For science enthusiasts in the United Kingdom, the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution (RI) are as much a part of the season’s celebration as are Christmas trees and carol singing. These iconic talks for a young audience, celebrating their 200th anniversary this year, have introduced many people to the delights of science through captivating demonstrations. Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock is the next speaker to take to the floor, delivering this historic lecture series this week.

Held in the RI’s famous lecture theatre on Albemarle Street in London, the lectures began in 1825 as one of London’s most fashionable educational spectacles. In theory, the lectures were open to anyone “who wanted to improve their minds”, says Charlotte New, the RI’s head of heritage and collections. But, although the ticket price wasn’t prohibitively high, it was enough to ensure a well-heeled and genteel audience. As the writer George Eliot observed in 1851, the lectures were “as fashionable an amusement as the Opera”.

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The RI was founded in 1799 by scientist Benjamin Thompson and botanist Joseph Banks as an organization to introduce new technologies and teach science to the general public through lectures and demonstrations. It soon also became a research institution with its own laboratories, in which chemist Humphry Davy, who was appointed director of the chemical laboratory in 1801, made groundbreaking discoveries about new chemical elements. Davy also presented many of the public lectures, and his flamboyant style brought them wide renown.

When Davy’s former assistant Michael Faraday took over as laboratory director in 1825, he faced the formidable task of living up to his mentor’s legacy. Once a bookbinder’s apprentice, Faraday had already come to rival Davy as a researcher, notably through his work on electromagnetic induction, which led to the invention of the electric motor. Soon enough, he proved himself to be his predecessor’s equal behind the lecture podium, too.

“Very little information exists in the archives to describe why the lectures were developed,” says New. The first series was delivered in 1825 by John Millington, the RI’s professor of mechanics. Originally, the series were much more extensive than today’s, comprising a set of 22 lectures on natural philosophy that were, according to the institute’s management minutes, “suited to a juvenile auditory, during the Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide recesses”. (Here, ‘juvenile’ probably referred to people aged 15 to 20 — older than the current target audience of schoolchildren, typically aged 11 to 17.)

Science in action

Initially, Faraday tried to avoid getting roped in as a speaker, but in 1827 he relented, delivering his first series on the topic of chemistry. Before long, he became the default Christmas lecturer, presenting 19 series over the next four decades and shaping the format that persists today. He mastered the art of live demonstration. “He never told his listeners of an experiment, he always showed it,” wrote Lovell Reeve, a dealer of natural-history objects, in 1863. The Illustrated London News declared in 1861: “There can be no greater treat to any one fond of scientific pursuits than to attend a course of these lectures.”

“If you look at his lecture notes, they are laid out almost like a theatre script,” says Katy Duncan, a postdoctoral research fellow at the RI. “Demonstrations like stage directions on the left leaf, and the script on the right.”

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Faraday’s most famous series, The Chemical History of a Candle (delivered between 1860 and 1861), turned an everyday object into a profound exploration of combustion, capillary action and electrolysis. His playful use of the party game snapdragon — in which players are dared to snatch flaming raisins from a bowl of brandy and eat them without getting burned — perfectly embodied his belief that science should inspire wonder.

The lectures were soon published in Chemical News by chemist William Crookes, and subsequently as a book with elegant illustrations, which was received as an exemplar of popular science. The Chemical History of a Candle, wrote the Glasgow Herald in 1861, “will be eagerly welcomed by many readers who turn in despair from the dry chronicles of scientific terms called popular works, but which, in many instances, are about as interesting as street directories”.

Over the following decades, RI professors such as John Tyndall, James Dewar and William Henry Bragg continued the tradition, although wartime interruptions paused the series between 1939 and 1942 — for safety reasons and because evacuations meant there were few children in London to attend.

Although the initial lectures reflected the RI’s focus on chemistry, by the early twentieth century topics had broadened — evolutionary biologist Edwin Ray Lankester gave lectures on ‘extinct animals’, physicist William Henry Bragg on ‘the world of sound’ and physiologist Archibald Hill on ‘nerves and muscles’.

In 1949, one of the lectures was televised for the first time, delivered by psychologist Frederic Bartlett. Despite occasional tension with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) — especially after a financial scandal involving the laboratory director Edward Andrade in the early 1950s — the televised lectures (filmed live) soon became a national institution. “The RI’s attitude to working with the BBC on these broadcasts was generally cooperative so long as the BBC did not inconvenience the day-to-day running of the institution as a social club for its members,” says Rupert Cole, a former curator at the Science Museum in London.

The postwar years brought cultural tensions to the RI, because the atomic bomb and rising environmental fears made the public adopt a more sceptical view of science’s role in society. Such tensions came to the fore in the Christmas Lectures of 1974, given by electrical engineer Eric Laithwaite. Framed around an Alice-in-Wonderland theme and infused with a then-fashionable dose of Eastern philosophy, the series culminated in Laithwaite’s demonstration of an alleged ‘anti-gravity’ device based on gyroscopes. The response from other scientists was predictably hostile, and Laithwaite was subsequently ostracized from the scientific establishment.