The Robert Hooke folio. Photograph: Bonhams / PA
As the streaming sun sparkled off Rolexes and pocket watches, the auctioneer strode on to the lectern like a public school headmaster about to take assembly, writes science correspondent James Randerson. "Settle down now, boys. First, congratulations to Bradbys for their victory in the inter-house rugby tournament ... "
Even with 189 lots to go before the big draw, the tension in the auction room is almost unbearable. "This thing is of huge historical significance - of national significance," I overhear a man behind me whisper.
The sale everyone is waiting for is described by Bonhams auctioneers, in Mayfair, as a manuscript "that marks the beginning of the modern world". And it has a price tag to match - £1m to £1.5m.
"Few memorials of the scientific revolution can have greater resonance. The Hooke folio - lost for some 300 years - is a remarkable survival from the heroic age of science," says the sale catalogue. The documents are notes taken by the brilliant scientist Robert Hooke in the early days of the Royal Society, the UK's premier scientific academy.
All around me is effortless, flagrant wealth. One man's smart/casual jeans, brogues and jacket combo must have cost more than most people's entire wardrobe. Another man, with green and brown check sports jacket, might have stepped straight out of Toad Hall.
The Hook folio is in good company. The preliminary auctions are of a first edition by Jane Austen, Malthus's Principles of Population, an autographed Charles Dickens, a wedge of Shakespeare and even original Thomas the Tank Engine artwork.
Most interesting to students of text messaging will be a 1905 letter signed, "Yours vy trly Winston S. Churchill", which sold for £1,100.
The future prime minister's letter on the parlous state of the Conservative party reads: "Their day will no doubt come again; but it will lag long on the road." A warning with enduring relevance, perhaps.
But the undoubted star of the show is Hooke's scribblings, peppered with his typical acerbic comments about rivals and bitter asides about the way colleagues have treated him.
More significantly, the folio describes progress at an electric point in scientific development. There are some of the first descriptions of micro-organisms viewed under a microscope: "RH had all week Discovered great numbers of exceeding small animalls swimming to & fro, they appeard of the bigness of a mite through a glasse that magnifyd about 100000 times."
Hooke admires a precursor to the computer: "Mr Leibnitz shwed his arithmetick engine, to perform mechanically all the operations of Arithmetick with certainty & speed."
But the story was to have an unexpected and sensational climax. With 45 lots still to go, proceedings were interrupted by the chairman of Bonhams, Robert Brooks. "Ladies and gentlemen. Some news is breaking that I wanted to pass on to you straight away."
Against the odds, the Royal Society (RS) had apparently scraped together the cash for a private deal with the owners, thus preventing the Hooke papers from falling into private hands.
The details remain murky, but there are rumours that Bonhams realised it had overvalued the piece and so, to save face, accepted the figure of "about £1m" from the RS. Despite a ripple of applause, the exodus of glum, rich faces suggested not everyone was happy that Hooke's manuscripts had been "saved for the nation".
