350th anniversary: Royal Society goes back to the future

A list written in the 1660s found among the private papers of Robert Boyle, one of the Royal Society's founders, outlined his hopes for what science would achieve
Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

Boyle predicted that science would bring flight, organ transplants, a way to precisely pinpoint geographic position, commercial agriculture and psychotropic drugs Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/guardian.co.uk

De Historia Piscium by Francis Willoughby (1686), the first illustrated encyclopedia of fish
Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

A drawing accompanying Isaac Newton's letter to the Royal Society in 1672 explaining his newly constructed reflecting telescope
Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

Newton's death mask (1727)
Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

Royal Society librarian Keith Moore examines an astronomical quadrant said to have been used by Captain James Cook
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

A letter to Charles Babbage – mathematician and inventor of the counting machine, a forerunner of the modern computer – from the mathematician John Herschel
Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

A repeating altitude azimuth circle in the library of the Royal Society. The instrument was used during the great trigonometrical survey of India in the 19th century
Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

A first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in front of a portrait of the great naturalist
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Radiometers and otheoscopes (1875-1878). Mounted in a partial vacuum, the rotor spins when the vanes are exposed to light. At first it was mistaken believed that light exerted a greater force on the black faces of the vanes than the white. In 1879 the phenomenon was correctly attributed to 'black body radiation'. Radiant energy heats the black surfaces more effectively, warming nearby air molecules. These warmer, faster-moving air molecules strike the vanes with more force on that side, turning the rotor
Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

Felicity Henderson of the Royal Society examines a radiometer presented to the Society in 1911 by its inventor, the physicist and chemist William Crookes
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA