On 6 March 1665 a small printed pamphlet went on sale in London, priced at one shilling. It was titled Philosophical Transactions: giving some accompt of the present undertakings, studies, and labours of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world, and it was produced by the secretary of…

The Nobel Prizes have three structural constraints that were reasonable in 1895 and fit modern science badly. No more than three people may share one prize. The recipient must be alive, and since 1974 posthumous awards are prohibited outright. And each prize belongs to a named discipline, so work that…

In April 1888 Alfred Nobel opened a French newspaper and read his own obituary. His brother Ludvig had died in Cannes, the press had confused the two, and the notice that appeared was not kind. The version usually quoted has the headline Le marchand de la mort est mort, the…

In February 1912 a Sussex solicitor named Charles Dawson wrote to the Natural History Museum in London to say that he had been given some unusual skull fragments from a gravel pit near Piltdown, and that he thought they might be important. By December the find had been announced to…

In 1919 a young mathematician took a job at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in Hertfordshire, an agricultural research institute that had been running field trials on fertilisers since 1843. Nearly seventy years of records were sitting in the archive, and Ronald Fisher was hired, more or less, to see whether…

The nursery of a house in the Russian province of Vitebsk ran short of wallpaper during a refurbishment, and one room was papered instead with sheets of lithographed lecture notes on differential and integral calculus that had belonged to the owner as a student. The child who slept in that…

In the spring of 1944 a visitor to a hut at Hanslope Park, a country house in Buckinghamshire used by the Radio Security Service, would have found two men surrounded by valves, resistors and a mass of wiring. One was a young electronic engineer named Donald Bayley. The other was…

In August 1865 an eleven year old boy named James Greenlees was brought into Glasgow Royal Infirmary with a compound fracture of the leg after a cart went over it. Compound meant the bone had broken the skin, and in 1865 that was very often a death sentence. The standard…

Anyone in England, Wales, Ireland or the American colonies who went to sleep on Wednesday 2 September 1752 woke up on Thursday 14 September. The eleven days in between did not happen. They were not skipped in the sense of being holidays. They were removed from the calendar by Act…

In 1735 the French Academy of Sciences did something no scientific body had done before. It sent two expeditions to opposite ends of the world, at enormous expense, to settle a disagreement about a number that nobody could see and that had no obvious practical use: whether a degree of…