Saturday, November 6, 2010

The Royal Society Archive and Optick Glaffes

The Royal Society is 350 years old in 2010. To mark the event, the Royal Society archives have been made freely available online.

ALL of them.

From 1665.

350 years worth.

The archives contain more than 66,000 articles, including the first ever article published in the world's first science journal Philosophical Transactions.


Here's a nerdy quiz question for you to ask, "What was the subject of the first paper in the first scientific journal?" Answer - Optick Glaffes.

The archive will remain free to access until 30 November 2010. So go in now and download some original articles from people such as Mr Issac Newton (a promising young mathematiks Profeffor)


and a Mr Charles Darwin (recently back from an around-the-world cruise).

5 comments:

  1. This is gonna blow my bandwidth!

    Thanks Chris, very useful.

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  2. And then there are the letters and communications of one Benjamin Franklin, LL. D., F.R.S. on his experiments with electric kites, observations of the transit of the planet Mercury, and other such things...

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  3. Franklin? Just some colonial. Nothing will come of it . . .

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  4. Just a minor nitpick (feel free to delete): the letters 'f' and non-final 's' are extremely similar in the fonts used those days, the difference is a small blotch of a bar in 'f'. So those are indeed "glasses" and "professor", respectively.

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  5. If you think that I'm going to let accuracy get in the way of a good blog post title you're very much mistaken! :-)

    ReplyDelete

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