The battered folio of notes looks like many others that have landed on the desk of Felix Pryor, manuscript expert at Bonhams auction house in London. But when he leafed through the pages of intricate seventeenth-century hand-writing, Pryor quickly realized he was looking at the most exciting scientific documents he had ever handled: a set of original minutes and commentary that detail the birth of modern science. “My jaw hit the floor,” he says.

The manuscripts are due to go on sale next month with an estimated value of £1 million (US$1.8 million). They capture the early days of Britain's oldest research institution, the Royal Society, through the eyes of Robert Hooke — a brilliant physicist, chemist and mechanic who during his career engaged in well-documented rows with contemporaries such as Isaac Newton. Historians who have seen the papers say they settle a major controversy in the development of timekeeping and provide fascinating insights into the fledgling UK research body.

Most of the notes date from Hooke's tenure as secretary of the society between 1677 and 1682, a time when Newton was developing his theory of gravity and Gottfried Leibniz was working on calculus. Transcriptions of Hooke's minutes, which record the group's weekly Thursday meetings, were printed at the time and survive to this day. But the discovery of the originals fills in several gaps created when the copies were made.

Science historians are desperate for Hooke's notes to remain accessible to study. Credit: BONHAMS

A second section sheds light on a 300-year-old quarrel over the invention of the spring-balance watch, a major advance in timekeeping. The invention is often attributed to the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, but Hooke always claimed that he had demonstrated the device at a Royal Society meeting in June 1670, five years before Huygens patented his. As the society's transcribed minutes make no mention of such a demonstration, many historians have questioned Hooke's claim.

The notes may change that thinking. The second section was written by Hooke as he looked through original minutes handwritten by his predecessor as secretary, Henry Oldenburg. Hooke had removed a sheet of Oldenburg's minutes and placed it in his folio. It contains details of the pocket-watch experiment that Oldenburg never transcribed into the official records. “Hooke must have been incensed when he found it,” says Lisa Jardine, a historian at Queen Mary, University of London, and a biographer of Hooke.

Other parts of the manuscript suggest that Hooke was indeed furious. Oldenburg's printed minutes for 1676 omit another of Hooke's experiments, this time on magnetism. In his commentary, Hooke notes: “The dog has entred nothing but Left a blank.”

The documents were found last September in a cupboard in a house in Hampshire, southern England, during a routine valuation of other items. The owners say they have no idea how they came by the manuscript, and that it had been in the cupboard for as long as they can remember.

Jardine and others say it is vital that the manuscript remains accessible after its sale, so that it can be properly studied by science historians. But there is no guarantee that will happen. The Royal Society says it wants to bid for the documents, but lacks the funds. “I believe there is a lot of other serious stuff in there,” says Jardine. “I'm desperate that it goes to an accessible home.”

Should a foreign collector triumph in the auction, the UK government is likely to impose a three-month delay on issuing an export licence for the manuscript. Such a move would be designed to enable British museums to raise funds to mount a rival bid; UK law dictates that a museum could take possession if it matched the winning bid.