Founding of the Royal Society
Next: November 28, 2026
Take nobody's word for it.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of the Royal Society. On 28 November 1660, after a lecture by the astronomer Christopher Wren at Gresham College in London, twelve men including Wren and Robert Boyle met and resolved to found 'a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning'. King Charles II granted the group a royal charter in 1662, and it became the Royal Society. Britannica calls it the oldest national scientific society in the world, and it still elects Fellows and funds research today.
How it's celebrated
There is no public festival on the date itself. The Society keeps the minutes of that first meeting in its archive in London, and it opened its 350th anniversary year on 30 November 2009 with an online timeline of its history. For everyone else it is a good day to do what the founders did: watch something carefully, try an experiment, and check the result for yourself.
Did you know
- The Society's motto, Nullius in verba, is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'.
- Its journal Philosophical Transactions, launched in March 1665, is the world's first and longest-running scientific journal.
- The first Indian Fellow, elected in 1841, was Ardaseer Cursetjee, a Bombay shipbuilder who brought gas lighting to the city; the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was the second, in 1918.
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- International Day for the Abolition of Slavery · December 2, 2026