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A replica of Leeuwenhoek’s microscope.
Leeuwenhoek’s observations of his own facial hair, 22 February 1676.
Leeuwenhoek’s observations of rotifers and their parasitic worms, 4 November 1704.
Leeuwenhoek had practically no education. He filed his reports in Low Dutch because he had no English and no Latin. He didn’t even have High Dutch, it appears. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that he had a genius for microscopy and a profound respect for knowledge.
In 350 years, the Royal Society has had a mere 8,200 members, but what a roll call of names. In no very particular order they include Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Edmond Halley, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Humphry Davy, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Joseph Banks, T.H. Huxley, James Watt, Joseph Lister, Henry Cavendish, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Lawrence Bragg, Paul Dirac, Peter Medawar, Alexander Fleming, James Chadwick, Lord Rayleigh, William Ramsey, Lord Kelvin, Kathleen Lonsdale, Dorothy Hodgkin, Miriam Rothschild, Anne McLaren and literally hundreds more who changed the world by changing our understanding of it. To be part of such an establishment is an extraordinary achievement. This isn’t just the most venerable learned society in the world, it is the finest club.
Throughout its busy history, the Society has demonstrated an almost uncanny knack for selecting people before they gave any particular hint of the greatness that would make them immortal. Edmond Halley was made a Fellow before he received his degree from Oxford. Charles Darwin, elected in 1839 only three years after his youthful Beagle voyage, was not even known for his work on barnacles, much less on evolution. William Henry Fox Talbot became an FRS a good two years before the first vague notion of photography flitted through his head. And of course there was Thomas Bayes, scribbling a theorem that the world would have to wait nearly 250 years to use.
The Society has also demonstrated a heroic, and indeed endearing, tendency to recognise the unsung. The example that leaps to mind for me here is that of Hermann Sprengel, the forgotten father of electric lighting. Everyone thanks Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison for giving us the homely glow of incandescent lighting, but in fact Sir William Grove (who, it more or less goes without saying, was himself a Fellow) had demonstrated a working incandescent bulb well over thirty years before them – seven years before Edison was even born. It’s just that Grove’s bulb didn’t last very long. What was needed was a vacuum that would allow a filament to burn for long periods. Sprengel, a German chemist working in London, invented a pump that could drain the air from a glass chamber down to one-millionth of its normal volume, allowing filaments to burn for hours and making electric lighting a commercial possibility at last. Edison and Swan found the filaments and got the glory. Sprengel was forgotten almost at once by everyone except the Royal Society, which made him a Fellow in 1878, nearly fifteen years before he was recognised by any institution in his native Germany.
The best place I know to get some sense of what the Royal Society is and has achieved is a modest, crowded storeroom in the basement of its headquarters in Carlton House Terrace in London. Here, neatly shelved or tucked into drawers and cabinets, are three and a half centuries of accumulated treasures – Newton’s manuscript copy of the Principia, the Shelton Regulator clock used by Captain Cook to time the transit of Venus on the Endeavour voyage, Joseph Priestley’s folding spectacles, Leeuwenhoek’s precious drawings, the papers of Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle – representing the moments of birth of some of the most enormous ideas human minds have ever had.
Keith Moore, the Society’s librarian, reaches into an anonymous-looking metal cupboard and, with an air of gentleness and care, brings out a white box. Inside it, resting delicately, is an object that automatically provokes an awed hush: the death mask of Isaac Newton. Only by a remarkable chance did the mask come into the Society’s possession. It had been lost for many years when, in 1839, a Mr Christie, a Fellow of the Society, developed a sudden desire to have a bust of Newton on his shelves and called in at a curio shop on Tichborne Street in London, near his place of work, to ask if they had anything. The shopkeeper replied that he had no statues, but they had a curious mask, which his father had bought many years before. After some rooting around, he found it and brought it to Christie to examine. It was Newton’s death mask. It had sat unregarded on a shelf for at least half a century, and in all likelihood would eventually have
Isaac Newton’s death mask.
been lost altogether had Christie not made his lucky enquiry.
The mask is a transfixing object, not surprisingly, but what is more unexpectedly moving is a small, exquisite piece of apparatus that sits on the shelf alongside it: a reflecting telescope made by Newton himself in 1669. It is only six inches long but beautifully fashioned. Newton ground the glass himself, designed the swivelling socket, turned the wood with his own hand. In its time this was an absolute technological marvel, but it is also a thing of lustrous beauty. Nowhere could you find an item that more vividly demonstrates the beauty as well as the wonder of science.
The reflecting telescope made by Newton in 1669.
Keith shows me some papers he has just been cataloguing. They are letters from Thomas Thorpe, an English chemist, written to his wife, Emma, during an 1878 Royal Society expedition to the American west. The purpose of the expedition was to view a solar eclipse, which, among other things, would allow them to confirm or disprove the existence of the planet Vulcan. The papers are irresistibly absorbing, partly because Thorpe brings a scientist’s curiosity to everything he sees – the quality of US trout, the character of the town of Cheyenne (home of ‘6,000 of the biggest scoundrels the world contains’), the climate, geology, everything – but also because they so vividly and charmingly catalogue the difficulties and discomforts necessary to do science in the field in the nineteenth century (or possibly any time).
When you look along the stacks or peek into the drawers, it is impossible not to be struck with wonder at how much aggregated human effort – how much thought and toil and nights under canvas – is embedded in what we know about the world and universe and how they are put together.
‘This is only a small part of it,’ Keith tells me. ‘There are eight thousand more boxes in storage in Wiltshire.’ He smiles. ‘You generate a lot of material in 350 years.’
Which brings me to my third remarkable fact about the Royal Society: it’s still there. More than that, it is still there and it is still important. How many enterprises can you name that are still doing today what they were formed to do 350 years ago?
It has had its moments of faltering, goodness knows. At times its quenchless curiosity has threatened to give way to mere morbidity. In the early days it was particularly fascinated with monstrous births and that kind of thing, and sometimes it engaged in experiments that were patently imprudent.
One such was in November 1667 when a penurious student named Arthur Coga was induced to let two Fellows transfuse sheep’s blood into him in return for the payment of a guinea. No one had any idea what would happen – whether it would kill him or fill him with boundless energy – and this degree of uncertainty left some of the more reflective members feeling distinctly uneasy. In the event, the transfusion didn’t do much of anything. Before an audience that included the Bishop of Salisbury, 14 ounces of blood were pumped out of the sheep and into
