Tag: royal society
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Henry Oldenburg’s Fear of the Post
Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677) had many things to be afraid of. He was perpetually short of money, he was once imprisoned on spurious grounds as a potential spy, and like most seventeenth-century people he lost numerous friends and family to communicable diseases. One other fear, though, recurs in the many letters he sent throughout his life:…
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Observing an earthquake in 1734
On Friday October 25th 1734, between three and four at night, an earthquake hit Sussex County in the South of England. Several days later, a local Duke named Charles Lennox wrote a letter to the Royal Society of London in which he reported on the various observations of the earthquake he had collected. The Royal…