The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 1

As part of the BBC’s year of science programming, Melvyn Bragg looks at the history of the oldest scientific learned society of them all: the Royal Society. Melvyn travels to Wadham College, Oxford, where under the shadow of the English Civil War, the young Christopher Wren and friends experimented in the garden of their inspirational college warden, John Wilkins. Back in London, as Charles II is brought to the throne from exile, the new Society is formally founded one night in Gresham College. When London burns six years later, it is two of the key early Fellows of the Society who are charged with its rebuilding. And, as Melvyn finds out, in the secret observatory in The Monument to the fire, it is science which flavours their plans.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Related episodes

• The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 2
  
  5 Jan, 2010 500 Science
• The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 4
  
  7 Jan, 2010 500 Science
• The Royal Society
  
  23 Mar, 2006 500 Science
• The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 3
  
  6 Jan, 2010 500 Science
• The Lunar Society
  
  5 Jun, 2003 500 Science
• Baconian Science
  
  2 Apr, 2009 500 Science
• Robert Boyle
  
  12 Jun, 2014 540 Chemistry
• The Fire of London
  
  11 Dec, 2008 940 History of Europe
• The Cavendish Family in Science
  
  20 May, 2010 500 Science
• Early Geology
  
  12 Apr, 2012 550 Earth sciences and geology

---

Programme ID: b00pk7j0

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pk7j0

Auto-category: 509 (History of science)