Would you like to know what Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, was doing on 23 May 1705, or why a consortium of spectacle-makers sent a letter of reproof to the Society on 7 November 1694? This is now possible, as we are excited to announce that we have just digitised five volumes of the draft minutes of Royal Society meetings taken for Hans Sloane between 1686 and 1711; there’s a full list of the contents at the end of this article. The volumes are displayed as part of our Turning the Pages collection of digital resources.
Page from MS/575, draft minutes of meetings of the Royal Society 1686-1691 © The Royal Society
The minutes are records of the Society’s science in their most original form, dating from the presidency of Samuel Pepys and the publication of the Principia Mathematica to the early years of Newton’s time at the helm. They contain summaries of Royal Society meetings discussing experiments, publications and natural curiosities. Through the attendance lists, the elections to the Fellowship and the distribution of tasks, you can also discover how the Society functioned in its second quarter-century.We have quite a few refs to the Royal Society. A couple of favorites:
The bulk of the manuscripts appear to have been compiled by, or on behalf of, Hans Sloane, who served as Secretary of the Royal Society from 1693 to 1713, and was later President (1727-1741). We know this from the inscriptions on the spines of the volumes, and we have identified various passages in Sloane’s hand as well as the handwriting of Richard Waller and Thomas Gale, both of whom served as Secretary during the period....MUCH MORE
October 2011
"Royal Society opens archive, kills productivity" (Newton's First Published Paper; Franklin and the Kite, etc.)
And this bit, used as the intro to an aught-seven post:
Monday, October 22, 2007
NASA Examines Arctic Sea Ice Changes Leading to Record Low in 2007
"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."
-President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817
President of the Royal Society, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London.
20th November, 1817.
