For more than two hundred years the Royal Institution has been at the centre of scientific research and has also provided a cultural location for science in Britain. Within its walls some of the major scientific figures of the last two centuries - such as Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, John Tyndall, James Dewar, Lord Rayleigh, William Henry Bragg, Henry Dale, Eric Rideal, William Lawrence Bragg and George Porter - carried out much of their research. Their discoveries include sodium, the miners' lamp, the electric dynamo, transformer and generator, the 'thermos' flask, x-ray crystallography...