The Copley Medal is an award given by the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

, for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science". It alternates between the physical sciences or mathematics and the biological sciences. Given every year, the medal is the oldest Royal Society medal awarded and the oldest surviving scientific award in the world, having first been given in 1731 to Stephen Gray, for "his new Electrical Experiments: – as an encouragement to him for the readiness he has always shown in obliging the Society with his discoveries and improvements in this part of Natural Knowledge". __TOC__

History

The medal was created following a donation of £100 to be used for carrying out experiments by Sir Godfrey Copley, for which the interest on the amount was used for several years. The conditions for the medal have been changed several times; in 1736, it was suggested that "a medal or other honorary prize should be bestowed on the person whose experiment should be best approved", and this remained the rule until 1831, when the conditions were changed so that the medal would be awarded to the researcher that the Royal Society Council decided most deserved it. A second donation of £1666 13 s. 4 d. (400,000

old pence The British pre-decimal penny was a denomination of sterling coinage worth of one pound or of one shilling. Its symbol was ''d'', from the Roman denarius. It was a continuation of the earlier English penny, and in Scotland it had the same ...

) was made by Sir Joseph William Copley in 1881, and the interest from that amount is used to pay for the medal. The medal in its current format is made of

silver-gilt Silver-gilt or gilded/gilt silver, sometimes known in American English by the French term vermeil, is silver (either pure or sterling) which has been gilded with gold. Most large objects made in goldsmithing that appear to be gold are actually ...

and awarded with a £25,000 prize. Since its inception, it has been awarded to many distinguished scientists, including 52 winners of the Nobel Prize: 17 in

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...

, 21 in Physiology or Medicine, and 14 in

Chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the elements that make up matter to the compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions: their composition, structure, proper ...

John Theophilus Desaguliers John Theophilus Desaguliers FRS (12 March 1683 – 29 February 1744) was a British natural philosopher, clergyman, engineer and freemason who was elected to the Royal Society in 1714 as experimental assistant to Isaac Newton. He had studied at ...

has won the medal the most often, winning three times, in 1734, 1736 and 1741. In 1976,

Dorothy Hodgkin Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot; 12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994) was a Nobel Prize-winning British chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became essential fo ...

became the first female recipient;

Jocelyn Bell Burnell Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (; Bell; born 15 July 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in ...

, in 2021, is the second.

Medal recipients

References

External links

* * {{featured list 1731 establishments in Great Britain 1731 in science Awards established in 1731 Awards of the Royal Society Biology awards Physics awards Silver-gilt objects

History

Medal recipients

See also

References

External links