Science Magazine history

In 1859, Alexander launched Macmillan’s Magazine, the first shilling monthly in England, aiming to unify science, literature and the arts under one banner, with David Masson as the editor.

The Reader, launched in 1863, was in many ways an early forerunner to Nature — 38 people who supplied reviews to The Reader later contributed to Nature.

Then, in 1868, he asked Lockyer to act as scientific adviser to his publishing house.

Lockyer approached Macmillan in early 1869 with plans for a new scientific journal.

At least the potential rival weekly Scientific Opinion had ceased publication in 1870, but Nature was not yet established as a preferred place of scientific communication.

The first proposal for Nature to provide science columns for The Times dates back to around 1878, when Norman Lockyer was editor.

Beyond Europe, the Mexican La Naturaleza started a second edition in 1887.

In his inaugural address to the association, he pointed out that the Royal Navy had received £21.5 million for a five-year building programme in 1888.

Richard Arman Gregory (pictured) joined Nature in 1893 as an assistant editor, after a brief stint as Lockyer’s assistant at his South Kensington laboratory.

On 23 January 1896, the journal carried the first description of X-rays in English, in two lavish articles spread over four pages, including three photographs.

Following enthusiastic reviews of scientific lectures for women in previous decades, Nature continued with its then forward-looking attitude towards the role of women in science in a book review in 1904.

Tennyson, who was particularly interested in astronomy, later wrote a note to Lockyer: “In my anthropological spectrum, you are coloured like a first rate star of science.” In 1910, Lockyer wrote a book called Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature.

On 22 April 1915, the German Army used a lethal asphyxiating gas for the first time at the second battle of Ypres, on the Western Front.

Editorials had often been book reviews under Lockyer, but from 1919 Gregory instigated comment on a major social or scientific issue every week.

Taking this as his example, Gregory went on to found a science news service run by the British Science Guild in 1924, an early forerunner to the Association of British Science Writers.

In 1927, two papers arrived in the Nature offices that would advance understanding of physics at the quantum level and lead to inventions such as the electron microscope.

“Once more the burden of war is laid upon us” begins the editorial of 9 September 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War.

In 1953, Brimble was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh; in his inaugural address, he professed that no papers were arriving from the Soviet Union, and very few from its satellite states.

A single issue in August 1955 contains items on ‘Displacement Activities in Fiddler Crabs’, ‘Experimentally Induced Twinning in Plants’ and ‘Reverse-Shearing Interferometry’ — typical of the incredible variety of the burgeoning section.

Before 1960, almost no one believed that the continents moved, but a series of papers in Nature changed how the world was viewed.

Arthur Gale (pictured, right, with co-editor Jack Brimble) retired at the end of 1961, after having worked for Nature for more than 40 years.

By the time Nature reached its centenary issue (pictured) in 1969, Maddox had begun to cast off the magazine’s antiquated air.

The magazine was reunited shortly after David ‘Dai’ Davies took on the sixth editorship in 1973, closing the first Maddox era.

A bacteriophage was the first organism to have its entire DNA sequenced (in 1978), and heralded an era in which the complete genetic blueprint of a living creature was within grasp — how long would it take to get from microbes to humanity?

She showed that mammals — familiar, cuddly ones that were bigger than small children — could be cloned and, surely, if you can clone a sheep, you can clone a person? Behind the headlines, however, Dolly was not the first cloned mammal: Steen Willadsen reported the first, also a sheep, in 1986.

In 1992, Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail obtained the first confirmed finding: two small planets orbiting a pulsar.

Image: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon (STScI). It was not until 1995 that Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory, Switzerland, found 51 Pegasi b (artist’s impression pictured), a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star, which could be a better bet for finding evidence of life.

Important scientific news has always been central to the Nature publishing philosophy, and 2004 saw the launch of news@nature.com, a specialized service for publishing in-depth news daily on the web, rather than just weekly in print.

Nature took an early interest in video, and from late 2005 began working with producers to make pieces to accompany major papers.

The final, final draft of the human genome was completed in 2006, when the sequence of the last chromosome was published, and Nature celebrated with a special Human Genome Collection supplement and produced a video to mark the event.

In that broader spirit, in 2011 Nature’s publishers launched Nature Climate Change.

In 2018, Magdalena Skipper was appointed as the first female editor-in-chief of Nature.