 Welcome back to Summer Science Live. We've heard from all sorts of different scientists today on the science that they've brought to the exhibition this year. We've heard about how scientists studying the movement of animals in the water can help us to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from shipping and can help us to study how animals are moving around our oceans. The Royal Society has a very long history in studying our oceans and I'm joined on the sofa now by Keith Moore, the society's head librarian to tell us about the exhibition that you've brought to the Royal Society which is a collaboration between Google Arts and Culture and tell us a bit more about your exhibition. Well it's about fish or rather the kind of long history of marine expeditions some of them are sponsored by the Royal Society starting in the 17th century and moving as far as the 20th. So we want to tell the story of how people began to understand the depths of the sea and the ways they went about it. And how, why did we first become interested in this and how did we first start studying it? Well in the early Royal Society and the organisation was started in 1660 quite a few of the early scientists were interested in what was happening under the water obviously fishermen and mariners knew the surface of the oceans very well but people like Robert Hook, the society's curator experiment began to design equipment so that they could start to see what was happening underneath the sea. So Hook designs a water sampling device, Edmund Halley whom we tend to know better as an astronomer, exactly right. He designs a type of diving bell and a diving suit mostly for rec reclamation but you can see that they began to get interested in other things down there and Halley particularly when he becomes a sea captain he leads expeditions to the South Atlantic he begins to start collecting fish, drawing them and presenting them to the Royal Society. Fantastic, and what could these fish tell them about the oceans? What the society was interested in in the beginning was trying to classify life and we're very familiar with this kind of concept now but they wanted to try and record everything in the natural world and give it names, classify it and be able to identify it. The leading figures in this kind of area in the Royal Society were two naturalists called Francis Willoughby and John Ray. They together did expeditions and collecting visits in Britain and in Europe and they decided that John Ray would produce a history of plants Willoughby would look after animals and collectively they'd produce these great works of natural history. Now unfortunately Willoughby died so the work fell upon John Ray and the Royal Society supported him in this and he produced one of the famous books of the early Royal Society which was the history of fishes. The history of fishes, so what did that contain? It contained identifications of marine life so previously if something swam in the ocean it was classified as a fish so if it was a crocodile it was a fish if it was a whale it was a fish so what John Ray was trying to do was to give names to things but also exclude things as well. Wales did sneak into his book I should say, they are mammals we know but he begins to look at previous illustrations in fish books the Royal Society had its own museum which collected objects including fish and he produces this great work which tries to capture all the fish in the sea at least all the ones they knew about at that time and I have the Royal Society's copy right here Can we take a look? We can take a look and you can see immediately it's a very beautiful thing and it has some fabulous illustrations in here of pretty much anything you can think of that was known at the period. Was it the explorers, the scientists themselves that were doing these illustrations or did they collaborate with illustrators for that? They collaborated so there would be original illustrations and sometimes they were taken from other books the Royal Society had some fish of its own of course and these things would be sent off to the engravers and the engravers would produce these wonderful copper plate prints. Society had a bit of a history of this I mean one of the great books that we published in the early days was Micrographia which had wonderful illustrations of microscopic life amongst other things so they thought that a wonderfully illustrated book like this would be a runaway bestseller and they decided to print lots of copies of it I didn't quite work out that way Go on, tell me more This is the book that is generally considered to almost have bankrupted the Royal Society the Royal Society paid for the printing of it so there is text as you can see in the beginning and it got sponsors to give money to produce each of the copper plates and very often you can see the names of the sponsors just here so this one is Samuel Peeps who is president of the Royal Society and he sponsored lots of plates in this book but it cost so much that the Royal Society was in some difficulties and they couldn't sell copies fast enough they in the end were beginning to use copies as a kind of currency so they tried to pay people with copies of the history of fishers and one of the reasons it's famous is because Isaac Newton's great work, Principia Mathematica was also being printed around this time and the Royal Society couldn't fund that work because it had spent so much money on this one Wow, so we nearly didn't have one of Newton's greatest works because of this book, The History of Fishers and we have an account book here from the Royal Society so this is the manuscript accounts of the period this is the 1680s and you can see rows and rows of figures here of the money they were spending to a whole host of engravers there's at least seven or eight on this page alone where they're farming out work to produce the history of fishers and the money's going out in this column here Goodness, wow but presumably the Royal Society stood by the decision that this type of work documenting these animals was worthwhile, this was important scientific work So this is pre-Linais who we know very well for classifying the animal kingdom but yes the Royal Society not only paid to print the book but quite a few fellows got involved in the process of trying to classify the fish involved I tried to eliminate some of them so Ray had a mini research team around him of fellows who knew a little bit about natural history and they helped to refine the work and get it through the press So thinking then about science in the modern day you know this summer science exhibition is all about celebrating the recent research that's been going on where does this sort of work fit in that story and is it still relevant to researchers today? I think it is relevant obviously this is a very much a paper exercise and the exhibition we have in the building is to do with scientists not just sitting in an office and looking at this kind of thing but actually going out and finding out about the natural world and this is important there's a long history of great voyages of discovery and many many of them were to do with finding out about marine life We know probably the most famous one is Charles Darwin's Beagle Voyage Now we tend to associate that with Galapagos islands and Darwin's finches but Darwin was collecting fish as well he collected many specimens The great 19th century expedition was HMS Challenger which occurred in the 1870 and was first properly oceanographic expedition The Ross Society helped to set it up and it sailed the world's oceans for years collecting specimens, finding out about the nature of the sea how it changed at depths what the sea floor was composed of so really it was a big moment in the history of science and today of course we're interested in the oceans for the impact that man is having on them so many of the 20th century expeditions that the Society has involved into the Great Barrier Reef and to the Seychelles they're important because you can begin to see changes in those environments People at Aldabra are looking at plastics in the ocean how much they can collect and obviously a few years ago they weren't there Great Barrier Reef expedition told us a lot about coral so it's a benchmark for that and of course we're very concerned today about acidity in the ocean plastic pollution, death of coral and many other things so it's important that we look back on these expeditions to see what the oceans were like in comparison to what they are now The oceans are changing so rapidly that for us to have this sort of timestamp to suggest how they were hundreds of years ago it gives us that benchmark to then compare the rate of change now and the importance of making sure that we are preserving these creatures that we know have been in our oceans and of course the deep oceans are still largely unexplored and therefore it wasn't just John Ray and Francis Willoughby finding new things there are new things still to be found in the seas so it's worth preserving them until we find out what is there Yeah, definitely So let's talk a bit about then so you're the Society's head librarian is that the right job title? These look incredibly good Nick What are the challenges with preserving these types of artefacts? From this period paper is pretty good actually so this is handmade paper it will last a thousand years if it's kept in the right conditions so we try to keep it in the right conditions so the Roth Society has a huge collection of both printed books and manuscript material going back to 1660 and even beyond that because Roth Society Fellows have collected manuscripts over the years things of interest to science these are kept in environmentally controlled stores so they are kept at standard temperature and humidity and the air in there is cleaned Of course things deteriorate over the years Fellows have used the books in our collections so they do need rebinding and repair from time to time and we do do that but today the movement is definitely towards not just keeping these things in archive stores but getting them out to where people can see them not just in the search rooms but online as well so we're digitising material very very hard at the moment and we hope to launch all of the manuscript content of the philosophical transactions in January 2023 and that will include unpublished material and things like referees reports on what one scientist thought about another scientist paper they're quite fun those ones because there's nothing like a good argument between scientists Definitely, and hopefully providing some comfort to scientists today that even the greats had their work criticised sometimes That's right, even the big ones had papers rejected so you shouldn't feel too bad about it We're all in this together Fantastic Well, Keith Moore, thank you so much for talking to me about your job as head librarian at the Royal Society and for telling us the story of the history of fishes Thank you very much and it's great to get these things out there