Melvyn Bragg (Courtesy: BBC)

By Hamish Johnston

BBC Radio’s Melvyn Bragg has embarked on a four-part series on the history of the Royal Society and its impact on British science and society.

2010 marks the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, which was founded by a dozen or so academics in Oxford as “a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning”. The society was granted a royal charter two years later.

In the first episode “Melvyn travels to Wadham College, Oxford, where under the shadow of the English Civil War, the young Christopher Wren and friends experimented in the garden of their inspirational college warden, John Wilkins”.

You can listen to that episode here.

The next installment will be broadcast later this evening.