The Royal Society Soirées

The Lewes-based surgeon Gideon Mantell showed microscope studies and new fossil finds at Royal Society events, but also documented his many impressions of the Presidential conversazioni.

His diary records meeting with Sir Robert Peel FRS (1788-1850) and Francois Guizot (1787-1874): ‘It was a curious circumstance to have two ex-ministers of the two greatest modern nations inspecting anatomical preparations of the brain of a cat…’

Mantell drew upon his own geological collections, the Mantellian Museum, to provide material for Presidential soirées. He exhibited a lily encrinite in 1843, possibly this one, later engraved for his book The wonders of geology (6th ed., 1848).

Mantell is most famously associated with the identification of the Iguanodon, one of the earliest finds of land-based dinosaurs. In April 1841, he explained the significance of Iguanodon teeth and bones under the microscope to Prince Albert, who ‘remained a considerable time inspecting with much interest the objects I placed before him.’

Anticipating the century to come, guests listened to live theatre concerts, via telephony. By the 1880s and 1890s, spectacular static generators by James Wimshurst (1832-1909) would greet visitors with fizz and crackle.

Following Faraday’s lead, some Fellows became known as brilliant performers of science, including Augustus Waller, FRS (1856-1922), who demonstrated the electrocardiograph, aided by his pet bulldog, Jimmy.

Other exhibits were drawn from the Society’s own scientific publications, and to demonstrate the national value of Government grants administered by the Royal Society.

The mildly eccentric scientist Charles Vernon Boys was ideally suited to the conversazione format. His soap-bubble physics gave play to his natural showmanship. Among his many other exhibits were quartz fibre-making and gravity measuring apparatus. Boys was in some respects a prototype for today’s media-based science popularisers.

Scientific instruments, both commercial and bespoke, were important elements of conversazioni. William Crookes, PRS (1832-1919) first displayed his then-unique radiometers at the Society in 1875. The instruments' rapidly rotating vanes produced a bright light, but the explanation for this action was the subject of scientific debate: Osborne Reynolds, FRS (1842-1912) and Arthur Schuster, FRS (1851-1934) joined Crookes with the correct answer at the 1876 soirées.

This specimen of an unused display label for Charles Carrington Brown’s Myanmar rubies is a chance survival, the exhibit being postponed until the following year. The gems in question were part of a wider pattern of exhibiting natural resources from all corners of the British Empire.

Charles Barrington Brown (1839-1917), Canadian geologist and explorer, was known for his ground-breaking work on rubies, proving they are composed of corundum in a paper published in the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions in 1896. Like many soirées' contributors, his invitation to display the ruby would have followed publication of research.

This classically-themed work by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was the highlight of the 21 June 1882 soirée at the Royal Society, displayed in the Council Room.

The printmaker Gustave Doré produced a series of illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Doré exhibited 'Elaine and Enid' at the Royal Society soirée of 2 March 1867. These illustrations were published in the 1868 edition of the book.

The Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was exhibited alongside Doré at the Royal Society soirée on 2 March 1867. His view of London Bridge is a marvellous confection of medieval banners and modern gas lighting technology, all under a moonlit sky.

This photographic revolution became a fixture of the conversazioni, bringing the Victorian world into Burlington House. Automatic image-making, including pendulum-based harmonograph drawings or the voice figures of Welsh singer and inventor Margaret Watts-Hughes (1842–1907), all featured alongside conventional visual aids, such as the electric lantern and, eventually, cinematography.

Shows by lantern formed part of the conversazione evening programming and these talks often featured photography. Here, instantaneous pictures of human and animal motion may be seen projected behind their author, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904).

By 1896, the novelty of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s recently discovery was being exploited to take x-ray pictures of conversazione visitors. In this example, industrialist William George Armstrong, FRS (1810-1900) offered his hand. Armstrong himself organised regional soirées, showcasing industrial output and mercantile products, including one at the Mechanics’ Institute in March 1864.

Armstrong's own electric art featured in several conversazioni of the 1890s: these Lichtenberg figures were created by high voltage discharges over lead and sulphur powders.

More serious research into the electric arc was exhibited by Sarah [Hertha] Ayrton (1854-1923). In this portrait, she poses with the sand ripple tank she demonstrated at a 1904 conversazione.
Although other women had volunteered material for exhibitions before, Ayrton's scientific work was a landmark.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1846) satirised the exhibitions in Ann Veronica (1909) while Kipling noted their bemusing appeal in his novel Kim (1901): ‘Nine men out of ten would flee from a Royal Society soiree in extremity of boredom; but Creighton was the tenth, and at times his soul yearned for the crowded rooms in easy London where silver-haired, bald-headed gentlemen who know nothing of the Army move among spectroscopic experiments, the lesser plants of the frozen tundras, electric flight-measuring machines, and apparatus for slicing into fractional millimetres the left eye of the female mosquito’.

Kipling was well-placed to refer to the conversazioni, having been invited to the Royal Society in 1893. He made the confession to Sir William Gowers: ‘chaperone me, you must or they’ll cast me out: for in the turmoil of packing I’ve lost the R.S. Soirée ticket!”

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a guest at several Royal Society receptions, including one in 1893, of which he wrote that ‘I talked on the exhibits…without (I flatter myself) betraying excessive ignorance in respect of the points in the show’. Hardy was already aware of the Royal Society: a character in his novel Two on a Tower (1882) despatches a paper on astronomy to the organisation.

The most scientifically well-connected of writers, H.G. Wells, could be critical of the popular science of the soirée. Nevertheless, in company with luminaires such as Paul Dirac, he was still attending Royal Society events as late as 1938, when he crawled, tongue-in-cheek, under an exhibition table to check for a hidden pump at a liquid helium fountain.