On November 4, 1869 , Alexander Macmilan and Joseph Norman Lockyer saw their efforts rewarded and launched the first issue of ‘ Nature ‘, a journal that would become a benchmark for the scientific community . In the Victorian era , science prospered enormously but its diffusion was still quite limited . Places like the Royal Society brought together so-called men of science but provided them with few tools to share their theories and discoveries, let alone to make them reach the rest of the population .
The first issue presented the aesthetics of the newspapers of the time, which had been generalized since the mid-nineteenth century, and Macmilan and Lockyer decided to focus its content on what today we would call a “declaration of intentions” in which they maintained their interest in to bring great scientific work and discoveries to the general public and to help scientists keep abreast of new “advances made in any branch of natural knowledge around the world.” ‘ Nature ‘ has followed these principles since its inception and has built a much wider network of knowledge than anyone would have thought.
Over the years, the magazine has ended up becoming a benchmark for the scientific community , respected by its readers and presenting specialized and highly technical content of which they tend to highlight its quality. Most of the publications are the results of research written by the scientific teams themselves and analyzed through the peer review system in which the submitted proposals are validated and modified by experts of equal or higher level than the authors. Among the journal’s collaborators, Thomas Huxley , a staunch defender of Darwin’s theories, or the scientists responsible for discovering the double helix structure of DNA : James Dewey Watson and Francis Crick .
It may be that a large part of the population does not take it into account in their daily lives, but the advancement of science implies enormous improvements for the entire planet. The mission of this type of journal such as ‘ Nature ‘ is precisely to ensure that knowledge crosses the barriers that contain it and reaches the largest number of people possible . To make sure nothing important has been leaked, we run through some of the best covers from this magazine giant .
