1071
Arts, but the Philosophical Magazine absorbed this in
- In 1822, Tilloch took the printer Richard Taylor
(1781–1858) into partnership as both editor and co-pro-
prietor in the face of increasing commercial competi-
tion. This move proved successful, and after Tilloch’s
death in 1825, leaving Taylor sole owner and editor, the
Philosophical Magazine (known throughout its many
permutations affectionately as ‘Phil. Mag.’) managed
to absorb Thomas Thomson’s Annals of Philosophy in
1826 (when its editor Richard Phillips became co-edi-
tor) and David Brewster’s Edinburgh Journal of Science
in 1832, when Brewster became the third editor of the
amalgamated London and Edinburgh Philosophical
Magazine and Journal. A Dublin editorship was created
when the eminent chemist Robert Kane (1809–90) was
invited onto the editorial board in October 1840.
As W.H. Brock and A.J. Meadows have written:
one estimate suggests that 64 per cent of all nineteenth-
century scientifi c periodicals were commercially pub-
lished rather than issued as the offi cial journals of learned
societies. Such journals served an important number of
functions. They speeded up publications at times when
the proceedings of scientifi c societies appeared intermit-
tently or only once or twice a year ... Such journals also
provided intelligence of science in foreign journals for
those who read no foreign languages or who had no
access to large libraries. They also aired controversies
or allowed space to issues involved in new research
programmes; they accepted for publication the minor
and even trivial research with which learned societies
could not be bothered, thereby continuing to cater for
the popular and cultural (and often provincial) images of
science during a time when it was undergoing the rigor
of specialisation. On the other hand, such journals often
accepted for publication original fi ndings or theoretical
speculations that were considered unorthodox by the
societies. In this respect they kept the scientifi c societies
on their toes, broke their monopolies, and made them
less authoritarian and cliquish than they might have been.
(Brock and Meadows 1984, 93)
Before the specialist photographic journals became
established, the Philosophical Magazine provided a
ready forum for early papers discussing the emergence
of the new science. For instance, one of those of the
pioneer photographer, W.H.F. Talbot, read before the
Royal Society but then not submitted to its prestigious
journal, the Philosophical Transactions, appeared in the
Philosophical Magazine in early 1839. Other important
papers relating to photography in 1839 included ones
by Sir John Herschel and John Towson; subsequently
in 1840, John William Draper discussed daguerreotype
portraits, and Antoine Claudet published his method
of speeded-up daguerreotype development there in
August 1841, having discovered it in May. Herschel
published a variation of a paper published earlier in the
Philosophical Transactions in February 1843, while
George S. Cundell wrote about the calotype in May
1844, and in December that year, George Shaw and Dr
Percy published ‘On some photographic phaenomena’
(Gernsheim 1984, 137–9). However, as the nineteenth
century progressed, the Philosophical Magazine be-
came increasingly specialized, and by the last quarter
of the century it had become almost entirely a journal
composed of physics articles.
A.D. Morrison-Low
See also: Brewster, Sir David; Claudet, Antoine-
François-Jean; Herschel, Sir John Frederick William;
Talbot, William Henry Fox; Royal Society, London;
Philosophical Transactions; Calotype and Talbotype;
Daguerreotype; Science; Cundell, George Smith and
Brothers; Draper, John William; Shaw, George.Further Reading
Arnold, H.J. P., William Henry Fox Talbot: Pioneer of Photog-
raphy and Man of Science, London: Hutchinson Benham,
1977.
Brock, W.H., ‘ Brewster as a Scientifi c Journalist.’ In Martyr
of Science: Sir David Brewster 1781–1868, edited by A.D.
Morrison-Low and J.R.R. Christie, 37–42, Edinburgh: Royal
Scottish Museum, 1984.
Brock, W. H., and Meadows, A.J., The Lamp of Learning: Taylor
& Francis and the Development of Science Publishing,London
and Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1984.
Dawson, G., Noakes, R., and Topham, J.P., ‘Introduction.’ In
Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical: Reading the
Magazine of Nature, edited by Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Daw-
son, Graeme Gooday, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth,
and Jonathan R. Topham, 1–34, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Gernsheim, Helmut, Incunabula of British Photographic Litera-
ture 1839–1875, London and Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1984.PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS
The Royal Society of London is deemed to have been
founded at an informal meeting at Gresham College in
the City of London on 28 November 1660, shortly after
the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the person of
the king, Charles II. ‘On 15 July 1662’, wrote Marie
Boas Hall:
a formal Charter of Incorporation was enacted for ‘the
Royal Society’, while in April 1663 a second charter
denominated it ‘Regalis Societas Londini pro Scientia
naturali promovenda’, the Royal Society of London
‘for improving naturall Knowledge’. It is thus the oldest
continuous scientifi c society in the world still operating
under its original charter, and its principal publication,
the Philosophical Transactions, is the oldest continuous
scientifi c journal. (Hall, 1984, ix.)The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Soci-
ety of London fi rst appeared in 1665, with beginnings
that upon closer scrutiny were turbulent but ground-