Robert Hooke

English scientist

• Born: July 18, 1635
• Birthplace: Freshwater, Isle of Wight, England
• Died: March 3, 1703
• Place of death: London, England

As curator of experiments for England’s Royal Society, Hooke proved to be one of the greatest experimentalists and inventors of the seventeenth century, contributing to a wide range of scientific fields. As city surveyor for London, he helped rebuild the city after the great fire of 1666.

Early Life

Robert Hooke was born into the household of John Hooke, a minister, and his second wife, Cecelie. He was so sickly as a child that his parents did not expect him to survive, and frequent headaches later kept him from attending school. As a result, Hooke was schooled at home and largely left to his own interests. These included drawing and the inner workings of machines, which he disassembled and used as guides for making his own devices; for instance, he constructed wooden clocks and a working model of a warship, complete with firing cannons.

Hooke’s father died in 1648, whereupon the thirteen-year-old collected his inheritance and went to London. At first he intended to become the apprentice of Sir Peter Lely (né Pieter Van der Faes), a celebrated painter of miniature portraits, but he soon changed his mind and entered Westminster School, a premier preparatory school. There Hooke impressed the headmaster, Richard Busby, with his talent for language and geometry and his mechanical skills. With Busby’s special tutelage and support, Hooke entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1653.

At Oxford, Hooke eventually joined a group of natural philosophers who viewed nature as a vast mechanism and wanted to reveal how it worked. Some members of this group, including Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle , became Hooke’s lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1657, Boyle hired Hooke to construct laboratory equipment and help with experiments. Hooke’s vacuum pump, a famous instrument of its day, permitted Boyle to explore the properties of air, part of the research that led to Boyle’s law (published 1662). At the same time, Hooke began his lasting interest in chronometers as he sought to invent a durable shipborne watch for use in determining longitudes.

Life’s Work

Hooke’s first solo publication was a 1661 pamphlet explaining capillary action. The work so impressed contemporary scientists that, with the help of Wren and Boyle, Hooke was hired as curator of experiments for the newly founded Royal Society in 1662 and was elected a full member the following year. His duties for the society were onerous: For the benefit of members, he was to perform “three or four considerable experiments” of his own at each weekly meeting, as well as any that members themselves suggested. This he did with ingenuity and gusto, setting a high intellectual standard for the Royal Society.

During the next twenty-six years, in hundreds of experiments, Hooke investigated the nature of light, air, gravity, magnetism, gunpowder, comets and other celestial phenomena, optics, chronometers (particularly the use of springs and pendulums), lightning, earthquakes, respiration, circulation, fossils, and medical treatments, while also inventing carriages, the iris diaphragm, meteorological instruments, watches, and a wide variety of scientific tools. In 1677, he began a five-year term as secretary of the Royal Society, and he later served on its council, while also caring for the society’s collection of rarities and its library.

Hooke found yet further scientific posts, each with a considerable workload. In 1664, John Cutler, a wealthy merchant, endowed a lecture series especially for Hooke in which he was to discuss the practical sciences and trades. In 1665, Hooke became Gresham College’s professor of geometry; the appointment included an apartment in the college’s London premises, which remained his home from then on. Amid these manifold duties, Hooke published one of the masterpieces of seventeenth century science literature, Micrographia (1665). It quickly became a best-seller, admired for the wide range of topics discussed, including new theories of light and combustion, as well as for the beautiful drawings of objects and creatures that Hooke had examined under his improved microscope. The book established the importance of the microscope as a scientific instrument and embodied Hooke’s guiding principle, drawn from the ideas of Francis Bacon, that philosophers must base their understanding of the world on rigorous observation and experimentation; theory must arise from demonstrable fact.

In subsequent publications, Hooke formulated the law of elasticity (now known as Hooke’s law), which states that stress in springs is directly proportionate to strain. That is, the force applied to and released by coiling and uncoiling a spring is directly proportionate to the amount of deformation undergone by that spring. Hooke also conducted an early analysis of harmonic motion, helped found the fields of meteorology and crystallography, proposed an explanation for celestial dynamics, and advanced explanations (broadly correct) for the origin of fossils and the evolution of species during environment change.

Following the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke helped to rebuild the devastated central city. He was appointed city surveyor in 1667, responsible for laying out the new streets, designing many new public buildings and overseeing their construction, enforcing building codes, and settling property disputes. He executed these many tasks in coordination with his friend Wren, who had been appointed royal surveyor. This partnership broadened when Hooke became an assistant and virtual partner in Wren’s architectural firm. Hooke designed private houses and public buildings on his own, including Bedlam Hospital, the Royal College of Physicians, and the towering monument memorializing the fire; he assisted Wren in many other projects, including designing the new Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Hooke’s official posts and private projects left him a wealthy man when he died at Gresham College in 1703, but not a happy one. He was a long-standing hypochondriac, and continual experiments in self-dosing, as well as overwork, impaired his health. Furthermore, bitter disputes with other scientists over priority in making discoveries and stating theories had gradually changed him from a gregarious, collegial genius to a suspicious, prickly recluse.

Significance

Hooke has an unfortunate, undeserved distinction. His memory was almost immediately and completely eclipsed by the reputations of both his friends and his foes. During his lifetime, he had an international reputation as the premier experimentalist in England, and his biographers have called him the first professional scientist in an era when most people interested in research were aristocratic dabblers. Science historians view Hooke as a key figure in the early development of the Royal Society. In fact, Hooke was so thoroughly associated with science and the Royal Society that when Thomas Shadwell satirized the society in his play The Virtuoso (pr., pb. 1676), he based his main character on Hooke.

Despite his experimental genius and mechanical talent, however, Hooke’s energies were scattered, and he seldom had the time or the mathematical skill to investigate topics fully. His insights were usually remarkably accurate and his suggested solutions to problems basically correct; still, he left it to others to supply proof. Accordingly, Hooke failed to get credit for many ideas that others pursued and developed largely or solely on the basis of his work. Even his architectural achievements were frequently attributed to Wren. Until a revival of interest in him around the three-hundred-year anniversary of his death, he was known almost solely for Hooke’s law. Even some histories of the Royal Society omitted or glossed over his role in its founding.

Hooke quarreled with the great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens over the invention of a spring-driven watch for use at sea and, worse still, with Sir Isaac Newton over the nature of light and the theory of universal gravitation. Hooke held that light was composed of waves; Newton insisted it was made up of tiny particles (both were later shown to be right). Hooke claimed to have first stated that gravity was centered in bodies and decreased in strength by the square of the distance between those bodies (the inverse-square law), but he could not demonstrate it mathematically. Newton did so in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1729; best known as the Principia ) and ridiculed Hooke’s claim to the discovery. After Newton became president of the Royal Society, Hooke’s influence quickly waned. At the same time, Newton’s insistence upon rigorous mathematical demonstration in scientific investigations became the intellectual standard instead of Hooke’s style of hypothesis and experimentation. Nevertheless, Hooke’s scientific methods and ideas were pervasively influential during his lifetime, affecting the work even of such rivals as Newton.

Bibliography

Cooper, Michael. “A More Beautiful City”: Robert Hooke and the Rebuilding of London After the Great Fire. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2003. Offers a brief sketch of Hooke’s life and work in science, while discussing in detail his architectural work and role in rebuilding London. Maps, illustrations, and manuscript reproductions.

’Espinasse, Margaret. Robert Hooke. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. This brief biography proposes that Hooke’s conflict with Isaac Newton entailed a change in how science was pursued in England, from broad, practical empirical studies to narrower, mathematical induction.

Inwood, Stephen. The Forgotten Genius: The Biography of Robert Hooke, 1635-1703. San Francisco, Calif.: MacAdam/Cage, 2003. Inwood explains Hooke’s varied scientific achievements lucidly and discusses the attendant controversies evenhandedly, suggesting that a tendency in Hooke to overstate his claims led him into conflicts.

Jardine, Lisa. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Jardine discusses Hooke’s grueling schedule of work for the Royal Society, his partnership with Christopher Wren, and his official duties for London and how these affected his research, professional standing, and health.

Robinson, Henry W., and Walter Adams, eds. The Diary of Robert Hooke, 1672-1680. London: Wykeham, 1968. This immensely detailed record of eight years in Hooke’s life testifies to the variety, intensity, and burden of his workload.