book I review in this post is “The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science” by John Henry. In contrast to previous history books I have read this is neither popular history of science, nor original material but instead an academic text book. My first impressions are that it is a slim volume (100 pages) and contains no pictures! Since childhood I have tended towards the weightier volume, feeling it better value for money.

The Scientific Revolution is a period in European history during which the way in which science was done changed dramatically. The main action took place during the 17th century with lesser changes occurring in the 15th and 18th centuries. The Royal Society, on which I have blogged several times, plays a part in this Revolution and God’s Philosophers by James Hannam is one view of the preamble to the period.

The book starts with a brief introduction to historiography (methods of history research) of the Scientific Revolution, with a particular warning against “whiggish” behaviour: that’s to say looking back into the past and extracting from it that thread that leads to the future, ignoring all other things - the preferred alternative being to look at a period as a whole in its own terms. History as introduced by scientists is often highly whiggish.

Next up is a highlighting of the Renaissance, a period immediately prior to the Scientific Revolution wherein much renewed effort was made to learn from the Classics, the importance of the Renaissance appears to have been in initiating a break from the natural philosophy and theology taught in the universities of the time, which were teaching rather than research institutions.

The Scientific Revolution introduced two “methods of science” which differentiated it from the previous studies of natural philosophy: mathematisation and experiment. Mathematisation in that for sciences particularly relating to physics the aim became to develop a mathematical model for the physical behaviour observed. Prior to the Revolution mathematics was seen almost as a menial craft, inferior to both natural philosophy and theology which relied on logical chains of deduction to establish causes. These days mathematics has a far higher prestige, as illustrated in this xkcd comicstrip. The second element of experimentation means the use of controlled experimentation rather than pure thought to determine true facts.

One of the more surprising insights for me was the influence of magic on the developing science, very much in parallel to the influence of alchemy on the developing chemical sciences: magic was a physical equivalent. Magicians were intensely interested in the mysterious properties of physical objects and were early users of lenses and mirrors. The experience they developed in manipulating physical objects was the equivalent of the experience the alchemists gained in manipulating chemicals. Some of this thinking went forward into the new science the remaining rump of bonkers stuff left behind.

It’s very easy to glibly teach of forces and atoms to students, or perhaps blithely demonstrate the solution to an, on the face of it, tricky integral. However, we take a lot for granted: the great names of the past were at least as intelligent as more recent ones such as Einstein or Maxwell yet they struggled greatly with the idea of a force acting at a distance and so forth and that’s because these ideas are actually not obvious except in retrospect. Mechanical philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes were amongst the competing ideas for a “system of the world” ultimately supplanted by Newton.

Henry highlights that most of the participants in the Scientific Revolution were religiously devout, as were many in that time. An interesting idea taken up, but now apparently rejected, was that Puritanism was essential in driving the Scientific Revolution in Britain. Despite this, it was in this period that atheism started to appear.

A few times Henry refers to differences in emphasis between the developing new science in Britain when compared to the Continent. In Britain the emphasis was on an almost legalistic approach with purportedly bare facts presented to a jury in the form, for example, of the fellows of the Royal Society – theorising was in principle depreciated. This approach originates with Francis Bacon, a former Attorney General and experienced legal figure. On the Continent the emphasis was different, experiments were seen more as a demonstration of the correctness of a theory. The reason for this difference is laid at the door of the English Civil War, only briefly passed when the Royal Society was founded. It is argued that this largely non-confrontational style arose from a need for a bit of peace following the recent turmoil.

In sum I found this book an interesting experience: it’s very dense and heavily referenced. Popular history of science tends to revolve around individual biography and it’s nice to get some context for these lives. I’m particularly interested in following up some of the references to other European learned societies.

Further Reading

The book provides a list of handy links to online resources:

1. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
2. Prof. Robert A. Hatch’s Scientific Revolution Website
3. Prof. Paul Halsall’s Scientific Revolution Website
4. SparkNotes Study Guide on the Scientific Revolution
5. The Robert Boyle Project
6. The Galileo Project
7. The Newton Project
8. The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive

These all look interesting, and although not polished I’ve been using the MacTutor for many years.

Early reports of the Royal Society

In an earlier post I wrote about Thomas Sprat’s “History of the Royal Society of London, for the improving of Natural Knowledge“. Published in 1667, under the direction of the Royal Society which had first met in 1660, receiving their royal charter in 1662. In that post I deferred discussion of a selection of the early reports of the Society that were embedded in the History, for reasons of space.

The reports by title are these:

• Answers returned by Sir Philberto Vernatti (Resident of Batavia in Java Major)
• A Method for making a History of the Weather by Mr Hook
• Directions for the Observations of the Eclipses of the Moon by Mr Rooke
• A Proposal for Making Wine by Dr. Goddard
• A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe
• Experiments of the Weight of Bodies increased in the Fire by Lord Brouncker
• Experiments of a Stone called Oculus Mundi by Dr Goddard
• An account of a Dog dissected by Mr Hook
• Experiments of the Recoiling of Guns by Lord Brouncker
• The History of the Making of Salt-Peter and The History of Making Gunpowder by Mr Henshaw
• An Apparatus to the History of the Common Practices of Dy[e]ing by Sir William Petty
• The History of the Generation and ordering of Green Oysters Commonly called Colchester-Oysters

Interspersed amongst them Sprat adds in various brief comments on other work of the Society along with what amounts to a personal eulogy to Christopher Wren, who seems to have been involved in pretty much everything although Sprat seems to have been generous in attributing to Wren work which was largely done by other people.

Looking first at the authors: of Sir Philberto Vernatti I can find little, he appears to have been Governor of Batavia (now Jakarta) for the Dutch East India Company whilst most references I’ve found to him arise from this report to the Royal Society; Mr Hook was the first curator of experiments for the Royal Society and paid an important role in keeping the Society with interesting things to see, he was an outstanding scientist in his own right; Lord Brouncker was the first President of the Royal Society; Mr Rooke appears to have been Lawrence Rooke, who died in 1662; Dr Goddard is Dr Jonathan Goddard the early Society met in his lodgings at Gresham College, physician to Charles I and present at the death of Cromwell; Mr Henshaw is Thomas Henshaw an early Biological Sciences Secretary to the Royal Society; Sir William Petty was amongst other things an economist and a Parliamentarian in the Civil War. On the whole these reports look like they have been selected on political grounds, they are from the movers and shakers of the Society.

The contributions vary considerably in length and content, Dr Goddard’s proposal on making wine amounts to: “Do it in the West Indies using sugar cane”, similarly Mr Hooks account of dissecting a dog is very brief (it’s also pretty horrifying).

The reports on dyeing, oysters and the making of Salt-peter and gunpowder are quite detailed reviews of the current “state-of-the-art” in important trades, involving both references to previous literature and reports of current practice which read very much as if the authors had gone and observed the processes described. The answers returned by men in distant places: Sir Philoberto Vernatti in Batavia, Java and the report on the scaling of Pico Teneriffe are also very much directed to trade: does this wood grow well there? These are quite lengthy and range over quite a range of topics. From this it’s clear that the Royal Society wanted to be seen as contributing to the national wealth.

The reports by Hooke (on recording the weather), Rooke, Brouncker and Goddard (on Oculus mundi) are those which most closely resemble modern scientific papers. They report methods for conducting measurements, or the results of those measurements, unlike modern papers they do not draw strong conclusions from those measurements. In a sense they are following the scheme laid out by Sprat in which empirical measurement is important and theorising comes later. Oculus Mundi is a form of opal now known as hydrophane which goes transparent when it absorbs water, the OED reports that Sir Kenelme Digby had brought some of this material to the Society in 1661.

In sum it looks like the early Society was very busy. Much of what they wrote was very practical and aside from a comment on making insects from cheese and sack it largely looks quite sensible. In these reports I can see the origins of the primary scientific literature that I access as part of my work.

Book review: The History of the Royal Society of London by Thomas Sprat

In which I venture into original material, in the form of Thomas Sprat’s “History of the Royal Society of London, for the improving of Natural Knowledge“. Published in 1667, under the direction of the Royal Society which had first met in 1660, receiving their royal charter in 1662. I must admit to having attempted to read this book a couple of times before and failed; the copy I have is a facsimile of the original therefore written in early modern English with heavy use of the “long s” inevitably leading to an internal voice with a pronounced lisp! It’s probably useful to replace “History” with “Prospectus” in the title, to satisfy modern tastes. Despite it’s age the writing style is surprisingly readable to my modern eyes.

Unlike any other book I have read the book starts with a dedication to the King, followed by a poem praising Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon’s presence recurs throughout the book, Sprat clearly sees him as the intellectual godfather of the organisation. The book is divided into three sections; the first is a prehistory describing the state of natural knowledge before the Royal Society, the second section details the founding of the Society and the final section discusses the value of the knowledge the Society seeks.

The tour of prehistory is rapid; starting with the ancient priests who held knowledge to themselves, followed by the Greek philosophers (described as the Ancients) who Sprat feels were too fond of rhetoric in determining questions of knowledge and who he accuses of “hastiness”. The Romans receive relatively short shrift. Following the Roman Empire, Sprat sees the rise of the Church of Rome and a relatively barren period dominated by war, he cites here William of Malmsbury (1080-1143), an early English historian in support of this. He then bemoans the time spent by the Scholastics in what he considers pointless theology in the later period, presumably 1000-1500, William of Ockham falls into this group. Finally he comes to the recent era where he lists five groups involved in natural philosophising. Francis Bacon is cited reverentially once again, those taking on the philosophy of the ancients – tidying it up after it’s release from the abbeys in the Reformation, are less venerated. “Chymists” receive a mixed review with the more pedestrian welcomed but the alchemists, often seeking eternal life or some other fancy, are scorned. Isaac Newton, a later president of the Royal Society was a keen alchemist but by this time it was seen as not quite proper. He also comments on the coming of specialisation to different areas of science.

The founding fathers of the Royal Society started meeting in Doctor Wilkins lodgings in Wadham College, Oxford – it’s not stated explicitly when this started but it ended in around 1638 when the meetings moved to Gresham College in London. Sprat skims over the Civil War (1642-1651), although this period was clearly much on his mind in writing the book, then happily reports: “For the Royal Society had its beginning in the wonderful pacifick year of 1660”, the year of the Restoration when Charles II returned to the English throne. Sprat goes on to describe in some detail the guiding principles of the society, explicitly ruling out a teaching organisation citing the time required to do this and the potentially unhealthy Master-pupil relationship as damaging to the purposes of the Society. It is a principle of the new organisation that men of all religions and nations are welcome. This internationalism is a hallmark of modern science. Also highlighted is the idea that the Royal Society becomes a central repository for written information, the first of its kind. The Royal Society was funded from the subscriptions of it’s fellows, although they were open to public funding.

Sprat then provides a rather detailed description of how the Royal Society is constituted including how they go about their business in terms of doing and reporting experiments, I must admit to finding this a bit dull. It has the air of an organisational fanatic describing his perfect organisation, it’s questionable how closely the Royal Society managed to keep to this ideal. However, in his description of the processes of the Society we can see the genesis of the still used scientific literature, with the primary literature comprised of relatively short papers containing experimental results and theoretical developments based on those results. Charles II makes several appearances here, unsurprising given the recent granting of the Royal charter, but he also seems to have been moderately involved in the Society and had his own chemistry laboratory.

A substantial portion of the middle of the book is taken by a compilation of reports by the early Royal Society, these include:

• Answers returned by Sir Philberto Vernatti (Resident of Batavia in Java Major)
  
• A Method for making a History of the Weather by Mr Hook
  
• Directions for the Observations of the Eclipses of the Moon by Mr Rooke
  
• A Proposal for Making Wine by Dr. Goddard
  
• A Relation of the Pico Teneriffe
  
• Experiments of the Weight of Bodies increased in the Fire by Lord Brouncker
  
• Experiments of a Stone called Oculus Mundi by Dr Goddard
  
• An account of a Dog dissected by Mr Hook
  
• Experiments of the Recoiling of Guns by Lord Brouncker
  
• The History of the Making of Salt-Peter by Mr Henshaw
  
• The History of Making Gunpowder
  
• An Apparatus to the History of the Common Practices of Dy[e]ing by Sir William Petty
  
• The History of the Generation and ordering of Green Oysters Commonly called Colchester-Oysters

I shall write on these reports in a separate post.
The book ends with a lengthy rebuttal of various criticisms of the Royal Society, including how “experimenting” is entirely compatible with the Christian religion and specifically the Church of England; this is perhaps unsurprising given Sprat’s occupation as a churchman. In addition to this there is the appeal that experimental philosophy as demonstrated by the Royal Society can benefit the nation by improving its industry and trade, including such things as importing plants across the emire. It also defends the interest of the nobility in this area, claiming that their country estates are the ideal places to conduct such studies, whilst the lower orders go off to fight wars!

Reading this book was an unusual experience for me. In contrast to the modern histories I more usually read I felt much more obliged to ask questions like: Why is this person writing this book? Why was Bacon so important? Is this some reverence to a politically important forbearer? Why the need for the book at all? A book length defence of such an organisation only 5 years after its formation seems a bit odd.

Reading this has given me a taste for contemporary material, I think I might have to look into Pepys and some original scientific publications.

Further Reading

1. Google Books version of the History of the Royal Society of London, for the improving of Natural Knowledge.
   
2. My earlier blog posts on the Royal Society
   
3. Image from the National Portrait Gallery

Science is Vital - history repeating 1667

I'm reading Thomas Sprat's "History of the Royal Society of London, for the improving of Natural Knowledge"* published in 1667. He's just mentioned that following the return of Charles II much spending has been made on public works and goes on to say:

This general Temper being well weigh'd; it cannot be imagin'd that the Nation will withdraw its Assistance from the Royal Society alone; which does not intend to stop at some particular Benefit but goes to the Root of all noble Inventions, and proposes an infallible Course to make England the Glory of the Western World.

This seems terribly relevant to current circumstances, he does spoil it slightly by going on to say:

There is scarce any Thing has more hindered the true Philosophy than a Vain Opinion, that men have taken up, that Nothing could be done in it, to any purpose, but upon a vast Charge, and a mighty Revenue.

 Old Sprat had a fine way with words!

*Quotes are from p78-79

Book Review: The Fellowship

I’ve written previously about the Royal Society via the medium of book reviews: Seeing Further, Joseph Banks and Age of Wonder, and also in a data mangling exercise. This post is about “The Fellowship: The Story of the Royal Society and a Scientific Revolution” by John Gribbin, it describes the scientific world before the Society and the founding of the Royal Society. As with many books about this period, the front cover of my copy features “An experiment on a bird in the Air pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby and so that is the image I use to decorate this post. Following my usual scheme this review is really an aide memoire as much as a review.

The book opens with a set of brief biographies, starting with William Gilbert of Colchester (1544-1603), and his scientific study of magnetism: de Magnete (1600). This work on magnetism was unusual for it’s time in that it was very explicitly based on experimental observation, rather than the “philosophising” of Aristotelian school which imputed that the world could be understood simply by thinking. William Gilbert is relatively little known (ok – I didn’t know about him!), perhaps because his work was in a relatively narrow field and was superseded in the 18th century by work of people like Michael Faraday furthermore Gilbert seems to have spent most of his life practicing as a doctor with his scientific work playing only a small part of his life.

Next step is Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). He continued in the tradition of William Gilbert, eschewing the philosophical approach for experiment. In contrast to Gilbert, Galileo made contributions across a wide range of science for a long period – promulgating technology such as telescopes, microscopes and computing devices. This likely explains his greater fame. A detail that caught my eye was that as a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa he was paid 60 crowns per year, whilst the Professor of Medicine gained 2000 crowns. For many early scientists, medical training appears to be the major scientific training available.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was more important as a parliamentarian, lawyer and courtier than a scientist. I link reluctantly to wikipedia in this instance, since in the opening paragraph they seem to be repeating the myth that he met his end through stuffing snow into a chicken to see if this helped preservation. His fame as a founding father of modern science is based largely on a book he didn’t write in which he intended to describe how a scientist should work – a scientific method. Perhaps more notably he had a vision as to how science might function in society at a time when there was no such thing as a scientist. It is apparently from Bacon that Isaac Asimov got his “Foundation”; it is the name of an organisation of scientific Fellows found in Bacon’s fictional work New Atlantis. Finally we are introduced to William Harvey (1578-1657), who identified the circulatory system for blood in the human body by a process of observation and experiment (published in De Motu Cordis (1628)) he was primarily a physician.

The point of this preamble is to say that, as the founding of the Royal Society approached, a number of people had started doing or proposing to do a new kind of science (or rather natural philosophy as it would have been called). The new natural philosophy involved doing experiments, and thinking about them – it was experimental science in contrast to the “received wisdom” from the ancient Greeks which was certainly interpreted to mean at the time that thinking was all that was required to establish true facts about the physical world. It’s not really accurate to say that one person did this and everything changed: rather that a shift had started to take place in the middle years of the 16th century. The foundation of the Royal Society can be seen as the culmination of that shift.

The Royal Society was founded at Gresham College in London on 28th November 1660, although it’s origins lay in Oxford where many of the group that would go on to form the Society had been meeting since the 1640’s. The Royal charter of the Society was agreed a couple of years later. The central figure in the Oxford group was John Wilkins (~1614-1672). The original Society included Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke amongst others. What striking is the political astuteness of the founding fathers as the monarchy returned to England in the form of Charles II, the first President, Viscount Brouncker, was a Royalist and the Society clearly identified that a Royal seal of approval was what they required from the very beginning. The Society had an air of purposefulness about it, not of airy philosophising for the amusement of gentlemen. The Society started publishing the worlds first scientific journal, “Philosophical Transactions”, and commissioning a history of their founding by Thomas Sprat only a few years later.  As a scientist I have picked out those names that mean most to me, however it’s very clear that the Royal Society was more than a group of scientists meeting to talk about science and the other less scientifically feted Fellows were equally important in the success of the Society.

Gribbin’s book then goes on to consider three men important in the early life of the Royal Society. Firstly: Robert Hooke (1636-1703), originally scientific assistant to Robert Boyle (1627-1691) who became the Society’s first “Curator of Experiments”. Prior to his appointment the Fellows appeared to be poorly organised in terms of providing weekly demonstration experiments for the Society’s education. Hooke was a really outstanding scientist, a skilled draftsman and maker of scientific equipment. The reason Hooke is not better known is largely down to Isaac Newton, with whom he had a longstanding feud and who outlived him. Newton (1643-1727) does not need further introduction as a scientist, his role in the Royal Society was to provide scientific gravitas (after Hooke had died) he was also President of the Society for the period 1703-27. Edmond Halley (1656-1742) was more important to the Society on the administrative side, he is chiefly remembered from the scientific point of view for his prediction of the return of a comet calculated using Newton’s theory of gravitation. He also spent a great deal of time persuading Newton to publish and trying to extract data from Flamsteed (the Astronomer Royal). In addition to this he invented a diving bell, wrote the first article on life annuities, published on the trade winds and monsoons, made observations of the stars of the Southern hemisphere and went on several scientific expeditions.

Some miscellaneous thoughts that arose as I read:

• Royal patronage, in this instance by Charles II, was important for the Society in this period and later by George III – as described a little in Age of Wonder.
• On the face of it astronomy is blue-skies research, but at the time the precise measurement of the position of the stars was seen as a route to determining the longitude - an important practical problem.
• It’s notable that the persistent anecdotes about the scientists mentioned here i.e. Francis Bacon and the frozen chicken, Newton and the apple falling from the tree and Galileo dropping things from towers, originate from the earliest biographies often written by people who knew them personally. These anecdotes have later been found to be rather fanciful, but nevertheless have persisted.
• There was serious feuding going between scientists in the early years of the Society!

Overall I enjoyed this book, although it does sometimes have the air of a collection of short biographies of men who are already relatively well known. The most interesting part to me was the core part around the founding of the Society, bringing in some of the lesser known members and also highlighting the importance of the non-scientific aspects of the Society in it’s success.

In terms of scientific history reading, where next? “God’s Philosophers” by James Hannam seems relevant to understanding scientific activities prior to those covered in this book. A deeper investigation into Edmond Halley seems worthwhile, and I should also make another attempt at the Thomas Sprat history of the Royal Society.

Further reading

1. “Joseph Banks” by Patrick O’Brian.
2. “Seeing Further” edited by Bill Bryson.
3. “God’s Philosophers” by James Hannam.
4. “Age of Wonder” by Richard Holmes.
5. “The Curious Life of Robert Hooke” by Lisa Jardine.
6. “Hostage to fortune” by Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, which is a biography of Francis Bacon.
7. “The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge” by Thomas Sprat.
8. “Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer” by Michael White.

Book review: Joseph Banks by Patrick O'Brian

Once again I venture into my own idiosyncratic version of the book review: more reading notes than review. This time I'm reading the biography of Joseph Banks by Patrick O'Brian. Joseph Banks has popped up regularly in my recent reading about the Royal Society and the Age of Wonder. He was on Captain Cooks trip to Tahiti, and then went on to serve as President of the Royal Society for 42 years - the longest term of any President. The Inelegant Gardener has been reading about Kew and various plant hunters, and Sir Joseph crops up there too. Despite his many talents, there are relatively few biographies of Banks, and he is relatively unknown.

Sir Joseph was born of a wealthy family from Lincolnshire, he was educated at Harrow, Eton and then Oxford University. At some point in his school years he became passionately interested in botany, and whilst at Oxford he went to the lengths of recruiting a botany lecturer from Cambridge University to teach him. The lecturer was Daniel Solander, a very talented student of Carl Linnaeus, who would later accompany Banks on his trip around the world with Captain Cook, they would remain close friends until Solanders death in 1782.

Sir Joseph's first trip abroad was to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1766. The area had been ceded to Britain by France, but there was an international fleet of fishing boats operating in it's waters. Banks made his trip as a guest Constantine John Phipps on HMS Niger, which was sent to the area to keep an eye on things. It seems fairly common for gentleman to travel as guests on navy ships of the time: this was broadly the scheme by which Charles Darwin would later join HMS Beagle on his trip around the world.

1768-1771 finds Banks circumnavigating the world on Captain James Cook's ship, HMS Endeavour, in Cook's first such expedition. This voyage was funded by George III following an appeal from the Royal Society for a mission to Tahiti in order to observe the transit of Venus. Banks paid for the contingent of naturalists from his own funds. The stay in Tahiti is much written about largely, I suspect, because they remained there some time. Following their stay in Tahiti, they continued on to New Zealand, which they sailed around rather thoroughly but seemed to land on infrequently as a result of hostile responses from the inhabitants. They then sailed along the East coast of Australia, stopping off on the way at various locations but most particularly Botany Bay. At the time the the existence of Australia was somewhat uncertain in European minds. There's a rather fine map of their course here and Banks' journals are available here.

Through the chapters on both these voyages, O'Brian makes heavy use of the diaries of Banks, quoting from them extensively and often between block quotes further quoting Banks' own words. This may work well for those of a more historical bent, but I felt the need for more interpretation and context. It often feels that O'Brian is more interested in the boats than the botany.

The next episode is somewhat odd: Banks was planning a second trip around the world with Captain Cook but he never went. At almost the last minute he withdrew on the grounds that the Admiralty would not provide adequate accommodation for him and his team scientists. The odd thing is that, despite what appears a fractious falling out, Banks appeared to remain very good friends with both Cook and Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admirality at the time. I wonder whether Banks, remembering the 50% mortality rate of his previous voyage with Cook, understandably got cold feet. As a consolation he went off to Iceland in 1772 for a little light botanising, where he scaled Hekla.

Despite recording an extensive journal, collecting a considerable number of anthropological, botanical and zoological specimens as well as a large number of drawings by his naturalist team Banks never published a full report of his Tahiti voyage. He showed the artefacts at his home in Soho Square and prepared a substantial manuscript, with many fine plates but seems to have lost interest in publishing close to the end of the exercise. Throughout his life he produced relatively few publications, this may be a reflection of his dilettante nature: he was skilled in many areas but not deeply expert and so published relatively little.

Banks was elected to the Royal Society whilst on his world tour, and later become President for a 42 year term, until his death in 1820. He made some effort to improve the election procedures of the Society, at the time of his election being in the right social class appeared to be more important than being a scientist. As part of his role as President he was heavily involved in providing advice to government including a proposal to use Australia as a colony for convicts. He was also heavily involved in arranging the return of scientists and others caught up in the wars following the French revolution. In addition to his work at the Royal Society, he also helped found the Africa Association and the Royal Academy.

Kew gardens was created a few years before Joseph Banks became it's unofficial superintendent (in around 1773) and then director. He had a pivotal role in building the collection: commissioning plant collectors to travel the world, all backed by George III. I must admit that my recent reading has led me to see George III in a new light: as an enthusiastic supporter of scientific enterprises, rather than a mad-man. George III and Banks also collaborated on a programme to introduce merino sheep from Spain, which had potentially huge commercial implications. Banks was seen as a loyal courtier.

Through his life it's estimated that Banks wrote an average of 50 letters per week almost entirely in his own hand, although they were fantastically well organised during his life, on his death they were rather poorly treated and dispersed. Warren R. Dawson produced a calendar of the remaining correspondence. I've not found this resource online but a treatment like this Republic of Letters would be fantastic.

I suspect a comprehensive biography of Joseph Banks is exceedingly difficult to write; this one seemed to cover voyaging well but I felt was lacking in botany and his scientific activities at the Royal Society. Perhaps the answer is that a comprehensive biography is impossible, since he had interests and substantial impacts in so many areas. There was simply no end to his talents!

Footnote
In the style of a school project I have made a Google Map with some key locations in Joseph Banks' life.

Seeing Further: A Blaggers Guide (Part 1)

I originally intended to describe this post as a book review, but really it isn't. It's a blagger's guide for those that haven't read the book in question, (Seeing Further: The Story of science and the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson) or who have read it, but need reminding of the contents. If you want to read a proper review then I suggest Clare Dudman's review at Bookmunch.

Seeing Further is a collection of essays from a wide range of authors, all relating in some way to the Royal Society which celebrates it's 350th anniversary this year. I've read other work by most of the authors - they are all excellent.

Since I've written notes on each chapter this has become quite a long post, so I've broken it into two parts. Part two can be found here.

Bill Bryson starts things off with an introduction, providing a brief sketch of the history of the Royal Society and introducing a few of the distinguished fellows. His favourite is Reverend Thomas Bayes. Bayes' most important work was on probabilities, published two years after his death in 1761. Few will have heard of Bayes, but his work is central to modern statistics. I must admit this chapter made me curious as to the origins of other learned societies across Europe.

Then the fun begins with James Gleick, who has written excellent books on chaos and Richard Feynmann amongst many other things. He writes of the Society as an earlier version of the internet and the first place where people started recording and communicating observations systematically. They also conducted their own experiments. The international reach of the Royal Society was an essential component, managed effectively by it's first Secretary, Henry Oldenburg.  Perhaps wisely the fellows instituted a ban on discussing religion or politics.

Margaret Atwood writes about the development of the idea of the mad scientist as portrayed in the 50's B-movies. She sees the Royal Society, satirised by Jonathan Swift as the Grand Academy of Lagado in Gulliver's Travels, as the link between Dr Faustus and the modern mad scientist. Travelling by way of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

These days it is broadly a given amongst scientists that the physical laws they determine here on earth extend throughout the cosmos. Margaret Wertheim writes on the genesis of this idea, the point when the boundary between heaven and earth was removed in mens minds and the heavens and earth started to be considered as a continuous whole, obeying the same physical laws. This transition had largely taken place prior to the formation of the Royal Society.

Neal Stephenson writes on Gottfried Leibniz and his monads. Stephenson is author of The Baroque Cycle, a historical science-fiction trilogy set around the time of the founding of the Royal Society with many of the early fellows featuring as characters. Monadology was Leibniz's philosophical program for understanding the universe, looked at with a modern eye one can see intriguing insights but ultimately our current understanding of the universe is quite distant from Leibniz's conception of monads. Nowadays it's recognised that Leibniz and Newton invented calculus independently and simultaneously, although Leibniz published first. The priority in this area was greatly disputed, with the Royal Society standing firmly behind Newton, latterly their President.

Next up is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on how the establishment of the Royal Society marked the coming together of the rationalists, whom we would probably call theoreticians now, and the empiricists, or experimentalist in modern parlance. Contrasting these two more modern movements with the teleologists of ancient Greece who believed that the world was designed with a purpose and so their philosophical program was to identify the purpose of all things and the progress of those things towards their final ends. Although the teleologists observed, they tended to do so passively whilst the empiricists actively experimented: setting up nature to reveal underlying processes. The immediate precursors to the Royal Society were represented by empiricists such as  Francis Bacon, William Gilbert, and William Harvey and the rationalists represented by Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes. John Locke, Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle are cited as those at the forefront of the debate on what constitutes an explanation during the forming of the Royal Society.

Now for Simon Schaffer who tells a tell about the use of scientific advice for public policy development, and public dispute over that advice. The story is set around the tale of a lightning strike in Norfolk which struck the Heckingham House of Industry (a workhouse) on 12 June 1781, causing substantial damage. The building was protected by pointy lightning rods, as recommended by the Royal Society and the tale is of much internal bickering as to whether the lightning rods had been installed properly or whether the advice given by the Society was wrong. This was highly relevant at the time since, for example, you'd want to be really sure of your lightning protection if you ran an arsenal, full of gunpowder. Also interesting is who the fellows of the Royal Society trusted to give eye-witness statements: gentleman! Schaffer never really resolves the issue of the accuracy of the advice but highlights the parallels of this argument with modern arguments about evidence-based policy and how best to make recommendations based on science.

We move on to Richard Holmes, who writes about ballomania. This is the name coined by Sir Joseph Banks, recent president of the Royal Society, for the enthusiasm in France for balloons of both hydrogen and hot air during the 1780's. Outwardly Banks was dismissive of balloons, but in private he appears to have been keeping a close eye on developments. Ultimately the lack of navigability meant that interest in balloons waned. This chapter reminded me that Benjamin Franklin is someone of whom I need to know more, Franklin was Banks' correspondent in Paris where much of the balloon-y action was based. Another snippet, Aeropaedia, published 1786 records a balloon flight from my now home-town of Chester. Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, on which I wrote earlier.

Richard Fortey is up next, author of Dry Store Room No. 1, which is about the Natural History Museum, given this background it's unsurprising that he writes about scientific collections. Well-curated collections of real objects are of critical importance to science. Fortey's chapter explains the role that the Royal Society played in setting up such collections, principally through the work of Sir Hans Sloane, a president of the society, whose collection was to form the basis of the Natural History museum via the British Museum. Sir Joseph Banks makes an appearance, for his work in setting up the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, as does Carl Linaeus father of taxonomy.

Richard Dawkins, who needs no introduction, writes on the claims for precedence in the discovery of evolution. It's relatively well-known that Alfred Russell Wallace spurred Charles Darwin into action by sending a manuscript to him which captured the core idea of evolution. Darwin's great achievement was the full length exposition of the theory, backed with experiments, in On the Origin of Species. Perhaps less well known are Edward Blyth, who believed that natural selection stabilised those species created by God (which is not really evolution) and Patrick Matthew, who mentions an idea of evolution quite similar to Darwin in the appendix of his book Naval Timber and Arboriculture but seems to have little idea of its significance.

Here endeth the first part of this review, feel free to get up and move around, perhaps have a cake and a coffee. Then move on to Part 2.

Seeing Further: A Blagger's Guide (Part 2)

My writings on Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society became unmanageably long, so I have split it into two parts, this is the second part, the first part can be found here.

In the earlier chapters there was much philosophy and history. Henry Petroski writes on bridges, which I must admit surprised me a little as an area of interest for the Royal Society but the link is there. When Robert Stephenson proposed the design for the original Britannia Bridge it was William Fairbairn, soon to become a fellow of the Royal Society, who carried out experiment studies to establish the shape of the iron box-sections. This was done by testing the strength of scale models, and progressively increasing the size of the models - extrapolating the results to the full-size bridge. Later he went on to investigate metal fatigue, which had led to several serious rail disasters in the 19th century.

We're heading into living memory now, with Georgina Ferry's chapter on structural biology through the medium of x-ray crystallography. A field in which Britain led the world in the middle of the 20th century. This period sees the election of the first female fellow of the Royal Society, Kathleen Lonsdale, in 1945, who made some of the first determinations, by crystallography, of the structure of small molecules. Following this Dorothy Hodgkin determined the structure of penicillin in secret work during World War II. This type of investigation reached a climax with the determination of the structures of first proteins, massive efforts taking Hodgkin 35 years for insulin and Max Perutz taking 22 years for haemoglobin. Georgina Ferry's biography of Dorothy Hodgkin is well worth a read and covers in more depth much of the material in this chapter.

Steve Jones, geneticist, provides a chapter on biodiversity. We believe that evolution provides a good explanation of how species arise and change over time. The subject of biodiversity addresses the question: how many species can we expect to find in a particular environment? And the answer is we don't really know,  there don't seem to be any rules that allow us to predict biodiversity. There are some observations, such as biodiversity is greater in the tropics than elsewhere but no real understanding of why this might be.

C.P. Snow wrote about the two cultures, what is less well reported are his comments on the gulf between "pure" sciences and applied sciences. Philip Ball expands on this theme, and makes a plea for a better appreciation of the engineers and technologists, under whose aegis much essentially scientific work is done. One of his examples are plastics (or polymers), the field in which I am trained.

Paul Davies asks how special are we? In cosmology we hew to the Copernican Principle, the idea that there's nothing special about earth, nor the sun nor even the galaxy we find ourselves in: if we look around the universe we expect to find planets, suns, galaxies just like our own. It is only when we enter the highly speculative area of the multiverse that this part of the Copernican Principle starts to break down. Related to this questions is the more open one of "Are we, intelligent life forms, special?". We simply don't know whether life, or intelligent life is common in the universe.

I hope you're not getting bored of this machine gun delivery of chapter synopses!

Ian Stewart writes on the importance of mathematics, often hidden from view even to those in the know. He uses the example of the recent Mars missions, which fairly evidently use the mathematics of Isaac Newton (a fellow of the Royal Society), but less obviously the work of George Boole (another fellow living 1815-1864). Boole is responsible for providing the foundations of modern computing through his Boolean logic - the ones and zeros on which computers thrive. Compression and error-correction algorithms also make heavy but invisible use of mathematics. JPEG compression, in particular, uses the work of, foreign member of the Royal Society, Joseph Fourier (1768-1830).

John D. Barrow is up next, he is a cosmologist. He starts off explaining the underlying simplicity of physical laws, and the attempts to unify the theories of different forces into a single "Theory of Everything". The current best candidate for this theory of everything is string theory. He then discusses chaos and complexity: simple laws do not lead to simple outcomes. The behaviour of a pile of sand is not easy to predict.

The next three chapters have a a slight theme running through them. Oliver Morton starts off with the "blue marble" image captured from Apollo 17. This demonstrates, self-evidently, the spherical nature of the earth but beyond this it implies an isolation and stasis. There is little evidence of movement, or process taking place. Morton's point is that the Earth is not a static system: light from the sun enters and great cycles turn over carbon, nitrogen and water in the system, taking these chemicals through the earth and the sky. This leads into thinking about climate change.

Maggie Gee starts off by introducing about apocalyptic writing, fiction about the end of the world (or at least after a great disaster). Gee is an author of such fiction, including The Flood and The Burning Book. I must admit I've always seen this as a genre that doesn't really ask me to contemplate my own end, but rather selfishly imagine my survival in the aftermath. After this introduction she then moves on to discuss global warming and the part that writers might play in it's communication. I found this a very interesting perspective. Most of the authors in this volume I've read before, Maggie Gee is one I haven't read but aim to address this lack.

Continuing the global warming theme, Stephen H. Schneider is a climate scientist who has long been involved in the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as an normal author in the first two reports and a lead author in the second two reports. In this chapter he talks about introducing standardised language to describe uncertainty into the fourth assessment report, known as AR4. There is a clear need to do this because if the scientists writing the report don't communicate their assessments of uncertainty then others, less-qualified, will do it for them. It's not that uncertainty was unrecognised in previous reports, but it's communication was not clear. Schneider was involved in preparing clear advice in this area. Persuading scientists to use well-defined language to communicate uncertainty seems to have been a battle.

Gregory Benford talks about time, firstly he talks about the Deep Time discovered in the 19th century by geologists such as Charles Lyell FRS. This was the realisation that the earth had been around rather longer that the few thousand years that a literal reading of the bible suggested. This change in thinking was based on an assumption that the changes in landscape seen in the present were largely all that was required to create the landscape, this is in contrast to the prevailing view of the time based on cataclysms like the biblical Flood. Also, Darwin was of the view that evolution would have required hundreds of millions of years to lead to the diversity of species seen today.  The great age of the earth was subsequently confirmed using radioactive decay measurements. Also discussed is time and it's merging into space which is central to Einstein's general theory of relativity. Benford is a scientist and science-fiction writer, I can recommend Cosm, a story about physicists who create a universe in a particle accelerator and drive it off in a pickup truck.

And finishing off with a chapter by Lord Rees, the current President of the Royal Society. Rees looks forward  to discoveries in the next 50 years; at various times in the past people have claimed we are coming to the end of science. Rees points out that each new discovery opens up new areas, so feels there's no risk of us running out of science to do. He also writes of the continuing role of scientists as advisers, a task that the Royal Society continues to coordinate and drive. And the finally on moral responsibilities of scientists, on which I wrote a little previously with regard to the atomic bomb.

All in all I found this a very enjoyable read, some of the philosophical and literary chapters I would not have read as full length treatments but enjoyed in shorter form. The links to the Royal Society are tenuous in many of the chapters, so perhaps it's best to approach this book as a sampler for fine science writing.

The Presidents of the Royal Society (reprise)

In my previous post I described how I downloaded and played with the data on the fellows of the Royal Society, including a plot of the presidents of the society and their terms of office. I was a bit unhappy with this plot, I felt like it could be a bit more interactive. So I've been busy. The plot below shows you who was in office when you wave your mouse over it, and highlights their term. On the face of it this looks like I've done very little, but it took me six hours of playing with Protovis (a Javascript visualization library) top achieve this! You can do lots of very neat things with Protovis, and having done it one visualisation it should be easier to do the next one.

The Royal Society and the data monkey

This year finds the Royal Society celebrating its 350th anniversary. The Royal Society is Britain's national academy of science, one of the first of such societies to be founded in Europe. My brief investigations suggest that only the Italian Accademia dei Linceis and the German Academy of Sciences are older, and then only by a relatively small margin. The goals of the Royal Society were to report on the experiments of its members and communicate with like-minded fellows across Europe.

The Gentleman Administrator is planning some historical blogging on the Royal Society this year, starting with this post on the founding of the society and the role that Charles II played in it. On the face of it this post is about the history of the Royal Society, but in truth it says more about me as a data monkey than it does about the Royal Society. I shall explain.

The Royal Society supply a list of previous members as a pair of PDF format files, these contain each fellow of the Royal Society with their election date, their membership type and, for some, the dates of their birth and death. The PDF is formatted in a standard way suggesting to me that it could be read by a computer and the data therein analysed. I suspect there is an easier way to do this: ask the Royal Society whether they can supply the data in a form more amenable to analysis such as a spreadsheet or a database. But where's the fun in that?

As an experimental physicist, getting data in various formats into computer programs for further analysis is what I do. This arises when I want to apply an analysis to data beyond that which the manufacturer of the appropriate instrument supplies in their own software, when I get data from custom-built equipment, when I trawl up data from other sources. I received a polite "cease and desist" message at work after I successfully worked out how to extract the text of internal reports from the reports database, they shouldn't have said it couldn't be done! I will save you the gory details of exactly how I've gone about extracting the data from the Royal Society lists, suffice to say I enjoyed it.

First up, we can identify the Presidents of the Royal Society, and their terms of office from the PDF files - this information is in the name entry for each of them. We can look this data up too). I've plotted these below in a manner reminiscent of the displays of the earth's magnetic field reversal, each coloured stripe represents a presidency, and the colours alternate for clarity. The width of the stripe shows you how long each was president:

In the earlier years of the Royal Society's history the Presidential term varied quite considerably: Sir Isaac Newton served for 24 years (1703-1727), and Sir Joseph Banks for 42 years (1778-1820). Since 1870 the period of the office seems to have been fixed at 5 years.

Next, we can work out the size of the fellowship in any particular year, basically we go through each fellow in the membership list and see when they were elected to the society and when they died: between these two years they were members. These data are plotted below:

We can see that membership in the early years of the 19th century started to rise significantly but then after 1850 it started to fall again.

This fits in with historical records, in the earlier years of the 19th century some younger fellows pointed out that the Royal Society was starting to turn into a fancy dining club and that most of the fellows had published very little, in particular Charles Babbage published Reflections on the decline of Science in England, and on some of its causes. Wheels ground slowly but finally, in 1846, a committee was set up to consider the charter of Society and how to curb its ever growing membership. I've not found the date on which the committee reported but subsequent to this date, admission to the society was much more strictly controlled. Election to the Royal Society is still a mark of a scientist a little above the ordinary.

The data on birth and death dates starts getting sparse after about 1950, presumably since many of the fellows are still alive and were reluctant to reveal their ages. Doing analysis like this starts to reveal the odd glitch in the data. For example,Christfried Kirch appears to have died two years before being elected. At the moment I'm not handling uncertainty in dates very well, and I learnt that the letters "fl" before a date range indicate that and individual "flourished" in that period, which is nice.

If anyone is interested in further data in this area, then please let me know in the comments below. I intend adding further data to the set (i.e. hunting down birth and death dates) and if there is an analysis you think might be useful then I'm willing to give it a try. I've uploaded the basic data to Google Docs.

Footnote
The illustration at the top of this piece is from the frontspiece of William Sprat's The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, published in 1722.