The Royal Society Is Founded on 'Nullius in Verba'
London natural philosophers adopt a motto that means take nobody's word for it
Quick facts
- Founded
- 28 November 1660, London
- Motto
- Nullius in verba (take nobody's word for it)
- First Secretary
- Henry Oldenburg
- Journal launched
- Philosophical Transactions, 1665
What happened
On 28 November 1660, following a lecture on astronomy by Christopher Wren at Gresham College in London, a group of informally meeting natural philosophers agreed to form a permanent society devoted to what they called natural knowledge, chartered soon after as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. By 1662 the Society had appointed Henry Oldenburg as Secretary, who in 1665 launched the Philosophical Transactions, one of the first scientific journals, and Robert Hooke as Curator of Experiments, responsible for demonstrating experiments at weekly meetings. The Society adopted the motto Nullius in verba, take nobody's word for it, formally in its first charter of 1662, expressing a commitment to verifying claims by experiment rather than by appeal to ancient authority. Early Fellows included Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, and John Locke, and by 1672 Isaac Newton; foreign members elected over the following decades included Christiaan Huygens and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.
Why it matters
The Royal Society gave English experimental science an institution: a place to present findings for peer scrutiny, a journal to publish and date discoveries, and a shared standard that a claim needed public demonstration or repeatable experiment behind it, not an appeal to Aristotle or Galen. Newton's Principia was published under the Society's imprimatur in 1687, and the Society's model was explicitly copied by Christiaan Huygens when he helped organize France's Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris in 1666.
How we know
The Royal Society's founding minutes, its 1662 charter, and its early Philosophical Transactions issues survive in the Society's own archives; the Royal Society's official history page documents the 28 November 1660 meeting, the adoption of the motto, and the early officers from these institutional records.
Sources
- The Royal Society. History of the Royal Society · General sourceroyalsociety.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews. Christiaan Huygens · Reputable sourcemathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk · The domain "mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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