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Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge

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This is an intermediate page for the Royal Society.

Stephensonia

It's clear that the Royal Society was sold to its sponsor the Merry Monarch as his 'think tank' for improving England's Navy. The Baroque's DARPA.

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Communal entry:Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge

Bits from Wikipedia

The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660. It is commonly known as The Royal Society, even outside the United Kingdom. The Royal Society of London is claimed to be the oldest learned society still in existence. Although a voluntary body, it serves as the national academy of the sciences in the United Kingdom.

The origins of the Royal Society lie in a group of men who began meeting around 1645 to discuss the new philosophy. The common theme among the scientists who began the Society was acquiring knowledge by experimental investigation. The first group of such men included Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, John Wallis, John Evelyn, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and William Petty. We would not have had the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge without the Invisble College.

Wilkins presented Thomas Spratt's The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge to their royal sponsor.

Sprat.JPG
Frontispiece of Pratt's The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge
by Wenceslaus Hollar

On its frontipiece, one can see several Masonic symbols shown on this image -- note that Charles II's bust is resting on a Enochian column. The link to the bibical Enoch is that Masons hold the Bibical Enoch to be a temple builder.

• The frontispiece was most likely done by Wenceslaus Hollar though it is identified as being John Evelyn's work.

Boyle, in his letters written in 1646 and 1647, refers to our invisible college or the philosophical college. Here is a description of the beginnings of the Society from John Wallis:-

About the year 1645, while I lived in London (at a time when, by our civil wars, academical studies were much interrupted in both our Universities), ... I had the opportunity of being acquainted with divers worthy persons, inquisitive natural philosophy, and other parts of human learning; and particularly of what hath been called the New Philosophy or Experimental Philosophy. We did by agreements, divers of us, meet weekly in London on a certain day and hour, under a certain penalty, and a weekly contribution for the charge of experiments, with certain rules agreed amongst us, to treat and discourse of such affairs...

About the year 1648-49, some of our company being removed to Oxford (first Dr Wilkins, then I, and soon after Dr Goddard) our company divided. Those in London continued to meet there as before (and we with them, when we had occasion to be there, and those of us at Oxford ... and divers others, continued such meetings in Oxford, and brought those Studies into fashion there...

Its official foundation date is November 28, 1660, when 12 of them met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, the Gresham Professor of Astronomy and decided to found 'a College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning'. This group included Christopher Wren himself, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Robert Moray, and William, Viscount Brouncker.

The Society was to meet weekly to witness experiments and discuss what we would now call scientific topics. The first Curator of Experiments was Robert Hooke. It was Moray who first told the King, Charles II of England, of this venture and secured his approval and encouragement. At first apparently nameless, the name The Royal Society first appears in print in 1661 and in the second Royal Charter of 1663, the Society is referred to as 'The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge'.

The Society found accommodation at Gresham College and rapidly began to acquire a library (the first book was presented in 1661) and a repository or museum of specimens of scientific interest. After the Fire of 1666 it moved for some years to Arundel House, London home of the Dukes of Norfolk, and it was not until 1710 under the Presidency of Isaac Newton, that the Society acquired its own home, two houses in Crane Court, off the Strand.

In 1662 the Society was permitted by Royal Charter to publish and the first two books it produced were John Evelyn's Sylva and Micrographia by Robert Hooke. In 1665, the first issue of Philosophical Transactions was edited by Henry Oldenburg, the Society's Secretary. The Society took over publication some years later and Philosophical Transactions is now the oldest scientific journal in continuous publication.

From the beginning, Fellows of the Society had to be elected, although the criteria for election were vague and the vast majority of the Fellowship were not professional scientists. In 1731 a new rule established that each candidate for election had to be proposed in writing and this written certificate signed by those who supported his candidature. These certificates survive and give a glimpse of both the reasons why Fellows were elected and the contacts between Fellows.

Many important figures such as Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Jonathan Swift and George Berkeley had interactions with the Royal Society. It is the single most important academic and professional forum of the entire Baroque era. It is hard to over-estimate its importance to science.

It was not universally popular and certainly not a fount of wisdom. Much protoscience and pseudoscience and Platonist fantasy was launched or encouraged there. Jonathan Swift's fictional narrator Lemuel Gulliver chronicled in Gulliver's Travels a visit to the land of Laputa, which is widely known to be a satire of the Royal Society's early attempts at 'empirical' science.

Isaac Newton is reputed to have refused to present the elliptical orbit to the Royal Society, simply because he considered them to be idiots who would waste his valuable time. It was only Edmund Halley who managed to convince him to publish, by offering to intercede and justify his results.