Flower with a summer sun.
Photograph: Fred Hunt/AP
"Among the many useful discoveries which this age hath made, there are very few which, better deserve the attention of the public than what I am going to lay before your lordship."
This is the less than modest introduction to Edmund Stone's account in 1763 of the medicinal properties of willow bark, writes James Randerson. "There is a bark of an English tree," he wrote, "which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish (sic) and intermitting disorders."
The pain-relieving properties he hit upon are due to salicylic acid - the forerunner to aspirin.
Stone's paper is part of a huge online database of every paper held in the dusty libraries of the Royal Society - Britains premier scientific academy, which was founded in 1660. And the academy has now given free access to these papers via the internet.
The archive also contains William Henry Fox Talbot's first accounts of photography in 1839. The first is entitled "Some account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the Artist's Pencil".
And the second account describes how to make photographic paper. "If properly made, [it] is very useful for all ordinary photogenic purposes. For example nothing can be more perfect than the images it gives of leaves and flowers, especially with a summer sun. The light passing through the leaves delineates every ramification of their nerves."
There is also Daines Barrington's breathless account of the prodigious talent of the 14-year-old Mozart. "His extemporary compositions also, of which I was a witness, prove his genius and invention to have been most astonishing."
In an attempt to catch Mozart out, Barrington gave him a five-part score to sight-read.
"My intention in carrying with me this manuscript composition was to have an irrefragable proof of his abilities as a player at sight, it being absolutely impossible that he could have even seen the music before."The score was no sooner put upon his desk than he began to play the symphony in a most masterly manner as well as in the time and stile (sic) which corresponded with the intention of the composer."
More recent is Francis Crick and James Watson's follow-up to their seminal 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA. In it they describe how the shape, "consists of two DNA chains wound helically round a common axis, and held together by hydrogen bonds between specific pairs of bases".
Other gems include Robert Hooke's 1667 experiments on a dog with an early form of ventilator; from 1752, Benjamin Franklin's risky experiments involving a kite in a thunderstorm which showed the electrical nature of lightning, and legendary physicist Stephen Hawking's first paper - written in 1965 when he was 23.
The archive will only be available free for the next two months, so get searching.
