Other articles in the first volume include "Methods of discovering whether Wine has been adulterated with any Metals prejudicial to Health" and "Description of the Apparatus used by Lavoisier to produce Water from its component Parts, Oxygen and Hydrogen".

Early in the nineteenth century, classic papers by Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and James Prescott Joule appeared in the journal and in the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell contributed several long articles, culminating in a paper containing the deduction that light is an electromagnetic wave or, as he put it himself, "We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena".

The famous experimental paper of Albert A. Michelson and Edward Morley was published in 1887 and this was followed ten years later by J. J. Thomson with article "Cathode Rays" – essentially the discovery of the electron.

Aside from his work on understanding radioactivity, Rutherford proposed the experiments of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden that verified his nuclear model of the atom and led to Niels Bohr's famous paper on planetary electrons, which was published in the journal in 1913.

Since the middle of the 20th century, the journal has focused on condensed matter physics and published significant papers on dislocations, mechanical properties of solids, amorphous semiconductors and glass.