Clopton Havers
Clopton Havers was an English physician who did pioneering research on the microstructure of bone. He is believed to have been the first person to observe and certainly the first to describe what are now called Haversian canals and Sharpey's fibres. Havers was born in Stambourne, the son of Henry Havers, Rector of Stambourne, he studied medicine under Richard Morton, in 1668, attended St Catharine's College, but failed to graduate. Following this, Havers' whereabouts are unknown until 1684, when he was admitted as an extra-licentiate of the College of Physicians of London, which allowed him to practice medicine in limited areas of the country. In 1685, he studied at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, was awarded a degree of "Doctor of Medicine" following presentation of his thesis, entitled De Respiratione in 1685. Havers practiced medicine in London and was interested in osteology, the study of bones, he was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society on 15 December 1686. His most influential work, Osteologia nova, or some new Observations of the Bones, was the first report of the microscopic structure of bone.
This work was praised by the Italian scientist, Giorgio Baglivi, was published in several editions in Frankfurt and Amsterdam. In February 1700, Havers reported to the Royal Society on a Chinese practice of smallpox inoculation, which involved inhaling dried matter from a smallpox pustule. Havers married daughter of Thomas Fuller, the Rector of Willingale, he was buried at Willingale Doe, Essex. His funeral sermon, dedicated to his widow, was preached by Lilly Butler, minister of St Mary Aldermanbury, was printed in quarto. Osteologia nova, or some new Observations of the Bones, the Parts belonging to them, with the manner of their Accretion and Nutrition. 1691
Boston
Boston is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city proper covers 48 square miles with an estimated population of 685,094 in 2017, making it the most populous city in New England. Boston is the seat of Suffolk County as well, although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999; the city is the economic and cultural anchor of a larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country. As a combined statistical area, this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth-largest in the United States. Boston is one of the oldest cities in the United States, founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan settlers from England, it was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Siege of Boston.
Upon gaining U. S. independence from Great Britain, it continued to be an important port and manufacturing hub as well as a center for education and culture. The city has expanded beyond the original peninsula through land reclamation and municipal annexation, its rich history attracts many tourists, with Faneuil Hall alone drawing more than 20 million visitors per year. Boston's many firsts include the United States' first public park, first public or state school and first subway system; the Boston area's many colleges and universities make it an international center of higher education, including law, medicine and business, the city is considered to be a world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship, with nearly 2,000 startups. Boston's economic base includes finance and business services, information technology, government activities. Households in the city claim the highest average rate of philanthropy in the United States; the city has one of the highest costs of living in the United States as it has undergone gentrification, though it remains high on world livability rankings.
Boston's early European settlers had first called the area Trimountaine but renamed it Boston after Boston, England, the origin of several prominent colonists. The renaming on September 7, 1630, was by Puritan colonists from England who had moved over from Charlestown earlier that year in quest for fresh water, their settlement was limited to the Shawmut Peninsula, at that time surrounded by the Massachusetts Bay and Charles River and connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. The peninsula is thought to have been inhabited as early as 5000 BC. In 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first governor John Winthrop led the signing of the Cambridge Agreement, a key founding document of the city. Puritan ethics and their focus on education influenced its early history. Over the next 130 years, the city participated in four French and Indian Wars, until the British defeated the French and their Indian allies in North America. Boston was the largest town in British America until Philadelphia grew larger in the mid-18th century.
Boston's oceanfront location made it a lively port, the city engaged in shipping and fishing during its colonial days. However, Boston stagnated in the decades prior to the Revolution. By the mid-18th century, New York City and Philadelphia surpassed Boston in wealth. Boston encountered financial difficulties as other cities in New England grew rapidly. Many of the crucial events of the American Revolution occurred near Boston. Boston's penchant for mob action along with the colonists' growing distrust in Britain fostered a revolutionary spirit in the city; when the British government passed the Stamp Act in 1765, a Boston mob ravaged the homes of Andrew Oliver, the official tasked with enforcing the Act, Thomas Hutchinson the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. The British sent two regiments to Boston in 1768 in an attempt to quell the angry colonists; this did not sit well with the colonists. In 1770, during the Boston Massacre, the army killed several people in response to a mob in Boston.
The colonists compelled the British to withdraw their troops. The event was publicized and fueled a revolutionary movement in America. In 1773, Britain passed the Tea Act. Many of the colonists saw the act as an attempt to force them to accept the taxes established by the Townshend Acts; the act prompted the Boston Tea Party, where a group of rebels threw an entire shipment of tea sent by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party was a key event leading up to the revolution, as the British government responded furiously with the Intolerable Acts, demanding compensation for the lost tea from the rebels; this led to the American Revolutionary War. The war began in the area surrounding Boston with the Battles of Concord. Boston itself was besieged for a year during the Siege of Boston, which began on April 19, 1775; the New England militia impeded the movement of the British Army. William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe the commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America, led the British army in the siege.
On June 17, the British captured the Charlestown peninsula in Boston, during the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British army outnumbered the militia stationed there, but it was a Py
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat, letter writer and poet. Lady Mary is today chiefly remembered for her letters her letters from travels to the Ottoman Empire, as wife to the British ambassador to Turkey, which have been described by Billie Melman as "the first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient". Aside from her writing, Lady Mary is known for introducing and advocating for smallpox inoculation to Britain after her return from Turkey, her writings address and challenge the hindering contemporary social attitudes towards women and their intellectual and social growth. Lady Mary Pierrepont was born in May 1689 and was baptised on 26 May 1689 at St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden, London, she was the eldest child of Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull by his first wife Mary Fielding. She had two girls and a boy. Aged seven, she was chosen by members of the Kit-Cat Club as the subject of their toast to the beauty of the season, had her name engraved on the glass goblet used for this purpose.
The children were raised by their paternal grandmother. Lady Mary was passed to the care of her father upon her grandmother's death, she began her education in her father's home. The family's land-holdings were extensive, including Thoresby Hall and Holme Pierrepont Hall in Nottinghamshire, a house in West Dean in Wiltshire. To supplement the instruction of a despised governess, Lady Mary used the library in Thoresby Hall to "steal" her education, teaching herself Latin, a language reserved for men at the time. By 1705, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Mary Pierrepont had written two albums filled with poetry, a brief epistolary novel, a prose-and-verse romance modelled after Aphra Behn's Voyage to the Isle of Love, she corresponded with two bishops, Thomas Tenison and Gilbert Burnet. By 1710, Lady Mary had two possible suitors to choose from: Edward Wortley Montagu and Clotworthy Skeffington. Lady Mary corresponded with Edward Wortley Montagu via letters from 28 March 1710 to 2 May 1711. After May 1711 there was a break in contact between Edward Wortley Montagu.
Mary's father, now Marquess of Dorchester, rejected Wortley Montagu as a prospect because he refused to entail his estate on a possible heir. Her father pressured her to marry heir to an Irish peerage. In order to avoid marriage to Skeffington, she eloped with Montagu; the marriage license is dated 17 August 1712, the marriage took place on 23 August 1712. The early years of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's married life were spent in the country, she had Edward Wortley Montagu the younger, on 16 May 1713, in London. A couple of months on 1 July 1713 Lady Mary's brother, aged twenty, died of smallpox and left behind two children. On 13 October 1714, her husband accepted post as Junior Commissioner of Treasury; when Lady Mary joined him in London, her wit and beauty soon made her a prominent figure at court. She was among the society of George I and the Prince of Wales, counted amongst her friends Molly Skerritt, Lady Walpole, Lord Hervey, Mary Astell, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Abbé Antonio Schinella Conti.
In December 1715, Lady Mary contracted smallpox. She survived, but while she was ill someone circulated the satirical "court eclogues" she had been writing. One of the poems was read as an attack on Caroline, Princess of Wales, in spite of the fact that the "attack" was voiced by a character, herself satirised. In 1716, Edward Wortley Montagu was appointed Ambassador at Constantinople. In August 1716, Lady Mary accompanied him to Vienna, thence to Adrianople and Constantinople, he was recalled in 1717, but they remained at Constantinople until 1718. While away from England, the Wortley Montagu's had a daughter on 19 January 1718, who would grow up to be Mary, Countess of Bute. After an unsuccessful delegation between Austria and Turkey/Ottoman Empire, they set sail for England via the Mediterranean, reached London on 2 October 1718; the story of this voyage and of her observations of Eastern life is told in Letters from Turkey, a series of lively letters full of graphic descriptions. During her visit she was sincerely charmed by the beauty and hospitality of the Ottoman women she encountered, she recorded her experiences in a Turkish bath.
She recorded a amusing incident in which a group of Turkish women at a bath in Sofia, horrified by the sight of the stays she was wearing, exclaimed that "the husbands in England were much worse than in the East, for tied up their wives in little boxes, the shape of their bodies". Lady Mary wrote about misconceptions previous travellers male travellers, had recorded about the religion and the treatment of women in the Ottoman Empire, her gender and class status provided her with access to female spaces, that were closed off to males. Her personal interactions with Ottoman women enabled her to provide, in her view, a more accurate account of Turkish women, their dress, traditions and liberties, at times irrefutably more a critique of the Occident than a praise of the Orient. Lady Mary returned to the West with knowledge of the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox, known as variolation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu defied convention most memorably by introducing smallpox inoculation to Western medicine after witnessing it during her travels and stay in the Ottoman Empire.
In the Ottoman Empire, she visited the women in their segr
East India Company
The East India Company known as the Honourable East India Company or the British East India Company and informally as John Company, Company Bahadur, or The Company, was an English and British joint-stock company. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region with Mughal India and the East Indies, with Qing China; the company ended up seizing control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent, colonised parts of Southeast Asia, colonised Hong Kong after a war with Qing China. Chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies", the company rose to account for half of the world's trade in basic commodities including cotton, indigo dye, spices, saltpetre and opium; the company ruled the beginnings of the British Empire in India. In his speech to the House of Commons in July 1833, Lord Macaulay explained that since the beginning, the East India company had always been involved in both trade and politics, just as its French and Dutch counterparts had been.
The company received a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600, coming late to trade in the Indies. Before them the Portuguese Estado da Índia had traded there for much of the 16th century and the first of half a dozen Dutch Companies sailed to trade there from 1595; these Dutch companies amalgamated in March 1602 into the United East Indies Company, which introduced the first permanent joint stock from 1612. By contrast, wealthy merchants and aristocrats owned the EIC's shares; the government owned no shares and had only indirect control until 1657 when permanent joint stock was established. During its first century of operation, the focus of the company was trade, not the building of an empire in India. Company interests turned from trade to territory during the 18th century as the Mughal Empire declined in power and the East India Company struggled with its French counterpart, the French East India Company during the Carnatic Wars of the 1740s and 1750s; the battles of Plassey and Buxar, in which the British defeated the Bengali powers, left the company in control of Bengal and a major military and political power in India.
In the following decades it increased the extent of the territories under its control, controlling the majority of the Indian subcontinent either directly or indirectly via local puppet rulers under the threat of force by its Presidency armies, much of which were composed of native Indian sepoys. By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the British East India company had a private army of about 260,000—twice the size of the British Army, with Indian revenues of £13,464,561, expenses of £14,017,473; the company came to rule large areas of India with its private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions. Company rule in India began in 1757 and lasted until 1858, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown's assuming direct control of the Indian subcontinent in the form of the new British Raj. Despite frequent government intervention, the company had recurring problems with its finances, it was dissolved in 1874 as a result of the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act passed one year earlier, as the Government of India Act had by rendered it vestigial and obsolete.
The official government machinery of British India assumed the East India Company's governmental functions and absorbed its navy and its armies in 1858. Soon after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the captured Spanish and Portuguese ships with their cargoes enabled English voyagers to travel the globe in search of riches. London merchants presented a petition to Queen Elizabeth I for permission to sail to the Indian Ocean; the aim was to deliver a decisive blow to the Portuguese monopoly of Far Eastern Trade. Elizabeth granted her permission and on 10 April 1591 James Lancaster in the Bonaventure with two other ships sailed from Torbay around the Cape of Good Hope to the Arabian Sea on one of the earliest English overseas Indian expeditions. Having sailed around Cape Comorin to the Malay Peninsula, they preyed on Spanish and Portuguese ships there before returning to England in 1594; the biggest capture that galvanised English trade was the seizure of the large Portuguese Carrack, the Madre de Deus by Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Cumberland at the Battle of Flores on 13 August 1592.
When she was brought in to Dartmouth she was the largest vessel, seen in England and her cargo consisted of chests filled with jewels, gold, silver coins, cloth, pepper, cinnamon, benjamin, red dye and ebony. Valuable was the ship's rutter containing vital information on the China and Japan trades; these riches aroused the English to engage in this opulent commerce. In 1596, three more English ships were all lost at sea. A year however saw the arrival of Ralph Fitch, an adventurer merchant who, along with his companions, had made a remarkable fifteen-year overland journey to Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. Fitch was consulted on the Indian affairs and gave more valuable information to Lancaster. On 22 September 1599, a group of merchants met and stated their intention "to venture in the pretended voyage to the East Indies, the sums that they will adventure", committing £30
Inoculation
The terms inoculation and immunization are used synonymously to refer to artificial induction of immunity against various infectious diseases. However, there are current differences. In English medicine, inoculation referred only to the practice of variolation until the early 1800s; when Edward Jenner introduced smallpox vaccine in 1798, this was called cowpox inoculation or vaccine inoculation. Soon, to avoid confusion, smallpox inoculation continued to be referred to as variolation and cowpox inoculation was referred to as vaccination. In 1891, Louis Pasteur proposed that the terms vaccine and vaccination should be extended to include the new protective procedures being developed. Immunization refers to the use of all vaccines but extends to the use of antitoxin, which contains preformed antibody such as to diphtheria or tetanus exotoxins. Inoculation is now more or less synonymous in nontechnical usage with injection and the like, questions along the lines of "Have you had your flu injection/vaccination/inoculation/immunization?" should not cause confusion.
The focus is on why, not the literal meaning of the technique used. Inoculation has a specific meaning for procedures done in vitro; these include the transfer of microorganisms into and from laboratory apparatus such as test tubes and petri dishes in research and diagnostic laboratories, in commercial applications such as brewing, baking and the production of antibiotics. In all cases the material inoculated is called the inoculum, or less the inoculant, although the term culture is used for work done in vitro; the term inoculation entered medical English through horticultural usage meaning to graft a bud from one plant into another. It is derived from the Latin in + oculus. Though "innoculation/innoculate" is sometimes seen, this is incorrect erroneously thought to be related to innocuous, derived from the Latin in + nocuus. Inoculation originated as a method for the prevention of smallpox by deliberate introduction of material from smallpox pustules into the skin; this produced a less severe infection than naturally-acquired smallpox, but still induced immunity to it.
This first method for smallpox prevention, smallpox inoculation, is now known as variolation. Inoculation has ancient origins and the technique was known in India and China; the earliest hints of the practice of inoculation for smallpox in China come during the 10th century. A Song dynasty chancellor of China, Wang Dan, lost his eldest son to smallpox and sought a means to spare the rest of his family from the disease, so he summoned physicians, wise men, magicians from all across the empire to convene at the capital in Kaifeng and share ideas on how to cure patients of it until a divine man from Mount Emei carried out inoculation. However, the sinologist Joseph Needham states that this information comes from the Zhongdou xinfa written in 1808 by Zhu Yiliang, centuries after the alleged events; the first clear and credible reference to smallpox inoculation in China comes from Wan Quan's Douzhen xinfa of 1549, which states that some women unexpectedly menstruate during the procedure, yet his text did not give details on techniques of inoculation.
Inoculation was first vividly described by Yu Chang in his book Yuyi cao, or Notes on My Judgment, published in 1643. Inoculation was not practised in China until the reign of the Longqing Emperor during the Ming dynasty, as written by Yu Tianchi in his Shadou jijie of 1727, which he alleges was based on Wang Zhangren's Douzhen jinjing lu of 1579. From these accounts, it is known that the Chinese banned the practice of using smallpox material from patients who had the full-blown disease of Variola major; this was called "to implant the sprouts", an idea of transplanting the disease which fit their conception of beansprouts in germination. Needham quotes an account from Zhang Yan's Zhongdou xinshu, or New book on smallpox inoculation, written in 1741 during the Qing dynasty, which shows how the Chinese process had become refined up until that point: Method of storing the material. Wrap the scabs in paper and put them into a small container bottle. Cork it so that the activity is not dissipated.
The container must not be warmed beside a fire. It is best to carry it for some time on the person so that the scabs dry and slowly; the container should be marked with the date on which the contents were taken from the patient. In winter, the material has yang potency within it, so it remains active after being kept from thirty to forty days, but in summer the yang potency will be lost in twenty days. The best material is that which had not been left too long, for when the yang potency is abundant it will give a'take' with nine persons out of ten people—and it becomes inactive, will not work at all. In situations where new scabs are rare and the requirement great, it is possible to mix new scabs with the more aged ones, but in this case more of the powder should be blown into the nostril when the inoculation is done. Two reports on the Chinese practice were received by the Royal Society in London in 1700.
Mutation
In biology, a mutation is the permanent alteration of the nucleotide sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA or other genetic elements. Mutations result from errors during DNA replication or other types of damage to DNA, which may undergo error-prone repair, or cause an error during other forms of repair, or else may cause an error during replication. Mutations may result from insertion or deletion of segments of DNA due to mobile genetic elements. Mutations may or may not produce discernible changes in the observable characteristics of an organism. Mutations play a part in both normal and abnormal biological processes including: evolution and the development of the immune system, including junctional diversity; the genomes of RNA viruses are based on RNA rather than DNA. The RNA viral genome can be double single stranded. In some of these viruses replication occurs and there are no mechanisms to check the genome for accuracy; this error-prone process results in mutations.
Mutation can result in many different types of change in sequences. Mutations in genes can either have no effect, alter the product of a gene, or prevent the gene from functioning properly or completely. Mutations can occur in nongenic regions. One study on genetic variations between different species of Drosophila suggests that, if a mutation changes a protein produced by a gene, the result is to be harmful, with an estimated 70 percent of amino acid polymorphisms that have damaging effects, the remainder being either neutral or marginally beneficial. Due to the damaging effects that mutations can have on genes, organisms have mechanisms such as DNA repair to prevent or correct mutations by reverting the mutated sequence back to its original state. Mutations can involve the duplication of large sections of DNA through genetic recombination; these duplications are a major source of raw material for evolving new genes, with tens to hundreds of genes duplicated in animal genomes every million years.
Most genes belong to larger gene families of shared ancestry. Novel genes are produced by several methods through the duplication and mutation of an ancestral gene, or by recombining parts of different genes to form new combinations with new functions. Here, protein domains act as modules, each with a particular and independent function, that can be mixed together to produce genes encoding new proteins with novel properties. For example, the human eye uses four genes to make structures that sense light: three for cone cell or color vision and one for rod cell or night vision. Another advantage of duplicating a gene is. Other types of mutation create new genes from noncoding DNA. Changes in chromosome number may involve larger mutations, where segments of the DNA within chromosomes break and rearrange. For example, in the Homininae, two chromosomes fused to produce human chromosome 2. In evolution, the most important role of such chromosomal rearrangements may be to accelerate the divergence of a population into new species by making populations less to interbreed, thereby preserving genetic differences between these populations.
Sequences of DNA that can move about the genome, such as transposons, make up a major fraction of the genetic material of plants and animals, may have been important in the evolution of genomes. For example, more than a million copies of the Alu sequence are present in the human genome, these sequences have now been recruited to perform functions such as regulating gene expression. Another effect of these mobile DNA sequences is that when they move within a genome, they can mutate or delete existing genes and thereby produce genetic diversity. Nonlethal mutations increase the amount of genetic variation; the abundance of some genetic changes within the gene pool can be reduced by natural selection, while other "more favorable" mutations may accumulate and result in adaptive changes. For example, a butterfly may produce offspring with new mutations; the majority of these mutations will have no effect. If this color change is advantageous, the chances of this butterfly's surviving and producing its own offspring are a little better, over time the number of butterflies with this mutation may form a larger percentage of the population.
Neutral mutations are defined as mutations whose effects do not influence the fitness of an individual. These can increase in frequency over time due to genetic drift, it is believed that the overwhelming majority of mutations have no significant effect on an organism's fitness. DNA repair mechanisms are able to mend most changes before they become permanent mutations, many organisms have mechanisms for eliminating otherwise-permanently mutated somatic cells. Beneficial mutations can improve reproductive success. Mutationism is one of several alternatives to evolution by natural selection that have existed both before and after the publication of Charles Darwin's 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. In the theory, mutation was the source of novelty
Royal Society
The President and Fellows of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge known as the Royal Society, is a learned society. Founded on 28 November 1660, it was granted a royal charter by King Charles II as "The Royal Society", it is the oldest national scientific institution in the world. The society is the United Kingdom's and Commonwealth of Nations' Academy of Sciences and fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, recognising excellence in science, supporting outstanding science, providing scientific advice for policy, fostering international and global co-operation and public engagement; the society is governed by its Council, chaired by the Society's President, according to a set of statutes and standing orders. The members of Council and the President are elected from and by its Fellows, the basic members of the society, who are themselves elected by existing Fellows; as of 2016, there are about 1,600 fellows, allowed to use the postnominal title FRS, with up to 52 new fellows appointed each year.
There are royal fellows, honorary fellows and foreign members, the last of which are allowed to use the postnominal title ForMemRS. The Royal Society President is Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who took up the post on 30 November 2015. Since 1967, the society has been based at 6–9 Carlton House Terrace, a Grade I listed building in central London, used by the Embassy of Germany, London; the Invisible College has been described as a precursor group to the Royal Society of London, consisting of a number of natural philosophers around Robert Boyle. The concept of "invisible college" is mentioned in German Rosicrucian pamphlets in the early 17th century. Ben Jonson in England referenced the idea, related in meaning to Francis Bacon's House of Solomon, in a masque The Fortunate Isles and Their Union from 1624/5; the term accrued currency for the exchanges of correspondence within the Republic of Letters. In letters in 1646 and 1647, Boyle refers to "our invisible college" or "our philosophical college".
The society's common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Three dated letters are the basic documentary evidence: Boyle sent them to Isaac Marcombes, Francis Tallents who at that point was a fellow of Magdalene College and London-based Samuel Hartlib; the Royal Society started from groups of physicians and natural philosophers, meeting at a variety of locations, including Gresham College in London. They were influenced by the "new science", as promoted by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis, from 1645 onwards. A group known as "The Philosophical Society of Oxford" was run under a set of rules still retained by the Bodleian Library. After the English Restoration, there were regular meetings at Gresham College, it is held that these groups were the inspiration for the foundation of the Royal Society. Another view of the founding, held at the time, was that it was due to the influence of French scientists and the Montmor Academy in 1657, reports of which were sent back to England by English scientists attending.
This view was held by Jean-Baptiste du Hamel, Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and Melchisédech Thévenot at the time and has some grounding in that Henry Oldenburg, the society's first secretary, had attended the Montmor Academy meeting. Robert Hooke, disputed this, writing that: makes Mr Oldenburg to have been the instrument, who inspired the English with a desire to imitate the French, in having Philosophical Clubs, or Meetings. I will not say, that Mr Oldenburg did rather inspire the French to follow the English, or, at least, did help them, hinder us. But'tis well known who were the principal men that began and promoted that design, both in this city and in Oxford, and not only these Philosophic Meetings were. On 28 November 1660, the 1660 committee of 12 announced the formation of a "College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning", which would meet weekly to discuss science and run experiments. At the second meeting, Sir Robert Moray announced that the King approved of the gatherings, a royal charter was signed on 15 July 1662 which created the "Royal Society of London", with Lord Brouncker serving as the first president.
A second royal charter was signed on 23 April 1663, with the king noted as the founder and with the name of "the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge". This initial royal favour has continued and, since every monarch has been the patron of the society; the society's early meetings included experiments performed first by Hooke and by Denis Papin, appointed in 1684. These experiments varied in their subject area, were both important in some cases and trivial in others; the society published an English translation of Essays of Natural Experiments Made in the Accademia del Cimento, under the Protection of the Most Serene Prince Leopold of Tuscany in 1684, an Italian book documenting experiments at the Accademia del Cimento. Although meeting at Gresham College, the Society temporarily moved to Arundel House in 1666 after the Great Fire of London, which did not harm Gresham but did lead to its appropriation by the Lord Mayor; the Society r
