The award was created after a £100 bequest in 1709 to the Royal Society by Sir Godfrey Copley, a wealthy landowner from Sprotbrough, near Doncaster, South Yorkshire, who was elected to the Society in 1691.
It is one of ten medals that the Society awards (some awards are made annually, others at different intervals according to their terms of reference). The Copley Medal alternates between the physical sciences and the biological sciences, and the winners are selected by Fellows of the Society.
Past laureates include:
1731 Stephen Gray
1732 Stephen Gray
1739 Stephen Hales
1744 Henry Baker
1748 James Bradley
1749 John Harrison
1753 Benjamin Franklin
1759 John Smeaton
1772 Joseph Priestley
1775 Nevil Maskelyne
1776 James Cook
1781 William Herschel
1784 Edward Waring
1787 John Hunter
1794 Alessandro Volta
1802 William Hyde Wollaston
1805 Humphry Davy
1815 David Brewster
1817 Henry Kater
1820 Hans Christian Orsted
1821 Edward Sabine
1822 William Buckland
1823 John Pond
1824 John Brinkley
1825 François Arago; Peter Barlow
1827 William Prout
1831 George Biddell Airy
1832 Michael Faraday; Simeon Poisson
1835 William Snow Harris
1836 Jöns Jacob Berzelius
1838 Carl Friedrich Gauss
1839 Robert Brown
1840 Justus Liebig
1841 Georg Ohm
1845 Theodor Schwann
1846 Urbain Le Verrier
1847 John Herschel
1848 John Couch Adams
1849 Roderick Murchison
1850 Peter Andreas Hansen
1852 Alexander von Humboldt
1855 Léon Foucault
1857 Michel-Eugene Chevreul
1858 Charles Lyell
1859 Wilhelm Weber
1860 Robert Wilhelm Bunsen
1861 Louis Agassiz
1863 Adam Sedgwick
1864 Charles Darwin
1866 Julius Plücker
1867 Karl Ernst von Baer
1868 Charles Wheatstone
1869 Henri Victor Regnault
1870 James Prescott Joule
1872 Friedrich Woehler
1873 Hermann Helmholtz
1874 Louis Pasteur
1876 Claude Bernard
1877 James Dwight Dana
1879 Rudolf Clausius
1882 Arthur Cayley
1883 William Thomson
1885 Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz
1887 Joseph Dalton Hooker
1888 Thomas Henry Huxley
1892 Rudolf Virchow
1893 George Gabriel Stokes
1899 Lord Rayleigh
1901 Willard Gibbs
1904 William Crookes
1905 Dmitri Mendeleev
1908 Alfred Russel Wallace
1910 Francis Galton
1912 Felix Klein
1918 Hendrik Lorentz
1925 Albert Einstein
1929 Max Planck
1938 Niels Bohr
1947 G.H. Hardy
1950 James Chadwick
1951 David Keilin
1952 Paul Dirac
1953 Albert Kluyver
1954 Edmund Whittaker
1955 Ronald Fisher
1956 Patrick Blackett
1957 Howard Florey
1958 John Edensor Littlewood
1959 Macfarlane Burnet
1960 Harold Jeffreys
1961 Hans Krebs
1962 Cyril Hinshelwood
1963 Paul Fildes
1964 Sydney Chapman
1965 Alan Hodgkin
1966 William Lawrence Bragg
1967 Bernard Katz
1968 Tadeus Reichstein
1969 Peter Medawar
1970 Alexander Todd
1971 Norman Pirie
1972 Nevill Mott
1973 Andrew Huxley
1974 W.V.D. Hodge
1975 Francis Crick
1976 Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
1977 Frederick Sanger
1978 Robert B. Woodward
1979 Max Perutz
1980 Derek Barton
1981 Peter Mitchell
1982 John Cornforth
1983 Rodney Porter
1984 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
1985 Aaron Klug
1986 Rudolph Peierls
1987 Robert Hill
1988 Michael Francis Atiyah
1989 Cesar Milstein
1990 Abdus Salam
1991 Sydney Brenner
1992 George Porter
1993 James Watson
1994 Charles Frank
1995 Frank Fenner
1996 Alan Cottrell
1997 Hugh Huxley
1998 James Lighthill
1999 John Maynard Smith
2000 Alan Battersby
2001 Jacques Miller
2002 John Pople