Royal Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The Royal Society has a motto that stops you cold: Nullius in verba. Latin for "Take nobody's word for it." Drawn from a poem by Horace, those four words captured everything the founders wanted to stand for when they first gathered at Gresham College on the 28th of November 1660. Twelve natural philosophers, including Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, resolved to start a college dedicated to experimental learning. They didn't want argument or authority. They wanted proof.

  What they built would become the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world. It would publish the world's first scientific journal, shape government policy across four centuries, and admit its first female Fellows only in 1945. The Royal Society's story is not a smooth arc of progress. It is a record of ambitions fulfilled and deferred, of internal politics and public controversies, of a motto that its members have not always lived up to and have never been willing to abandon.

• 2. An Invisible College

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  Robert Boyle, in letters dated 1646 and 1647, referred to gatherings of like-minded thinkers as "our invisible college" or "our philosophical college". The phrase had older roots. German Rosicrucian pamphlets in the early 17th century had used it, and Ben Jonson had referenced a similar idea in a 1624-25 masque called The Fortunate Isles and Their Union. Boyle's letters were addressed to his former tutor Isaac Marcombes in Geneva, to Francis Tallents at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and to Samuel Hartlib in London.

  These groups of physicians and natural philosophers met at Gresham College in London and at Wadham College in Oxford. They were drawn to the "new science" promoted by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis. At Oxford, John Wilkins ran a group called the Philosophical Society, operating under rules still held today at the Bodleian Library.

  A rival account of the founding pointed to French influence. Jean-Baptiste du Hamel, Giovanni Domenico Cassini, and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle all believed the example of the Montmor Academy in Paris in 1657 had sparked the English initiative, partly because Henry Oldenburg, the society's first secretary, had attended its meetings. Robert Hooke forcefully disagreed, writing that the philosophical meetings in England and Oxford had existed well before Oldenburg arrived from France, and that Oldenburg himself "knew very little of philosophic matter".

• 3. Charter, Crisis, and Controversy

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  The second royal charter, signed on the 23rd of April 1663, named the king as the society's founder and gave the society its full official title. Robert Hooke was appointed Curator of Experiments that November. Lord Brouncker served as the society's first president, and his peer's helmet appearing on the coat of arms remains a heraldic anomaly: corporations are supposed to use a closed helmet, and scholars believe the engraver either didn't know the rule or chose to flatter the president.

  The Great Fire of London in 1666 pushed the society temporarily out of Gresham College and into Arundel House. The fire didn't damage the college, but the Lord Mayor commandeered it. The society returned in 1673.

  Isaac Newton's presidency, which ran from 1703 until his death in 1727, raised the society's reputation considerably. It also, by Newton's own hand, raised questions about fairness. During the dispute with Gottfried Leibniz over who invented infinitesimal calculus, Newton used his presidential authority to appoint a committee he described as impartial. He then wrote the committee's report himself and published it under the committee's name.

  The 18th century's most public rupture came in 1777 over lightning conductors. Benjamin Franklin had invented the pointed version in 1749; Benjamin Wilson invented a blunted alternative. The argument grew poisonous. Opponents of Franklin's design accused his supporters of being American sympathisers rather than British subjects. The president, Sir John Pringle, eventually resigned.

• 4. Fellows, Money, and Reform

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  Ninety-eight men are known as the Original Fellows, appointed in two tranches: 94 on the 20th of May 1663 and 4 on the 22nd of June. Many of them were not scientists at all. Two-thirds of the fellowship in 1663 were non-scientists; by 1800 that proportion had risen to 71.6%. The entrance fee was set at £4, with a subscription of one shilling a week, which should have generated around £600 a year. Many fellows paid neither on time nor at all.

  By 1740 the society was running a deficit of £240. The treasurer began taking a harder line with defaulters in 1741. The fellowship at the time stood at around 300 people, up from 110 in the early years of the 18th century.

  Charles Babbage's 1830 book, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, targeted the society's permissive membership standards. Of 662 fellows that year, only 104 had ever contributed to the Philosophical Transactions. Reform came: a Charters Committee recommended limiting new elections to 15 per year, selecting fellows purely on scientific merit, and holding all elections on a single day. That cap rose to 17 in 1930 and 20 in 1937. From 1850 onward, the society also began administering a government grant for scientific research, which began at £1,000 a year and has since grown to over £47 million.

• 5. Women and the Vote

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  On the 22nd of March 1945, Marjory Stephenson and Kathleen Lonsdale became the first female Fellows of the Royal Society. The vote that admitted them had been conducted by post during the Second World War, since co-ordinating all Fellows in person was impractical. The result was 336 in favour and 37 opposed.

  The legal basis for their election was a statutory amendment passed in 1944, contained in Chapter 1 of Statute 1, which read "Nothing herein contained shall render women ineligible as candidates". That a statute had been required at all tells its own story about the society's first 285 years.

  In 1947, Mary Cartwright became the first female mathematician elected to the fellowship. She was also the first woman to serve on the council of the Royal Society.

• 6. Publishing and Peer Review

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  Philosophical Transactions first appeared in 1665, making it the world's first journal dedicated exclusively to science. Henry Oldenburg, the society's first secretary, served as its founding editor. The journal has been published continuously since then, a record no other scientific journal can match.

  Peer review as it is now widely practised in scientific publishing originated with this journal. Since 1886, Philosophical Transactions has appeared in two parts: A for mathematics and the physical sciences, and B for the biological sciences.

  Biology Letters, covering short research articles across all areas of biology, was launched in 2005. The society announced in May 2021 that it would transition its four hybrid research journals to open access. The oldest honour the society bestows is the Croonian Lecture, created in 1701 at the request of the widow of William Croone, one of the original founding members. The lecture was first actually awarded in 1738, seven years after the Copley Medal, which is given for outstanding achievement in any branch of science and is the oldest medal the society still awards.

• 7. Headquarters and Homes

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  Carlton House Terrace, where the society has been based since 1967, was designed by John Nash as two separate blocks with a gap between them. The building at 6-9 Carlton House Terrace is Grade I listed and is still owned by the Crown Estates; the society leases it. A renovation costing £9.8 million ran from 2001 to 2004, and the Prince of Wales reopened the building on the 7th of July 2004.

  Before Carlton House Terrace, the society spent decades at Burlington House, moving into the East Wing in 1873 after overcrowding at Somerset House. The society had moved to Somerset House in 1780 under president Sir Joseph Banks, but the library there had to be spread across multiple rooms and the museum collection was handed to the British Museum in 1781 because there was simply no room to store it.

  In 2009 the society purchased Chicheley Hall, a Grade I listed building near Milton Keynes, for £6.5 million with partial funding from the Kavli Foundation. Renovated as the Kavli Royal Society International Centre, it held its first scientific meeting on the 1st of June 2010 and was formally opened on the 21st of June 2010. Ten years later, on the 18th of June 2020, the centre was permanently closed and the building was sold in 2021.

• 8. Science, Politics, and the Present

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  In October 2020, the society's Science in Emergencies Tasking group published a report on vaccine deployment led by sociologist Melinda Mills. The report examined how governments might address misinformation about vaccines online, and drew public responses from commentators including former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, who argued in 2021 that "science advances by confronting contrary arguments, not by suppressing them".

  In October 2025, the Financial Times reported that the society had discussed the fellowship status of Elon Musk. The society stated that its incoming president, Sir Paul Nurse, had written to Musk asking him to consider resigning if he felt unable to promote or support science. Musk did not respond on that point, and the society concluded it was not in its interests to pursue disciplinary action.

  Sir Paul Nurse formally took over from Adrian Smith as president on the 1st of December 2025. The Charter Book, which Fellows and foreign members have signed on joining since 1663, was digitised in 2019 and carries the signatures of every British monarch since then, with the exception of William and Mary and Queen Anne. That book, and the motto above the door, remain the society's oldest continuous threads.