The Royal Society - Video Podcasts

Within a few years of its foundation, the Royal Society acquired a crucial institutional role in organising and arbitrating scientific research. Yet what has often been overlooked is the element of evolution - even of trial and error - in the Society's development in its earliest years. This talk will explore the sometimes painful process by which the Society's founders discovered what functions this novel body could most usefully serve.

Is it helpful to consider the history of science in Britain through one of its regions? By considering one such region the English county of Cornwall this lecture argues that it is. A variety of economic, political and cultural forces acted on and through the region to produce a flourishing scientific scene there in the nineteenth century, including numerous scientific museums and regular exhibitions of local scientific and industrial innovations; the second-oldest geological society in Britain; and a Royal Society-funded meteorological observatory (as well as two nineteenth-century Presidents of the Royal Society). Its unique geology, natural history and antiquities attracted the attention of scientific luminaries such as Sir William Hooker, Sir Henry De la Beche and Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. More generally, it is argued that such a geographically-contextual approach highlights important processes that are otherwise missed in more conventional histories of science. Simon Naylor is Senior Lecturer in Historical Geography at the University of Exeter's Cornwall Campus. He has just completed his latest book, Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England, which will be coming out in 2010.

Charles Darwin came to Cambridge University after a dismal year reading medicine at Edinburgh. At Cambridge he fell deeply under the influence of John Henslow, Professor of Botany, whose own vibrant research programme focussed on experimental studies of the nature of species. Such a close friendship grew between them that Darwin was known as "the man that walks with Henslow", and it was Henslow who recommended Darwin for the Beagle voyage. We will here explore the contribution of Henslow and his scientific colleagues in the University to the education of young Mr Darwin, and consider its lasting impact. John Parker is Professor of Plant Cytogenetics at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and Curator of the University's Herbarium.

Francis Galton's scientific career was based on his fascination with statistics. He counted and measured everything from numbers of attractive women in different cities to the frequency people fidgeted in scientific meetings. However his most intensive research was devoted to human physical attributes such as height, chest width, arm strength and colour vision. At the same time as developing theories on inheritance of physical characteristics, he proffered suggestions about the improvement of the human race. This talk will concentrate on his work in the context of Victorian ideas about criminality. Natasha McEnroe is the Museum Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy and Curator of the Galton Collection at University College London. She has lectured widely, and co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Tyranny of Treatment: Samuel Johnson, His Friends and Georgian Medicine (British Art Journal, 2003).

Scientific explanations have often relied on common objects, from watches to grains of sand, to provide an understanding of the natural world. The use of familiar things to illustrate scientific theories was particularly prevalent and powerful in the mid-nineteenth century. In this talk we will see how many different household artefacts - from candles to cups of tea, pebbles to primroses, salt to see-saws - were used to instruct new audiences in the science of common things.

Joseph Dalton Hooker once described classifying plants and animals as exciting work, 'the species go smash smash every day'. Hooker was one of the nineteenth century's most powerful and influential men of science: director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, President of the Royal Society and a close friend and key ally of Charles Darwin. In this engaging, illustrated talk Jim Endersby will show that understanding why Hooker was so keen to "smash" species, and how he did it, helps us understand much about Victorian science, especially why Darwin's ideas about species were both useful and dangerous to his friends and colleagues.

In 1845 William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, built the largest telescope in the world at his home, Birr Castle in Ireland. The combination of its extravagant ambition, uniqueness and inaccessibility brought to a head a problem that had run through the history of the reflecting telescope, where the foremost research instruments had been built by amateur instrument makers for their own ends. Lord Rosse fulfilled his ambition to have the world's largest telescope, but did he achieve his other aim, to bring the large reflector out of the sphere of the individual enthusiast and into mainstream of a shared astronomical practice?

Excavations from the 1820s to 1860s in Kent's Cavern (Torquay, Devon) played a major role in the establishment of deep roots for human antiquity, coinciding with the development and promulgation of Darwin's and Wallace's notion of evolution by means of natural selection. We review the history of investigations at the site in wider context, showing how the cave's archaeology challenged established dogma promulgated by Buckland, Cuvier and others, and came to be one of the most informative sites for Ice Age human behaviour in Britain.

As it begins its fifth century, the telescope holds its own as an icon of scientific endeavour. Its status has not always been uncontested, however, since telescopes and their users have often found themselves on the wrong side of sharp-minded wits. As science suffered turbulent times, so the telescope could come under attack

The private laboratories and equipment used by the Third and Fourth Barons Rayleigh (John William Strutt and his son Robert John Strutt) remain largely as they were when used by these great scientists. This lecture will take the audience on a virtual tour of the laboratories and describe some of the important experiments conducted there.

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford interpreted the earlier experimental results of his students, Geiger and Marsden, as showing that at the centre of the atom there was a small, dense nucleus with a positive electric charge. This insight was to fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of the physical world and led to the birth of nuclear physics. As we near the centenary of this historic scientific contribution, we will look at how this discovery came about, examine Rutherford's legacy and the important questions that remain in the field of nuclear physics a hundred years on.

Founded in 1788, the Linnean Society is one of London's oldest learned institutions. Among other collections, the Society's Library preserves the manuscripts, books and correspondence of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern plant and animal classification. Linnaeus's library gives fascinating insight into his life and work.

In the spring of 1781, William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, using his homemade telescope in the back garden of his house at 19 New King Street, in Bath. For the world of astronomy, it was an astonishing find - the first new planet ever found. But Herschel himself considered it relatively unimportant compared with his true quest: to understand, with the help of his sister and collaborator Caroline, the very nature and evolution of the universe itself.

Dr Martin Lister (1638-1712), vice-president of the Royal Society and court physician, is best known as England's first arachnologist and conchologist. This talk will also address some of his lesser-known discoveries, including his invention of the histogram and the stratigraphic map.

The tale of how a group of passionate plant collectors, botanists and explorers turned Britain into a nation of gardeners. The cast includes Peter Collinson, who brought the American wilderness to British parks; botanists Carl Linnaeus and Daniel Solander; and Sir Joseph Banks, who turned Kew into a storehouse of Empire.