Royal Society Politics
As soon as he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1840 Grove was a critic of the Society, deprecating its cronyism and the de facto rule of a few influential Council members. In 1843, he published an anonymous attack on the scientific establishment in Blackwood's Magazine and called for reform. In 1846 Grove was elected to the Council of the Royal Society, and was heavily involved in the campaign to modernise its charter, in addition to campaigning for the public funding of science.
A charter committee had already been established, and Grove joined it. Groves's fellow campaigners included Gassiot, Leonard Horner and Edward Sabine. Their principal objectives were for the number of new Fellows to be subject to an annual limit, and limitation of the power of nomination to the Council. The reformers' success in 1847 led to the resignation of several key conservatives and the establishment of Grove and his associates with domination of the Council. To celebrate, the reformers founded the Philosophical Club.
Though the Philosophical Club succeeded in ensuring that William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse was appointed next President, they failed to get Grove appointed as Secretary. Grove continued to campaign for a single home for all the scientific institutions at Burlington House.
Read more about this topic: William Robert Grove
Famous quotes containing the words royal and/or society:
“Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,
that untamable, eternal, gut-driven, ha-ha
and lucky love.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)