lectures
Lectures have taken various forms over the Royal Institution’s
200 years. They have included:
- Afternoon lecture courses, which could comprise anything from
three to twelve lectures, which ran from 1800 through to the mid
1950s. Details of these lectures from 1927 can be found on the
catalogue.
- Chemistry lectures for medical students from St George’s
Hospital and elsewhere were provided from the mid 1810s till the
early 1850s by Brande and Faraday with assistance as necessary
from other chemists.
- Friday Evening Discourses are formal lectures founded by Faraday
in 1826 and continue to this day, although there has been some
evolution in their details. Some very important scientific discoveries
have been announced at them, for instance the invention of photography
(1839), the beginnings of field theory (1846) and the existence
of the fundamental particle later called the electron (1897).
Details of these lectures from their founding until the mid 1990s
can be found on the catalogue.
- Christmas lectures for young people. Also founded by Faraday
in 1826, but are really a variant of the afternoon lectures. Christmas
lectures continue and are now televised after Christmas each year
and details can be found here.
- Young People’s Programme of lectures established by Lawrence
Bragg in the mid 1950s (as a replacement for the afternoon lectures).
Now attended by 30,000 children annually, details of these lectures
can be found on the catalogue.
The Christmas Lectures
A list of the Christmas Lectures since 1825 can be downloaded in
PDF format by clicking on the link below. To view these files you
will need the Acrobat Reader plugin, which can be downloaded by
clicking here.
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