Scientific academies

The story

Scientists who worked alone

At the start of the 17th century people who studied nature mostly worked alone, or with a few friends, and often in secret. Some feared that rivals would steal their ideas, others were afraid of being accused of heresy or magic. Discoveries also spread slowly: books were expensive and were printed years apart, letters travelled for weeks, and many errors went uncorrected.

Then came the idea of bringing curious people together, so that they could meet, discuss, repeat other people's experiments and check the results. This is how scientific academies were born, associations of scholars who met regularly.

The Lincei and the Cimento

One of the first modern scientific academies was the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome in 1603 by an eighteen-year-old young nobleman, Federico Cesi. The name recalls the lynx, an animal with sharp eyesight: the academicians were to look at nature with careful eyes. In 1611 Galileo joined too, and he proudly signed himself “Lincean”. The Lincei published some of Galileo's works, but after Cesi's death, in 1630, the academy faded away.

In Florence, between 1657 and 1667, another academy existed, the Accademia del Cimento, sponsored by the Medici, in particular Prince Leopold and Grand Duke Ferdinand II. “Cimento” means “trial”, and the motto was “Provando e riprovando”, “Testing and testing again”. The academicians, who were pupils of Galileo, repeated experiments with the barometer, with the vacuum, with falling bodies and with temperature, and in 1667 they published an account of everything they had done.

The Royal Society

On 28 November 1660, in London, after a lecture by the astronomer and architect Christopher Wren at Gresham College, twelve people decided to found a society “for the promoting of experimental physico-mathematical learning”. It was a company of doctors, astronomers, chemists and educated men. In 1662 King Charles II granted it a royal charter, and the Royal Society was born, which still exists today.

Its motto, “Nullius in verba”, can be translated “on the word of no one”: it means that ideas must be proved by facts and not accepted just because an authority has said them. At meetings the fellows carried out experiments in front of everyone. Robert Boyle studied air and pressure with his vacuum pump, Robert Hooke looked at small things under the microscope and in 1665 published an illustrated book, “Micrographia”, in which he drew an enlarged flea and the “cells” of a piece of cork. Later Isaac Newton joined, and he was its president from 1703 to 1727.

The fellows met every week, on Wednesdays, paid a small fee and brought the results of their experiments. Letters from foreign scholars were also read aloud, and discussed together. It was an open way of doing science, in which nobody had to trust anybody else blindly.

The journal and the other academies

In 1665 the secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, founded a journal, the “Philosophical Transactions”, which still comes out regularly today: it is one of the oldest scientific journals. Before it, in the same year, the “Journal des sçavans” had already appeared in Paris. Publishing results in a journal made it possible to establish who had made a discovery first and to make it known across Europe.

In 1666 in France King Louis XIV and his minister Colbert founded the Académie des sciences, in Paris. In Germany the Leopoldina academy had been born in 1652. Others followed all over Europe, and in the 18th century the model spread to Russia, Sweden, Prussia and America.