From today's Guardian. Anyone feeling generous...?
J.

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Eureka! Lost manuscript found in cupboard

· Royal Society fears losing £1m minutes at auction
· Handwritten papers chart birth of modern science

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday February 9, 2006
The Guardian


A long-lost 17th century manuscript charting the birth of modern science has 
been found gathering dust in a cupboard in a Hampshire home. Filled with 
crabby italics and acerbic asides, the 520 or so yellowing and stained pages 
are the handwritten minutes of the Royal Society as recorded by the 
brilliant scientist Robert Hooke, one of the society's original fellows and 
curator of experiments.
The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish 
scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682. There 
is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings 
of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton 
and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter's 
proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And 
there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed 
the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude.

The discovery was made by chance during a routine evaluation at the house by 
Bonhams, the auctioneers. The manuscript had been kept in a cupboard for 50 
years and was only shown to the valuer as he was leaving. "I thought it must 
be too good to be true. The first page I saw was headed: 'President Sir 
Christopher Wren in the chair' and I knew I was looking at the vanished 
minutes of the Royal Society," said Felix Pryor, manuscript consultant for 
Bonhams. "Then there were all these names: Wren, Leibniz, Aubrey, Evelyn, 
Newton. Then I began to recognise the handwriting of Robert Hooke. It was a 
magical moment."

The delight of scientists and historians has quickly turned to anxiety, 
however. The manuscript is to be put up for auction in London on March 28 
and is expected to sell for more than £1m, prompting Lord Rees of Ludlow, 
the president of the Royal Society to appeal for a "white knight" to buy the 
papers so they can be returned to the society's archive.

"It is a great pity that the Royal Society cannot itself afford to purchase 
them so that they could be restored to our collection of documents, from 
which they were removed at some point during our early history," he said.

Lisa Jardine, professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of 
London, and biographer of Hooke, said: "It would be a tragedy if it was to 
go elsewhere. This is the last bit of the jigsaw for the society's archive, 
which is otherwise intact from 1660. There are Hooke enthusiasts out there 
and some are very wealthy and the calamity would be if it were to end up in 
one of their private collections where the broader community would be unable 
to study it."

Minutes from December 1679 describe correspondence between Hooke and Newton 
proposing an experiment to confirm the rotation of the Earth. The notes 
include a suggestion from Sir Christopher Wren, Hooke's closest friend, to 
test the hypothesis by "shooting of a bullet upwards at a certaine angle 
from the perpendicular round every way - thereby to see whether the bullets 
soe shot would all fall in a perfect circle".

Hooke became embroiled in a bitter controversy himself that remained a 
mystery until the new manuscript emerged. In 1675, the Dutch physicist 
Christiaan Huygens claimed to have designed a watch that, unusually, kept 
the correct time for days on end, thanks to tiny springs in the mechanism. 
Such a watch was precisely what was needed if longitude was ever to be 
measured.

On hearing of Huygens' claim, Hooke was incensed, having shown just such a 
watch to the Royal Society five years earlier. He was convinced someone had 
leaked his design to Huygens and in an effort to prove it, he scoured the 
notes of the society's minutes but found no record.

In the latest manuscript, Hooke describes painstakingly working through the 
draft minutes of the society's meetings in search of evidence. He found that 
on June 23 1670, his predecessor, Henry Oldenburg, had written: "The curator 
[Hooke] produced a pocketwatch of a new contrivance devized by himself, 
which he affirmed should goe as equally as a pendullum, and without 
stopping, and might be made to goe for 8 days."

By mistake, Oldenburg failed to record the event in the finalised minutes, 
and the design was probably leaked by accident some time later.

The irony is that Hooke tore the page out of the draft minutes and stuck it 
in his own notes, so historians were never able to verify his claim. "It was 
all the proof we needed," said Prof Jardine.

Michael Hunter, professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, said: "It 
is an extraordinary discovery, filling a gap in the documentation of the 
early Royal Society and including details of discussions at various meetings 
that have hitherto been unknown."