A long-lost 17th century manuscript charting the birth of modern science has been found gathering dust in a cupboard in a house in southern England.
Filled with crabby italics and acerbic asides, the 520 or so yellowing and stained pages are the handwritten minutes of the United Kingdom Royal Society (of eminent scientists) as recorded by the brilliant scientist Robert Hooke, one of the society’s original fellows and curator of experiments.
The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682.
There is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter’s proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude.
The discovery was made by chance during a routine evaluation at the house by Bonhams, the London auctioneers. The manuscript had been kept in a cupboard for 50 years and was only shown to the valuer as he was leaving.
”I thought it must be too good to be true. The first page I saw was headed: ‘President Sir Christopher Wren in the chair’ and I knew I was looking at the vanished minutes of the Royal Society,” said Felix Pryor, manuscript consultant for Bonhams. ”Then there were all these names: Wren, Leibniz, Aubrey, Evelyn, Newton. Then I began to recognise the handwriting of Robert Hooke. It was a magical moment.”
The delight of scientists and historians has quickly turned to anxiety, however. The manuscript is to be put up for auction in London on March 28 and is expected to sell for more than £1-million, prompting Lord Rees, the president of the Royal Society to appeal for a ”white knight” to buy the papers so they can be returned to the society’s archive.
”It is a great pity that the Royal Society cannot itself afford to purchase them so that they could be restored to our collection of documents, from which they were removed at some point during our early history,” he said.
Minutes from December 1679 describe correspondence between Hooke and Newton proposing an experiment to confirm the rotation of the Earth. The notes include a suggestion from Sir Christopher Wren, Hooke’s closest friend, to test the hypothesis by ”shooting of a bullet upwards at a certain angle from the perpendicular round every way — thereby to see whether the bullets soe shot would all fall in a perfect circle”.
Michael Hunter, professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, said: ”It is an extraordinary discovery, filling a gap in the documentation of the early Royal Society and including details of discussions at various meetings that have hitherto been unknown.” — Â