A Declaration of Enquiry

Cotton Mather FRS, best known for the Salem witch trials, was also one of the Royal Society's most prolific American correspondents. In this 1705 letter, he described bones unearthed near Albany, the first North American prehistoric remains, later identified as a mammoth.

Of Mather’s many letters to James Jurin and Richard Waller (Secretaries of the Society) some of the more interesting contain descriptions of smallpox inoculation in the colonies. He also discussed rattlesnakes, mooses, meteorology, Native American astronomy and mathematics.

The first woman to submit a paper to the Royal Society was from New England. In 1734, Martha Gerrish observed a parhelion, a 'mock sun' which consists of bright light on either side of the sun caused by refraction through ice crystals high in the atmosphere.

Aware that the Royal Society did not welcome women's contributions, Gerrish explained that a 'masculine hand' should forward her letter to make it 'acceptable to the Royal Society. Her paper was not published, but her letter survives in the archives.

Dudley was the Chief Justice of Massachusetts and donated many items from the New World to the Society’s museum. He wrote on maple syrup as in this letter, but also whales and ambergris, sweating cures and forestry.

Catesby produced some of the most beautiful works on American botany and zoology. He first published essays in the Royal Society journal in the 1730s, before his magnificent hand-coloured plates of plants, birds and insects gave London a vivid picture of American nature.

Pennant’s History of Quadrupeds was a leading work of zoology from a British-based collector and cataloguer.  His paper on the bison contains an excellent watercolour of the buffalo based on this original artwork. The same volume contains Pennant’s description of the turkey.

No single figure better embodies the transatlantic scientific bond than Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's 1752 kite experiment which made him internationally famous was read aloud at the Royal Society and published in the Philosophical Transactions.

Long before he helped draft the Declaration of Independence, Franklin was a Fellow of the Royal Society, elected in 1756 as 'the first who suggested the experiments to prove the analogy between lightning and electricity.' He understood science as a form of diplomacy.

Thomas Paine emigrated to America on the advice of Benjamin Franklin and is best known as a revolutionary pamphleteer. But he was also an inventor: after the war, he developed a pioneering single-span iron arch bridge, patented in England and submitted to the Royal Society.

In the 19th century, the Royal Society coordinated a global network of meteorological observers to establish the physical laws governing weather and the Earth's magnetic field. Among the contributors: an unknown observer in Honolulu, in what would become American Pacific territory.

In 1878, two Royal Society physicists, Thorpe and Schuster, crossed the American West to observe the Transit of Venus. During their astronomical expedition, they set up their observatory in Utah in the garden of Brigham Young, the Mormon founder of Salt Lake City.

Gibbs, a Yale professor who barely left New Haven, produced two monumental papers on thermodynamics that no one in America recognised. Championed by James Clerk Maxwell FRS, he was elected to the Royal Society in 1897 and his letter of thanks survives in the archives.

Nobel Prize winner McClintock was the first female American scientist to be elected to the Fellowship. Her citation reads: "Barbara McClintock was mainly responsible for founding a whole new field of genetics - that of transposable genetic elements."

Alexander Fleming FRS discovered penicillin in London in 1928. Howard Florey FRS and Ernst Chain FRS transformed his observation into a life-saving drug, isolating and purifying it at Oxford and testing it on human patients. American wartime funding then manufactured it at scale.