Lockyer approached Macmillan in early 1869 with plans for a new scientific journal. This was lucky for Lockyer, because - despite his best efforts - The Reader had proved editorially and financially troublesome, and his career path at the War Office was uncertain. Then, in 1868, he asked Lockyer to act as scientific adviser to his publishing house. Macmillan commissioned Lockyer to write a book about astronomy. With their shared interests and friends (including poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson), they soon became friends themselves, travelling to France together in 1867 after Lockyer’s second nervous breakdown (he had three, the first in 1864). The exact time and place of Macmillan and Lockyer’s first meeting is not known, but the twin topics of science and publishing would have dominated their early conversations. Image source: Life and Work of Sir Norman Lockyer by T. Unfortunately for Lockyer, the paper was commercially disorganized and its poor financial performance meant that - like many publications in the Victorian era - it lasted for only a few years. The Reader, launched in 1863, was in many ways an early forerunner to Nature - 38 people who supplied reviews to The Reader later contributed to Nature. Lockyer frequently shared a train carriage to London with publisher John Ludlow and author Thomas Hughes, both friends of Macmillan, and they asked him to be the science editor of their proposed weekly, The Reader, which was to cover the arts, literature and science.
A clerk in the UK government’s War Office, he was a keen and talented young amateur astronomer - he was later to co-discover the element helium in the corona of the Sun, using a spectroscope. Lockyer (pictured) was born in Rugby in Warwickshire on. Huxley’s article ‘Time & Life’ was published in the second issue. In 1859, Alexander launched Macmillan’s Magazine, the first shilling monthly in England, aiming to unify science, literature and the arts under one banner, with David Masson as the editor. This “talk, tobacco and tipple on Thursdays” group, as he described it, fostered friendships among the great scientific educators of the Victorian era, including Huxley and the physicist John Tyndall, who were eager to write for Macmillan. He would host ‘tobacco parliaments’, at which science, art and hot topics of the day, such as Darwinism, would be discussed. The academic standing of the Macmillans in Cambridge (their shop was at the heart of the university city) later helped Alexander to establish contacts with eminent men of science in London. Macmillan’s headquarters were in Cambridge until 1863, when they moved to 16 Bedford Street in London. After Daniel’s death in 1857, Alexander opened a London branch at 23 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. This it owes to Alexander Macmillan, who tolerated a loss-making venture for three decades to Norman Lockyer, the first editor and to a string of influential collaborators and contributors, including biologist Thomas Henry Huxley - one of the heavyweights of Victorian science and a staunch ally of Charles Darwin (he was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’).īrothers Alexander and Daniel Macmillan founded their bookshop and publishing house in Cambridge, UK, in 1843. Many earlier publishing adventures in science had failed dismally, but Nature’s eventual success grew out of the social and scientific conditions under which it was founded - driven by the vision of strong personalities, who forged ahead when the odds seemed against them. The first issue of Nature was published on 4 November 1869.
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