Royal Society

Royal Society oldest scientific organization in Great Britain and one of the oldest in Europe. The Royal Society was first incorporated in 1662 as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. It was founded in 1660 by a group of learned men in London who met to promote scientific discussion, particularly in the physical sciences. It stimulates research in that field and acts in the capacity of adviser on scientific matters to the government, from which it receives annual subsidies. The Royal Society ranks as the foremost organization of its kind; its membership always includes leading scientists of the world. One of its activities is the publication of its Proceedings and The Philosophical Transactions. Among those who served as president of the Royal Society are Samuel Pepys, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Humphry Davy, Sir William Huggins, Lord Rayleigh, Sir Archibald Geikie, Sir William Crookes, Sir Joseph John Thomson, Sir Charles Sherrington, Lord Rutherford, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, and Sir William Henry Bragg.

Bibliography: See T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667, ed. by J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones, 1959); Sir Harold Hartley, ed., Royal Society: Its Origins and Founders (1960); M. Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (1989).

Royal Society British society founded in 1660, and incorporated two years later. Its aim was to accumulate experimental evidence on a wide range of scientific subjects, including medicine and botany as well as the physical sciences. In the 20th century, the Royal Society became an independent body of scientists encouraging research.

Royal Society The oldest surviving scientific body in the world, the Royal Society was founded in 1660 and obtained its first charter in 1662, for the promotion of natural knowledge. In 1665 Henry Oldenburg, the secretary, began a journal, Philosophical Transactions, which evolved from letters to papers, and still continues. Unlike the Paris Academy of Sciences founded soon after, it was and is a kind of club, and it was not until Humphry Davy was president in the 1820s that a majority on council had published any science. Instead of a group of mostly amateur enthusiasts, the society by the 1870s had become a body of distinguished professional scientists. Since the mid‐19th cent. the society has received a parliamentary grant to support research, and increasingly it has advised governments about science. It has a splendid library, but has never had a laboratory.