The British Association Festival of Science opened on Wednesday in South Kensington, London. It is part of the wider Creating Sparks event which takes science and scientists to the public.

• The festival dates back to 1831, when the first meeting was held by the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science.
• Its purpose is to act as a forum for publicly presenting and discussing developments across many different areas of science. Members of the public, journalists and school students are among the thousands of visitors who attend every year.
• Charles Dickens satirised the BA as the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Absolutely Everything.
• For decades the festival had immense prestige and was famous for staging major clashes between leading academics.
• The best known occurred at the meeting in Oxford in 1860 when the Bishop of Oxford, Sam Wilberforce, launched a bitter attack on Charles Darwin. Thomas Huxley and JD Hooker hit back in a series of legendary exchanges.
• Years later, when Bishop Wilberforce died after falling off his horse, Huxley remarked: "For once, reality and his brains come in contact and the result was fatal."
• Another row started in 1836 with an attack on a young upstart railway engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, by Dionysus Lardner, who refused to believe a steamship could carry enough fuel to travel from Bristol to New York. The dispute continued into the 1837 meeting, but by the following year Brunel had won the argument. The Great Western took 15 days to cross the Atlantic to New York, with 25% of her coal unused.
• History was made at the festival in 1894, when Oliver Lodge gave the first public demonstration of a radio transmission.
• This year it is estimated that about 2,000 delegates will attend the festival, and speakers will give more than 300 presentations. The festival will include lectures, debates, visits, exhibitions and hands-on workshops.

The BA's Creating Sparks events run until 30 September in South Kensington, London. There are more than 400 events.

The festival is centred on Imperial College, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Geographical Society, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.