Letās face it. Who wouldnāt get a rush to discover through Ancestry.com, or your goofy cousin who has spent the last 20 years researching how your family got to the U.S. and who all the generations of your ancestors are, that you are descended, however remotely, from some president or royal family or famous artist? Thatās rather the way I felt this morning when over tea and toast (I am in the U.K. after all), I found
this announcement. It announces an exhibition celebrating the 350
th anniversary of the first publication of the Royal Societyās
Philosophical Transactions, billed as the worldās oldest surviving scientific journal.
Itās a long and circuitous route from the Philosophical Transactions, billed on the cover of the first 1665 edition as āGiving Some Accompt [sic] of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the INGENIOUS in Many Considerable Parts of the Worldā to Control and Control Design, but the DNA is there.
CT/CD and their Internet iterations are 8th cousins, once removed, at best, but we are related. Edmund Halley has never been one of our editors. We did not publish James Clerk Maxwellās āA Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.ā Yes, that Maxwell. Those equations. Charles Darwin didn't fact-check for us. But we have absorbed our ancestorās thinking and motivation: to provide a forum for the best āscientific gentlemenā and ānatural philosophersā in our field--automation--to exchange ideas with one another and with a larger public. The Shinskeys, McMillans, LiptĆ”ks and our other subject matter experts are not a bad group of local ānatural philosophersā to exchange ideas with.
And it is a rush to realize that youāre related, however remotely, to a royal family.