On November 4, 1869, the first issue of Nature was published in London, under the editorship of the astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had been arguing for a weekly paper that would set out what was happening in science both for those who did the work and for those who wanted to follow it. The first number carried reviews and reports and a short piece on the weather, and it cost a few pence. The aim was plain. Lockyer ran the paper for half a century.
The paper was not the first of its kind. The weeklies that came before it had failed or had turned into magazines for the general reader, and Nature borrowed from them the idea of short reports written by the people doing the work, and it added a strict habit of checking. The style was set. The habit held. Through the 1870s and 1880s it became the place where new instruments and new results were described first, and where arguments between scientists were carried on in print.
Its standing grew with the work it printed. The paper on the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick appeared in 1953, and the reports that first set out the evidence for the hole in the ozone layer came in 1985, and papers on the cloning of a sheep and on the editing of genes have run in its pages since. The range is wide. It also prints letters and comment and news of research policy, and its correspondence columns have carried some of the sharpest exchanges in science.
The journal is now part of a group that publishes many titles, and it still comes out every week, and the decision about what to print is made by editors after advice from researchers who are not named. That system has been argued about, for it puts a great deal of power over careers in a few hands. The first issue sold for a few pence and the first editor wrote much of it himself. The paper has outlived its rivals and its critics.