AnniversariesAuthor(s): Alan CookSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 1-2Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/531924 .

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 53 (1), 1-2 (1999)

MORE FREQUENT ISSUES

The Council of the Society has agreed that from this issue, Notes and Records will appear three times a year, in January, May and September. This change follows the growing interest in the history of science, and appropriately as our first article under the new publication schedule, we reproduce the text of an address by Professor Maurice Wilkes, F.R.S., to a conference on the teaching of the history of science in Europe. Notes and Records will remain the journal of record for the Society, publishing the President's annual address and appropriate lectures to the Society.

At the same time, there are topics that may become more prominent in future issues, for instance, the European and American connections of the Society in our first centuries; we had European and American Fellows from our earliest years, and astronomical and botanical observations from those continents appeared in Philosophical Transactions. Another topic, dealing with more contemporary science, is recollections of scientists and scientific occasions from the very recent past. Nowadays much communication is ephemeral as never before, and is likely to become more so. Written records of how we interacted with other scientists, how we came to our discoveries, of our academic or business connections, are ever fewer, and our successors as historians of science will have difficulty going behind the bare, printed record unless journals such as Notes and Records can attract more informal reminiscences. In this way we may supplement the work of the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists (which the Society supports).

Potential contributors may notice that the scope of the records of the Society is very wide. Every article and review should have some relation to the Society, but that does not exclude the social positions nor moral characters of our predecessors; nor the activities of those who preceded the formation of the Society, even by centuries, but whose influence is evident in the aims and achievements of the early Fellows. The history of science is not just facinating gossip: it has serious lessons for us today about the way science is pursued, how the scientific imagination is stimulated, and fundamental questions of methodology and metaphysics. Furthermore, science is a major part of the human condition, along with economics or politics or the arts, and the history of science is as relevant and important as the histories of any of those pursuits.

ANNIVERSARIES

Two interesting anniversaries fell in the autumn of 1998, between our last issue in July and the present one. One is the occasion of the article by Sir John Meurig Thomas on Count Rumford's arrival in London, based on a lecture Sir John gave to the American Philosophical Society. As the Millennium dawns, the Royal Institution will be commemorating its foundation by Rumford, and the many fertile developments in the sciences that have come from it. No doubt we shall acknowledge in Notes and Records its close connections with the Royal Society.

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© 1999 The Royal Society

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On 20 October 1698, a Thursday, Edmond Halley, F.R.S., holding a commission as Captain RN, took the pink Paramore down the Thames from Deptford to Gravesend to begin the first of two cruises around the Atlantic to observe the magnetic variation and determine longitudes of American ports, the first expedition undertaken for scientific purposes at public expense. His results have been of use ever since in the study of the historical behaviour of the Earth's magnetism, and his presentation as a chart of lines of equal variation ('Halleyan lines') became the model for representing geographical variables from that day to this. After his Atlantic voyages, Halley spent a few months observing the tides in the English Channel, a survey that was not repeated for a century and a half. His Channel chart was reproduced many years later for the first stage in an atlas of charts for the sea route from England to India.

Sir Alan Cook, F.R.S.

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