2023-04-26 08:30:42
- Written by Georgina Rannard
- BBC climate and science correspondent
image source, royal society
Fossil hunters on the south coast of England have sent pictures of their finds to scientists
One of the first scientific findings signed by a woman is now available online for the public to see for the first time.
Martha Grech’s 1734 descriptions of the stars join the discoveries of Isaac Newton and the pioneering Victorian paleontologists and photographers.
The documents have been digitized by the scientific institution Royal Society of London.
It hopes it will lead to more discoveries as researchers use the archives.
Some 250,000 documents can now be viewed online, covering everything from climate observations, the history of colors, how electricity is conducted, and animals.
You can access the archive online here. We’ve picked out some highlights:
The first letter is signed by a woman
In 1734, a woman living in New England named Martha Grech wrote to the Royal Society that she had spotted a rare astronomical sight called the Parcelion or “Sun Dog” — an optical phenomenon that appears in the sky in the form of two halos next to the sun.
It is the first letter in the archives of the Society’s journal – Philosophical Transactions – known to have been sent by a woman on her own behalf. Most women at the time had limited access to formal education and would not be considered the intellectual equals of men.
image source, royal society
Drawing of the sun by Martha Grech, who signed the letter to the Royal Society in her own name
Mrs Gresh acknowledges this imbalance in her letter when she writes: “If this came from a male hand I think it would be an acceptable gift to the Royal Society”.
This letter demonstrates that women have contributed to science for centuries even when their work was not public, Royal Society historian Louisiane Verlier explains.
Victorian dinosaurs
Dinosaur hunter Gideon Mantell has sent detailed drawings from his 1849 finds of dinosaur fossils on the Jurassic Coast in southern England.
Some of the drawings were actually made by his wife, Royal Society librarian Keith Moore explains, and were needed to show other scientists what had been discovered before photography was invented.
image source, royal society
Fossil hunters plot their dinosaur finds and send them to scientists for study
Moore adds that drawings of dinosaur fossils have been important to collectors, but also to anatomists who were trying to figure out how bones fused together to form an animal.
“You have a bunch of bones here. How are they put together? These days we kind of know what a dinosaur looked like, but when you’re starting from absolute zero, these sketches were really useful,” he explains.
Discovery of Uranus
Take a look at the original letter written by the scientist who discovered the planet Uranus.
William Herschel wrote to the Society in 1782 to say that he had discovered “a new fundamental planet of our solar system”.
image source, royal society
A letter from William Herschel stating that he has discovered a new planet
It was a shocking discovery at the time, Moore says, because scientists thought they understood what was in the sky.
But William Herschel was using a powerful new telescope and “suddenly found something new, the first planet ever discovered in modern history.”
But if Herschel had gotten his way, we would have called the planet Uranus something completely different. It was his idea to call it “Georgium Sidus” – after King George III.
Early photography experiences
Long before smartphones and digital cameras were everywhere, inventors in the 1830s and 1840s were experimenting with a new idea.
Some of the first attempts at photographing were sent to the Royal Society.
image source, royal society
An early cyanotype photographic experiment from the 1830s
One of the innovators, William Henry Fox Talbot, wrote in 1839 that he thought he had discovered something that might have “many useful and important applications”.
His letters also reveal how inventions can sometimes emerge through failure, as the librarian, Mr. Moore, explains.
Frustrated by his poor drawing abilities, Talbot resorted to trying to devise a new way of taking pictures.
In addition to these four discoveries, the Royal Society – one of the world’s leading scientific organizations – has thousands of others collected since its founding in 1660.
Leading scientists including Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton have submitted the results of their research to the Society’s Journal.
But ordinary people can also present their ideas and discoveries in letters and pictures. One letter in 1790 from a French cloth maker included a piece of silk that he said showed how to make “a dye of all pink”.
Making the history of science accessible to the public is “essential,” says Ms Ferreler, who helped digitize the archive.
“It shows how science has evolved and grown into a discipline with checks and balances that we can trust today,” she explains.
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