Items21The creator’s order
  1. 1Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da VinciBorn 15 Apr 1452Leonardo da Vinci left thousands of notebook pages, written in mirror script and mixing anatomy, water flow, flight and shopping lists. The Codex Arundel at the British Library and the Royal Collection's anatomical drawings are digitised. They show him returning to the same problem for years,…0i
  2. 2Galileo GalileiGalileo GalileiBorn 15 Feb 1564Galileo Galilei's working papers on motion, held at the National Central Library in Florence, record ball-rolling and projectile experiments with measured distances that historians such as Stillman Drake used to reconstruct how he reached the law of falling bodies. His January 1610 notes on the…0i
  3. 3Robert BoyleRobert BoyleBorn 25 Jan 1627Robert Boyle's work diaries, kept at the Royal Society and published online in a scholarly edition by Birkbeck, University of London, record experiments, recipes, failed trials and reports from others. They show how much of his work relied on assistants such as Robert Hooke, who built his air pump,…0i
  4. 4Isaac NewtonIsaac NewtonIsaac Newton's student notebook, with its list of "Certain Philosophical Questions", and his waste book of mathematical work from the mid-1660s are digitised by Cambridge University Library, along with many of his alchemical and theological papers. They show a young man questioning his textbooks,…0i
  5. 5Gilbert WhiteGilbert WhiteBorn 18 Jul 1720Gilbert White, curate of Selborne in Hampshire, kept a daily Naturalist's Journal from 1768 until his death in 1793, recording weather, first swallows, flowering dates and the habits of earthworms. Held at the British Library and published in full, the journals show observation slowly turning into…0i
  6. 6Antoine LavoisierAntoine LavoisierBorn 26 Aug 1743Antoine Lavoisier's laboratory registers, held by the French Academy of Sciences, record weighings that show him slowly abandoning the phlogiston theory in the 1770s and arriving at the role of oxygen in burning. Many entries are in the hand of his wife and collaborator Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier,…0i
  7. 7Humphry DavyHumphry DavyBorn 17 Dec 1778Humphry Davy's notebooks, held mainly at the Royal Institution, mix experiments on laughing gas, electrochemistry and the miner's safety lamp with drafts of poetry. The Davy Notebooks Project, led by Lancaster University, transcribed them with help from volunteer members of the public. They show…0i
  8. 8Michael FaradayMichael FaradayBorn 22 Sept 1791Michael Faraday numbered the paragraphs of his laboratory diary consecutively for decades, from 1820 to 1862, and the Royal Institution holds the originals; a printed edition appeared in the 1930s. The entry for 29 August 1831 describes the iron ring experiment that showed electromagnetic…0i
  9. 9Charles DarwinCharles DarwinBorn 12 Feb 1809Charles Darwin's transmutation notebooks of 1837 to 1839, held at Cambridge University Library and published in a scholarly edition and on Darwin Online, show the theory of natural selection forming over two years. Notebook B contains his branching tree sketch headed "I think", and later entries…0i
  10. 10Alfred Russel WallaceAlfred Russel WallaceBorn 8 Jan 1823Alfred Russel Wallace's field notebooks from the Malay Archipelago, kept from 1854 to 1862 and held mainly at the Natural History Museum and the Linnean Society, record specimens, local helpers and ideas about species. His assistant Ali, from Sarawak, collected alongside him for years. The…0i