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 Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, on his own initiative, at his own risk, and for his own profit.
It has been published continuously ever since, which makes it the oldest scientific journal in the world still running, and it established a set of conventions that every journal since has inherited.
Before the Journal There Were Letters
Scientific communication in the 1660s worked through private correspondence, books, and occasionally an anagram. Books were slow and expensive. Letters reached a handful of people. And announcing a discovery before you were ready to explain it fully was dangerous, because somebody else could take it.
The result was a set of habits that look bizarre now. Hooke published the principle of the arch and his law of elasticity as encrypted anagrams to establish priority without disclosing the content. Galileo did the same with his observation of the phases of Venus. Fermat wrote results in margins and did not always supply proofs.
Oldenburg’s position gave him a solution. He was a German theologian and diplomat who had settled in London, spoke five languages, and as secretary of the newly chartered Royal Society had built a correspondence network across Europe, writing and receiving something like sixty letters a week at his own expense.
The journal began as a way to print what was arriving in those letters, and to make the enterprise pay for itself.
The Four Things It Invented
The Transactions is not just an early journal. The specific practices it introduced are the ones that still define the form.
- Registration. A dated public record of who claimed what and when. This is the direct answer to the anagram problem: publish quickly, and the date on the issue settles priority without secrecy
- Dissemination. One account reaching everyone at once rather than a chain of letters, with the same text in every copy
- Certification. Oldenburg sent submissions to knowledgeable members of the Society for an opinion before printing. When the Society took the journal over formally in 1752, this was made a rule and the Committee on Papers was created. That is the origin of peer review, though the modern anonymous version is a twentieth century development
- Archive. A permanent, indexed record that can be consulted afterwards, which is what allows a result to be checked, cited and built on decades later
Priority, distribution, review and archive. Every argument about scientific publishing since, including the current ones about open access and preprints, is an argument about how to deliver those four functions.
What Was Actually in It
The contents of the early volumes are a good corrective to any idea that early modern science was a stately procession of great discoveries.
The first issue includes an account of the improvement of optic glasses, a report of a peculiar lead ore in Germany, observations of a spot in one of the belts of Jupiter, a prediction of a comet’s motion, and an account of a monstrous calf. There are reports of whales caught off the coast, of tides, of a man who claimed to have been cured of madness, and a good deal on the making of instruments.
Mixed in with that are documents that anyone would now recognise as foundational.
- Leeuwenhoek’s letters from Delft, from 1673 onwards, describing what he saw through his single lens microscopes. He wrote in Dutch, was not a scholar, and the journal translated and printed him anyway, which is how the existence of microorganisms entered the record
- Newton’s first publication, the 1672 letter on light and colours, describing the prism experiments
- Halley’s work on comets, magnetic variation, and mortality tables, the last of which is one of the founding documents of actuarial science
- Hooke, Boyle, Wren, Flamsteed and most of the rest of the early Royal Society, along with correspondents in Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries
The Trouble Newton Caused
The 1672 paper on light is worth dwelling on because of what happened next. Newton argued that white light is a mixture of rays of different refrangibility, and that colour is a property of the light rather than something the prism adds.
Hooke replied within a week with a critique, having read it, by his own account, in a few hours. Others objected too, including Huygens. Newton, who had expected the paper to settle the matter, found himself in a correspondence he considered a waste of time, and wrote that he had sacrificed his peace, a real and substantial blessing, to run after a shadow.
He withdrew from publication almost entirely for years. It is the origin of his reluctance to print, which is the reason that the Principia nearly did not appear at all, and part of the reason it appeared as a book rather than in the journal.
The other reason was money. The Royal Society had agreed to fund the Principia and then discovered that it had spent its publication budget on Francis Willughby’s De Historia Piscium, a lavishly illustrated history of fishes that did not sell. Edmond Halley, then clerk to the Society, paid for it himself, and was partly reimbursed in unsold copies of the fish book.
So the most important scientific work of the century was published outside the journal system that the same society had created, by a young astronomer paying out of his own pocket. Our edition of the Principia reproduces that first edition of 1687, the one Halley shepherded through the press and proofread himself.
Oldenburg Went to the Tower
Running an international correspondence network during a war with the Dutch was not a safe occupation. In 1667 Oldenburg was arrested and held in the Tower of London for about two months on suspicion of dangerous designs and practices, largely because he wrote to too many foreigners.
He was released without charge, resumed the journal, and continued until his death in 1677. The Transactions lapsed briefly and was revived, and the Royal Society formally took it over in 1752.
He also never made money from it. The venture was expected to supplement a secretary’s income that was frequently unpaid, and it did not.
What Came With It
The Journal des sçavans appeared in Paris in January 1665, two months earlier, and is sometimes called the first. It covered book reviews, obituaries, law and theology alongside natural philosophy, so the Transactions has the better claim to being the first devoted to science.
What both introduced was the idea that knowledge is a public, dated, cumulative record rather than a personal possession. That change did more for the pace of science than any single discovery in either journal. A result printed in 1665 could be read in Florence, checked in Delft, disputed in Paris and cited in 1730.
The Philosophical Transactions is now published in two series, A for the physical sciences and B for the life sciences, and it has been in print for 361 years. The first issue reported an account of a very odd monstrous calf, and the same volume began the practice of writing down who found what, and when, so that everyone else could argue about it properly.
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