The Royal Society Is Founded in London
A dozen men leave a Gresham College lecture and decide to found a society for testing claims by experiment
Quick facts
- Founded
- November 28, 1660
- Location
- Gresham College, London
- Royal charter
- 1662, under Charles II
- Motto
- Nullius in verba
What happened
On November 28, 1660, a group of natural philosophers meeting at Gresham College in London, including Christopher Wren, who had just delivered a lecture as the college's Professor of Astronomy, agreed to found a society devoted to what they called improving natural knowledge. The group met weekly to watch experiments performed and repeated in front of the whole membership before a claim was accepted, and it received a royal charter from Charles II in 1662 as The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Its later motto, Nullius in verba, roughly "take nobody's word for it," captured Bacon's insistence on verifying claims against demonstrated fact rather than citing authority.
Why it matters
The Royal Society became the model for scientific institutions across Europe and gave figures like Isaac Newton, whose Principia it helped publish, a forum where experimental results were checked in public before they counted as knowledge. That practice of open verification is the direct ancestor of peer review.
How we know
The Royal Society's own institutional history, drawn from its surviving meeting minutes and charter documents, records the November 1660 meeting and the 1662 charter.
Sources
- The Royal Society. History of the Royal Society · Primary source (author-declared)royalsociety.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. The Foundation of the Royal Society · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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