As the British Society for the History of Science's president during its fiftieth year, it gives me the greatest pleasure to introduce this anniversary issue of the Journal. For some readers there will be a special poignancy in recalling the vision and energy of the Society's founding fathers who, believing that the history of science had a strategic role to play both as a humanizing force and as an integral part of the culture of science, turned their belief into action. Many justifications have been and will continue to be given for the importance of our subject. Prominent among them when the Society was launched in 1947 was that the history of science would underpin claims for the inherent progressiveness and universality of scientific knowledge. In his presidential address, delivered in May 1948, the Society's first president, Charles Singer, also drew a parallel between the humanism of the Renaissance and a new humanism represented by the cultural possibilities of this history of science: both had had ‘small beginnings in a disturbed world’.

Presidential addresses offer an opportunity to reflect on the history of our subject and where the history of science stands in our own day. Such reflections are particularly appropriate with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) which is marked in 1997. Some may consider that looking back over our past is either an unacceptable luxury or an occasion for the kind of celebration that can all too easily degenerate into hagiography and an excuse to rake over the past in a thoroughly uncritical manner. This address – and I trust the events of 1997 – will try to avoid such excesses and instead contribute to the historiography of our subject.

In the Annual Report of University College London (UCL) for 1946–47 it is stated that ‘the Department of History and Philosophy of Science played a leading part in the formation of the British Society for the History of Science’ and that four members or former members of the department were serving on its Council, one of them as the founder president. A brief account of the early history of the department may therefore be of interest to members of the Society.

In the Spring of 1944, an informal discussion took place in Cambridge between Mr. R. S. Whipple, Professor Allan Ferguson and Mr. F. H. C. Butler, concerning the formation of a national Society for the History of Science.

This is the opening sentence of the inaugural issue of the Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Science, the Society's first official publication. Butler himself was the author of this outline account of the subsequent approach to the Royal Society, the parallel moves to establish a National Committee of the International Academy of the History of Science, the formation of a provisional committee to prepare a draft constitution for a national society, and the proceedings of the first Annual General Meeting in May 1947. Whipple had been in Cambridge to discuss his offer to present his collection of old scientific instruments to the University and the possible foundation of a new museum, and Butler, as Secretary of the History of Science Committee in Cambridge, was the chief mover in both this development and an initiative coupled with it to establish a department of the history of science.

Whereas the academic discipline of the history of science has made enormous strides in half a century, ironically, recognition from without has often been disappointing. Private success has not been matched by public status. The work of the Science Museum in London as one of the few widely accessible windows into the discipline is therefore worth remarking upon here, and more detailed investigations are even now under way. The foundation of the British Society for the History of Science at the Museum, in 1947, symbolized a role that the Museum had already played for decades and plays to this day: the pre-eminent public space of the history of science. This distinctive role has of course been shared by other object-based museums attracting large numbers of visitors in places such as Manchester, Greenwich and Edinburgh as well as in Munich and Washington.

The present interest of Englishmen in education is partly due to the fact that they are impressed by German thoroughness. Now let there be no mistake. The war has shown the effectiveness of German education in certain departments of life, but it has shown not only its ineffectiveness, but its grotesque absurdity in regard to other departments of life, and those the departments which are, even in a political sense, the most important. In the organization of material resources Germany has won well-merited admiration, but in regard to moral conduct, and in regard to all that art of dealing with other men and other nations which is closely allied to moral conduct, she has won for herself the horror of the civilized world. If you take the whole result, and ask whether we prefer German or English education, I at any rate should not hesitate in my reply.

Thus William Temple, future archbishop, addressing the Educational Section at the 1916 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Newcastle. Temple's statement introduced his contribution to the ‘neglect-of-science’ debate, a public dispute over the place of science in English secondary education. Originally, the debate had been started by prominent scientists convinced that England's military and industrial fortunes were suffering as a result of the country's continuing scientific illiteracy. The contrasts Temple drew between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between England and Germany, between ‘conduct’ and ‘efficiency’, cropped up throughout the debate.

The store of scientific knowledge is a general treasure-house from which all men may draw. And yet – perhaps because of the wide spread of scientific ideas – we seldom remind ourselves that the development of the stock of scientific ideas, the heritage of all men, has always been the work of a very small band. Men capable of great scientific effort are rare and, for their effectual working, an intellectual environment is needed that is well nigh as rare as themselves. Surely the contemplation of the conditions under which such men have laboured and lived, the examination of their training and mental history, of their ways of life, and of the human setting must be of some value to those who would follow in their footsteps or prepare others to do so. Nor is the reverse side of the picture without its lesson. The study of those social, economic and philosophical conditions that fail to produce effective scientific fruits, or that yield only bizarre or deformed products, can at least explain for us certain phases in the mental history of mankind. Thus the study of the scientific mood in its historical development needs little justification.

It is perhaps ironic that a society of historians such as the British Society for the History of Science should have been in existence for some thirty-six years before any attempt was made to create a formal archive of its history. Such an oversight is doubtless attributable to the undue modesty of those involved in the earlier history of the Society, possibly tinged with a distrust of what historians can do with archival records, but it is none the less regrettable that there are not more early records of our Society's activities. The official Council Minutes from 1947 onwards, however, are more detailed than one might expect, and a very useful source of information.

As described elsewhere in this issue of BJHS, preliminary steps towards founding a society for the history of science in Britain were taken in 1946. A meeting was held at the Science Museum, London, on 22 November 1946, chaired by Herbert Dingle, at which Gavin de Beer formally proposed the foundation of a history of science society, seconded by Michael Roberts. A provisional committee was appointed to draw up rules and a constitution.

With the death of Joseph Needham on 24 March 1995 the world of learning lost one of the greatest scholars in this or any country, of this or any century. For more than thirty years Needham had been the greatest sinologist in the West, having previously achieved an international status as a research biochemist and as a historian. Intellectually a bridge-builder between science, religion and Marxist socialism, and supremely so between East and West, he has been called the Erasmus of the twentieth century. A sober assessment suggests that with the passage of time he will be recognized as a greater figure than the scholar from Rotterdam.