by Don Jordan
On the evening of 28 November 1660, Christopher Wren. Gresham’s 27-year-old professor of astronomy, gave a lecture at the college, after which he was among a group which gathered in the college rooms of Dr Lawrence Rooke, the professor of geometry, to discuss the formation of a new society. It would be something entirely new: a national body to promote science – natural philosophy, as it was then known. Nothing like it existed anywhere in the world.
Among others present were the wealthy experimentalist Robert Boyle, the influential clergyman and polymath John Wilkins, the mathematician Viscount Brouncker and Sir Robert Moray, a soldier and statesman with an interest in natural philosophy and, importantly, a friend of Charles П. These founding fathers, as it were, of what became the Royal Society were therefore not solely experimentalists, but included Anglican clergy and well-connected royalists and grandees. The mix was no accident; it was undoubtedly designed to ensure that the society would appeal to the King and receive royal approval. In this way, from its inception the society was a highly political act.
Sir Robert Moray undertook the task of obtaining approval from the King in the form of a royal warrant. At the committee’s next meeting on 5 December he reported he had secured the King’s approval. Charles, who had an enquiring if easily distracted mind, was eager to support a society to explore astronomy, navigation, trade, alchemy, medicine and the rest. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was born, though it would be more than a year before it would be granted its royal warrant and be entitled to use its full title.
John Evelyn suggested the name, saying it was ‘too great an honour for a trifle’. Evelyn is also credited with the society’s motto, Nullius in Verba, or ‘take nobody’s word for it’, emphasising the society’s aim of verifying all theories by observation and experimentation. The society’s formation was a key moment in the early development of what became known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. Under the roof of the Royal Society, scientific discoveries would henceforth be presented in public, tested in public and disseminated freely for the public good.
The society’s origins dated back to well before the Restoration, to at least 1645. Learned virtuosi also met in other places, especially in Oxford. In his correspondence, Robert Boyle used the term ‘our invisible college’ for an informal group of like-minded men with whom he was associated in 1646. There was, it appears, no one single group that acted as a precursor to the society; rather, there were many who had considered new forms of education and of the collection and dissemination of the new ideas. The Anglican priest and distinguished mathematician John Wallis wrote about the origins of the society:
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 . . . 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 . . .1
The group at Oxford was led by men of extraordinary merit, including Boyle, later of world renown, and Wallis himself, an exemplar of the renaissance man. By the time he left school, Wallis had mastered Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew and logic, going on at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study anatomy and medicine along with mathematics. He contributed substantially to the development of calculus before Isaac Newton’s decisive work and introduced the °° symbol to represent infinity.
The group required a meeting place conducive to informal debate. Somehow, an apothecary named Arthur Tillyard was persuaded to open a coffee house around 1655 in which the group of friends regularly met. They became known as the Oxford Coffee House Group.
Those who gathered in London had no such luck with their regular meeting place, as Wallis explained:
The London group continued to meet at Gresham College until the year 1658 when they had to disband in fear of their lives as soldiers took over their meeting rooms and London underwent a period of terror. In February 1660 Monck’s army entered London and restored order. King Charles returned to London at the end of May 1660 and the meetings at Gresham College resumed.
Thus the idea of a college had been around for many years and had taken several forms. In September 1659 John Evelyn, a religiously devout individual, had written to Robert Boyle putting forward a proposal for a monastic college, with its members taking a vow of chastity. Those members who, like Evelyn, were married would be furnished with separate rooms for their wives to avert temptation. Unsurprisingly, the idea was not universally applauded. Evelyn persevered, writing to Boyle three weeks later, ‘Might not some gentlemen whose geniuses are greatly suitable, and who desire nothing more than to give a good example, preserve science, and cultivate themselves, join together in society . . .’2
A letter written by Evelyn to John Wilkins, the Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, on 17 February r66o provides further evidence that the notion of a learned society or college was well advanced. Evelyn hailed Wilkins, a noted polymath, as the ‘President of our Society at Gresham’s College’, and indicated that a group had been meeting there for some time with the aim of forming themselves into some new society. Despite his central role in uniting the Oxford and Gresham groups, Wilkins felt that in the post-Restoration era it was better for him to stay out of the limelight. Though an Anglican priest, his politics were Cromwellian. Not only that, he was married to Cromwell’s sister Robina.
Thanks to the persuasive power of high-level courtiers Sir Robert Moray and Sir Paul Niele, the King visited Gresham College in October to see for himself what was afoot. The star of the show appears to have been Christopher Wren, who set up a telescope for the King to view the stars. The Anglo-Polish intelligencer Samuel Hartlib† wrote of the meeting: ‘His Majesty was lately, in an evening, at Gresham College, where he was entertained with the admiral long tube, with which he viewed the heavens, to his very great satisfaction.’3
The tube was long indeed – thirty-five feet long. It had been donated to the college by Sir Paul Neile, an astronomer of some renown. Neile thought highly of Wren and commended him to the King for greater preferment’.4
A few weeks later, the mission undertaken by Moray at the request of his colleagues proved successful, as recorded in the minutes for the meeting of 5 December 1660: ‘the King had been acquainted with the design of this Meeting, And he did well approve of it, and would be ready to give encouragement to it. It was ordered that Mr Wren be desired to prepare against the next meeting for the pendulum experiment. . . ‘
The reference to Wren preparing a demonstration of a pendulum indicated how highly valued the youngest member of the group was from the outset. Wren had a wide-ranging knowledge in many fields, including anatomy, mathematics and astronomy. He had the ability to design instruments and the mechanical understanding to ensure instrument-makers accurately followed his instructions. He was therefore the most practically minded of the founding Fellows and was very active in society meetings.
Interest in pendulums had increased since the success of Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens in building a pendulum clock in 1656, so putting into practice an idea first proposed by Galileo Galilei in 1641, the year before he died.‡ The pendulum clock was much more accurate than any previous timepiece, reducing the device’s inaccuracy from around fifteen minutes a day to as little as fifteen seconds. With the pendulum’s many fascinating characteristics now coming under scrutiny, it was na
tural for a man with Wren’s varied interests to wish to demonstrate some of the pendulum’s properties to the new society.
Wren’s usefulness to the society was not limited to his broad experimental interests. He was from a family that was close to the Stuarts. His father had been not only Dean of the chapel at Windsor Castle but also register (registrar) of England’s oldest chivalric order, the Order of the Garter.5 During the Civil War and after, Wren’s father took great care to gather up all the records of the order, which could have perished during the interregnum. It fell to Christopher to fulfil his father’s intentions (his father died in 1658) and present the precious records to the returned King. From that moment on, Charles took a personal interest in the career of the young virtuoso.6
If Wren was the ideal Fellow of a society dedicated to natural philosophy, Charles II was the ideal patron. He was fascinated by all things new, loved architecture and chemistry and was especially attracted by alchemical experiments whereby lead might be turned into gold. Like his cousin Prince Rupert, Charles set up a laboratory in which to pursue alchemical investigations. But Charles’s interests went beyond the hermetic; he was essentially a practical man, whose love of sailing fuelled his interest in the latest developments in shipbuilding and navigation, advances that might help England open up new trade routes and expand her influence abroad.
Charles’s interest in the advancement of the city’s trade was not entirely that of a benevolent father figure. Thanks to the royal warrants given to monopolistic trading companies, the King was rewarded with a portion of their profits. Charles saw the new experimental society as a practical tool to help trade and shipping, rather than as a society of learning for its own sake. He was quick to request that the society turn its mind to such things. On 19 December Petty and Wren would be asked ho consider the philosophy of shipping and to bring their thoughts about it to the society’.7
As was the nature of the times, women could not become members of the new society. Thus Edward, ist Earl of Conway, joined while his wife Anne, one of the most eminent philosophers of the day, did not. Viscountess Conway was her own woman: she ran a centre for Quakerism, though membership of this oppressed group opened her to much mistrust. She studied philosophy under the Platonist Henry More and, as he said himself, became his equal. A sufferer from migraine headaches, she was treated by the physician Thomas Willis, one of the society’s founders. Despite his eminence in understanding the brain – it was Willis who coined the word neurology – he failed to cure Anne. They did, however, have an affair.
From the beginning, the members discussed grand ideas of forming a physical college, a grand building with rooms for researchers and staff, laboratories and lecture theatres. This was based to some extent on ideas put forward by Francis Bacon more than thirty years before in his New Atlantis, describing an ideal college he named Solomon’s House.8 Owing to a lack of funds, the society would never build its great research institute. It continued to meet at Gresham College, where it would remain for several years. Despite its financial limitations, however, the society got off to a flying start with the presentation of a historic scientific breakthrough.
Peter Lely’s former pupil Robert Hooke, now Boyle’s scientific assistant, recorded the Gresham College meetings in a diary he labelled Dr Hooke’s Extracts out of the Journal-Books of the RS [Royal Society] for his private use. The very first entry reads:
1661 April 3. Mr Boyle brought in his book concerning glasse tubes ordered that every member of the Society should have one of Mr Boyle’s books to Discourse against this day sevenight9
With this simple entry Hooke recorded one of the wonders of the age. The book referred to was nothing less than Boyles seminal work on the relationship between pressure and the volume of air, which would culminate in the establishment of Boyle’s Law, one of the basic laws of the behaviour of gases.10 Boyle was an aristocrat, born in County Cork, Ireland. He owned an estate in Dorset but lived chiefly in Oxford, where he lodged with a learned apothecary. Aided by Hooke, his paid scientific assistant, he carried out his experiments in a laboratory at the apothecary’s house.
Boyle was not alone in investigating the phenomenon of the relationship between pressure and volume. His most notable contemporary in the field was Richard Towneley, an independent enthusiast for empiricism who, like others around the kingdom, had little or no connection to London, carrying out his investigations at his home near Burnley in Lancashire. Towneley was a Catholic and so was excluded from English universities, which were then controlled by the Church of England. He seems to have been educated in Europe and carried on his mathematical and scientific work thanks to a private income from family estates.
Towneley cleverly designed a simple experiment in which he and his friend and fellow experimental enthusiast, the physician Henry Power of Halifax, carried a barometer up Pendle Hill in Lancashire. As they went, they recorded the changes in the level of the mercury column.11 From this they recognised the relationship between the density of air and its pressure. Towneley published little, but he corresponded with many contemporary figures; Boyle certainly saw an early account of his work, written by Power, and discussed the experiment with Towneley when the latter made a rare visit to London. In the history of the discovery of a mathematical relationship between pressure and volume Towneley is, however, almost forgotten.
Boyle’s great advance in this sphere of experimentation was to be the first to carry out a series of controlled, repeatable and measurable experiments on what he called ‘Mr Towneley’s hypothesis’. With Hooke’s help, he sealed a quantity of air in a J-shaped tube by introducing a quantity of mercury at either end, and noted that the volume of air in the tube decreased as he increased the pressure on the mercury. Air, he deduced, had a ‘spring’ in it, what we call today elasticity. Boyle’s insistence that everything should be verified by experiment was a breakthrough in an age when even Galileo was wont to describe-an experiment but not actually carry it out. Boyle and Hooke not only carried out their experiment, but repeated it with improved apparatus until they could test the hypothesis that supposed the ‘pressures and expansions to be in reciprocal proportion’.
A week after Boyle came to talk about his work on the ‘spring’ in air, Hooke wrote that the society woidd debate what he called only his own ‘little booke’. This was Hooke’s report on what is now called capillary action. Hooke had had made for him several very thin glass tubes by which he demonstrated that the w’ater rose up in accordance with the bore of the pipe. From this it is clear that by dint of being a mere employee, Hooke had to fit his own experiments around those he was involved in with Boyle or others – a fact that was to have serious repercussions upon his career.
On 15 May, Boyle was back at Gresham College, this time to ‘present the Society’ with his Engin’. This was his famous vacuum pump, designed and made by Hooke. The pump was a large and delicate apparatus, which had to be transported to London from Boyles lodgings in Oxford. Hooke was in charge of all arrangements, including the actual operation of the engine’. As an aristocrat, it would have been unseemly for Boyle to operate a machine – even one of his own invention.
At the core of Boyle’s elaborate vacuum pump was a large glass sphere fifteen inches in diameter; he and Hooke had wanted it to be larger, but the glass blowers were unable to create a larger bowl that retained sufficient strength to withstand the stress put on it by the vacuum the experimenters planned to create within. Objects could be inserted into the vessel through an aperture at the top measuring four inches across, while below the receptacle was a vertical metal shaft in which a piston was cranked up and down using a rack and pinion attached to a winding handle. When the piston was cranked down, a valve was opened so air could be drawn out of the vessel then closed again, while another valve opened at the end of the shaft to expel the evacuated air. Boyle recognised that owing to the constraints of the apparatus, achieving a total vacuum was impossible; Hooke would simple wind away until something approachi
ng a vacuum was arrived at.
Boyle and Hooke had been developing the air pump for some time; its earliest form had existed in 1659. The design of the pump was described at length over nineteen pages in Boyle’s groundbreaking book New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, touching the Spring of the Air;’12 he had taken such trouble in describing the construction of the pump because he wanted people to be certain that he had built such a machine.
He also wanted other experimenters, if they so wished, to copy and validate his work. In the current philosophical climate, it was generally held that those who dwelt in the realm of thought should not become involved in mechanical operations. Such operations were, according to the prevalent ideology, likely to muddy the pure waters of philosophical truth. Critics of the Royal Society’s endeavours went so far as to say that by its very experimental nature, the society was moving away from the superiority of thought into an arena into which natural philosophy was not meant to go. The reasoning was that God had not intended apparatus to be employed in philosophical endeavours and to do so was unnatural. It was firmly felt that mechanical things got in the way of logic.
All of these arguments weighed on Boyle, who was a religious man, but ultimately the desire fully to understand the nature of God’s creation overcame any constraints. He was clearly setting himself apart from the philosophical theorists who considered such experiments unnecessary. There was a further departure; the.book was published both in an English edition and in Latin, the common language of the intelligentsia of Europe, so that it could be read by experimenters abroad.