Founding of the Royal Society of London

Date

28 November 1660 (chartered 1662)

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

England (London)

Era

Early Modern

Significance

On 28 November 1660 twelve natural philosophers met at Gresham College in London and resolved to found a 'College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning'. Among them were Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins and Robert Moray.

King Charles II granted a royal charter on 15 July 1662 creating the Royal Society of London, with Lord Brouncker as its first president; a second charter in 1663 named the king as founder and gave it the fuller title of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Inspired in part by the Baconian ideal of cooperative, experiment-based inquiry, the Society institutionalised the new science: it held regular demonstrations, kept records, and from 1665 published the Philosophical Transactions, the world's first continuously running scientific journal, establishing peer communication and the practice of publishing experimental results. Robert Hooke served as its early curator of experiments, and Isaac Newton, whose Principia (1687) appeared under the Society's imprimatur, later served as its president. As a model of an organised scientific community, the Royal Society helped consolidate the Scientific Revolution and shaped the institutional form of modern science.

Empires active in 28 November 1660 (chartered 1662)

• Mughal Empire
  1526 CE – 1857 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Ottoman Empire
  1299 CE – 1922 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Newton's Principia and universal gravitation
  1687
• Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus and the heliocentric universe
  1543
• Watt patents the rotative steam engine
  1781
• Edward Jenner Develops Smallpox Vaccination
  14 May 1796
• William Harvey demonstrates the circulation of the blood
  1628
• Galileo's telescope and the Sidereus Nuncius
  March 1610

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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