The Royal Society - Video Podcasts

When the decade-long argument between Johannes Hevelius, the Danzig astronomer, and Robert Hooke about the respective merits of plain and telescopic sights for astronomical instruments reared its head again in 1685, the resulting controversy threatened to engulf the Royal Society. The sequel to this argument reveals not just a clash between two notable and notoriously egotistical natural philosophers but a complex set of negotiations between three British learned societies which developed into an open competition for ascendancy.

New York Times Best Selling and award-winning author Andrea Wulf tells the extraordinary story of the first global scientific collaboration set amid warring armies, hurricanes, scientific endeavour and personal tragedy. On 6 June 1761 and 3 June 1769 the planet Venus passed between earth and sun - each time visible as a small black dot. Transits of Venus always arrive in pairs - eight years apart - but then it takes more than a century before they are seen again. In the 1760s the world's scientific community was electrified because the transit would allow them for the first time to calculate the distance between the planets in our solar system. At a time when war was tearing Europe and much of the rest of the world apart, hundreds of astronomers overcame political, geographical and intellectual boundaries to work together. For a decade the Royal Society was gripped by transit fever, organising viewings and expeditions to farflung corners of the globe, including Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage to Tahiti

In this talk, Alan Morrison discusses Cayley's pioneering aviation work; his role as an inventor; and as founder of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street. Cayley's work will be related to the scientific and intellectual milieu of the day, and to debates regarding the public engagement with science and technology.

Nevil Maskelyne, 5th Astronomer Royal and Fellow of the Royal Society, is today best known as the villain of Dava Sobel's Longitude. This talk will, however, look further back and examine how Maskelyne has fared since his death in 1811, attempting to pinpoint when and why a more negative assessment overshadowed the positive celebration of a significant figure of British science

Florence Nightingale disliked having her portrait taken as much as she hated being a celebrity, yet it was largely through the visual representations of her face and person in the press that she gained iconic status in Victorian England. Representations of the idealised Angel of the Crimea tell as much about attitudes of her time as they do about the reality of her life. Natasha McEnroe examines Nightingale's life through a selection of images of her, and will consider whether they can shed some light on the controversy around the mysterious illness of her later years.

From the moment of their discovery, each of the chemical elements has embarked on a journey into our culture. Over millennia and decades, they have gained meaning through encounter and manipulation. Those long known, such as gold, silver, iron and sulphur, all found in the Bible, have largely settled associations with immortality, virginity, strength and evil. The arts exploit, renew and modify these meanings often in surprising ways. Hugh Aldersey-Williams elaborates.

Eighteenth-century chemists could gain useful income and patronage as advisors to industry - and some of the wealthiest and most influential industrialists were brewers. Making chemical knowledge credible to this audience, however, was not always easy: most brewers trusted the direct lessons of the brewhouse - and also the countinghouse - to those of the laboratory. In this talk, Dr James Sumner discusses how chemists tried to resolve these problems, and how they were challenged by experienced brewers promoting a scientific identity of their own.

Plastics pioneers had great aspirations for their new materials. Roland Barthes called plastics "a miraculous substance . . . a transformation of nature". Serendipity, careful experimentation and entrepreneurial skills have all played significant roles in the development of modern plastics. This presentation by Dr Susan Mossman of the Science Museum will assess whether the visions of key early pioneers such as Leo Baekeland have been realised today.

Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Her research interests include the development of web technologies, digital libraries, and human computer interaction. In this talk she will discuss the history of the web, and give an insider's perspective on its possible future.

Michael Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle is arguably the most popular science book ever published. Based on Faraday's final series of Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution, it has never been out of print in English since it was first published in 1861.

William Crookes was a physicist, chemist, entrepreneur and spiritualist. Being a consummate experimenter he designed precision instruments of great delicacy, in particular exquisite glass vacuum tubes. The radiometer, when first exhibited in 1875, took the scientific world by storm, and became his trade mark.

The mathematician and surveyor Jonas Moore was elected FRS in the 1670s, but under the Cromwellian regime he had had a different kind of career as a surveyor, working for the company that successfully completed the draining of the Fens. This paper examines one of the products of that time: his sixteen-sheet 'Mapp of the Great Levell', printed in 1657 or (more likely) 1658. It was an impressive advertisement, for the drainage project, for the skills of its Surveyor, and for the increasing capabilities of the English map trade.

In October 2010 the National Media Museum hosted the 'Niepce in England' Conference where they could announce and share with the photographic, conservation and scientific communities the ground breaking findings which had been discovered during the collaborative research partnership between the National Media Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute.

How do you get ordinary people to take an interest in science? This was already becoming a problem for the scientific community in the early twntieth century. But rather than letting outsiders do the job, the scientists took an active role. This talk explores their successes and failures as communicators, with comments on how things changed between then and now.

During the Renaissance in Venice, composers such as Gabrieli and Monteverdi created some of their greatest masterpieces for performance in the great churches on festive occasions. But what would the music have sounded like, given its complexity and the long reverberation times of the large churches?