Gresham College

A London institution founded in 1597 under the will of financier Thomas Gresham.

History

Gresham’s will endowed seven professorships — in divinity, astronomy, music, geometry, law, physic, and rhetoric — with free public lectures. The college occupied Gresham’s former mansion on Bishopsgate Street.

Its greater historical significance: the Royal Society met at Gresham College from its founding in 1660 until 1710. Robert Hooke had rooms there and served as both Gresham Professor of Geometry and Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society. The weekly meetings where experiments were performed, debated, and recorded took place in its halls.

In the novel

Gresham College is the physical center of Book 1’s scientific world. Daniel Waterhouse attends meetings there, and it is where much of the Royal Society’s experimental work — Hooke’s demonstrations, debates over optics and mechanics — plays out. The college grounds the novel’s portrayal of how the new science actually happened: in a specific building, on specific evenings, among people who knew each other.