The fish that almost blew Newton's career

(Image: Royal Society)

Give an angler the time of day and chances are they'll have a story to tell about the one that got away. When the Royal Society chose to publish a book on the natural history of fish in 1686, they came perilously close to letting slip one of the biggest scientific catches of all time - Newton's Principia Mathematica.

John Ray and Francis Willughby's 1686 book Historia Piscium must have seemed like a good bet - the illustrations, like this one of a flying fish, were impressive. And other natural history books - such as Robert Hooke's 1665 book Micrographia - had become bestsellers.

But Historia Piscium bombed, leaving the society so strapped for cash that it fell to one of their clerks, the scientist Edmund Halley, to raise the money needed to publish the Principia.