X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society


Griffith Hughes

From this location, he returned to London and published his findings, first an article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1743/4, and while there attended a winter meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

Raised-relief map

In his 1665 paper for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, John Evelyn (1620–1706) believed that wax models imitating nature and bas relief maps were something entirely new from France.

Robert Hutton

Hutton published work in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Transactions of the Faraday Society, and the Institute of Metals, contributing the Autumn Lecture to the Institute of Metals in 1922, on the “Science of Human Effort’.

William Heberden

Heberden, who was also a classical scholar, published several papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; and among his noteworthy contributions to the Medical Transactions (issued, largely at his suggestion, by the College of Physicians) were papers on chickenpox (1767) and angina pectoris (1768).


James Bradley

This discovery of what became known as the aberration of light was, for all realistic purposes, conclusive evidence for the movement of the Earth, and hence for the correctness of Aristarchus' and Kepler's theories; it was announced to the Royal Society in January 1729 (Phil. Trans. xxxv. 637).

John Trevisa

John Trevisa is the 18th most frequently cited author in the Oxford English Dictionary and the third most frequently cited source for the first evidence of a word (after Geoffrey Chaucer and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society).

Scientific journal

The history of scientific journals dates from 1665, when the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first began systematically publishing research results.


see also

François Budan de Boislaurent

Budan's work on approximation was studied by Horner in preparing his celebrated article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1819 that gave rise to the term Horner's method; Horner comments there and elsewhere on Budan's results, at first being sceptical of the value of Budan's work, but later warming to it.

William George Horner

His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designation Horner's method, in particular respect of a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819.