How did this London townhouse become the world’s greatest research centre?

If you were asked to name the world’s greatest research centre in terms of discoveries per square yard, the answer wouldn’t be an Oxford or Cambridge lab. Nor would it be anywhere in America. Or China, for that matter. The correct answer would be a handsome Georgian townhouse in the heart of London. 

For it was at the Royal Institution (Ri), in the 19th century, that Sir Humphry Davy identified nine new elements in the periodic table. And it was there that Michael Faraday teased out the relationship between electricity and magnetism, which enabled the creation of our modern electrified world. And it was there that, in the 20th century, in addition to a rockfall of other discoveries that took place at the Ri, the Nobel Laureates William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence developed their researches in X-ray crystallography, on which others would later build to discover the structure of DNA. 

Crucial to the building’s claim to greatness is that research continues there to this day – something that cannot be said of the Beijing Ancient Observatory, for instance, or Cambridge’s original Cavendish Laboratory building, which became museums in the 1920s and 1970s respectively.