The Royal Society
And the Invention of Modern Science
by Adrian Tinniswood
2019
I think I originally saw The Royal Society in a museum gift shop, and decided I wanted to read it based on the catchy cover art.
Tinniswood delivers a short (125 page) and just-the-facts style account of the founding and development of the Royal Society of London. We don't go very deep into the psychology or personality of any of the founders, but we do get a succinct overview of the major issues the organization faced in its first 200 years.
Okay, so in the early 1600s, Francis Bacon proposes "what if, instead of assuming Aristotle et al were right about everything, what if we try directly observing the world and learning about it that way?" Bacon proposed this around the same time that some astronomers and surgeons were looking at the stars and dissected corpses and beginning to suspect that Aristotle et al were not, in fact, right about everything.
In 1660, a dozen college professors started meeting to perform and discuss experimental observations of the world, and by 1662, they had a Royal Charter. The Royal Society had (and in fact courted) a mixed membership of working scientists and rich men with a hobbyist's interest in science.
The rich hobbyists provided the money and political connections needed to maintain the existence of the organization, if not its intended spirit. Isaac Newton spent about 25 years as the Society president in the early 1700s, but most of the leaders were aristocrats. The split membership was an ongoing source of conflict until about 1850, when the scientists pushed through some reforms to the nominating process that resulted in it (eventually) becoming an all-professional organization.
Apparently the term "gimcrack" comes from a play called The Virtuoso, whose title character, Dr Gimcrack, was a parody of the Royal Society fellows, and his ridiculous experiments in the play are based on the playwright looking for the silliest articles in the Society's journal.
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