History is a living, breathing creature – a fickle beast that is likely to forget even the greatest people unless it is constantly fed by its keepers. They say history is written by the conqueror but it also written by those that follow in its wake.
If history’s keepers don’t celebrate your achievements then history will look elsewhere for sustenance and you will be forgotten.
Time is littered with the corpses of the forgotten – great men and women who should be celebrated as pioneers, change-makers and revolutionaries but for one reason or another have been snubbed by the beast and are not remembered as they should be. One such victim is Robert Hooke.
Hooke was one of the greatest minds of the Renaissance – he was Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei rolled into one, a polymath who should be celebrated as an English Leonardo Da Vinci but who instead is barely remembered at all.
At a time when science was beginning to separate itself from the magic and superstition of the past and establish itself as a respectable discipline, Hooke was at the forefront.
He built one of the earliest reflecting telescopes and with it he extended the boundaries of astronomy.
With his improvements to the microscope he opened up the alien realm of the very small and, with his exquisite drawings, he held them up for the whole world to marvel at. His studies of fossils led him to become a proponent of evolution almost 150 years before Darwin and his explorations of the properties of light and air paved the way for the particle theories that would culminate in the discipline of quantum physics.
His pioneering works in the field of surveying and map-making helped pull London out of the devastation wrought by the Great Fire of 1666 and led to the first modern plan-form maps.
He came astonishingly close to deducing the nature of gravity and how it influences the movements of the planets – work that was built upon by Isaac Newton. And all this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
[Graphic: Just some of Robert Hooke's achievements: Click to Micrographiafy]
Yet chances are you have never heard of Robert Hooke. So why has this great pioneer and thinker been left shivering in the hinterlands of history?
Well, it’s all down to the people that followed him and their reluctance to feed the beast. He might have been a genius but, by all accounts, he was not a particularly likable man. Prone to outbursts of jealously, he had a knack for alienating himself from his colleagues.
For example, when Newton came to present his work on gravity at the Royal Society in 1686, Hooke launched into a rant that his work on gravity had priority over Newton’s. He argued he had brought the theory to Newton’s attention and demanded that he be given due credit in Newton’s book. Newton responded by deleting all reference to Hooke in the work.
Nor was this Hooke’s only run-in with the great and the good of 17th century science.
He fought a series of bitter patent battles, including one with Christiaan Huygens over the invention of the first balance-spring watch.
All of this meant that many of Hooke’s contemporaries were less than motivated to celebrate his work after he died.
Hooke hasn’t been completely ignored by history. He is rightly celebrated for his work on the microscope and for the physical law describing the effects of weight on a spring that bears his name. But his other achievements have fallen into obscurity, along with their creator.
It’s time to rehabilitate this irascible genius.
[Amazingly, no portait of Robert Hooke remains. It is said that, when he was appointed President of the Royal Society, Newton had the only portrait of Hooke destroyed. This new portrait comissioned by the Institute of Physics has been created by Rita Greer. With no visual sources for reference, Greer had to rely on written sources]
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Robert Hooke
Nice article on Hooke but you should check your dates. His theories on evolution predate Darwin's by nearer 150 years (not 250). Darwin developed his theory of natural selection in the late 1830s and eventually published the Origin of Species in 1859.
Keep up the good work though.
Thanks
Hi Rick, you are of course absolutely correct. I have now changed this. Thanks for pointing it out
Robert Hooke
I was shown a copy of your article on Robert Hooke yesterday, and while I enjoyed reading it, I would like to take issue with one aspect.
You stated that he was an irascible man who had a reputation for embroiling himself in unnecessary arguments. You have, I fear, fallen for the pejorative spin that Newton and his followers placed upon the great man after his death.
If you take the trouble to read some of the excellent Hooke biographies that have been published in recent years, you will discover that he was, in fact, widely regarded as one of the fairest men in London, completely honest and totally incorruptible. After the Great Fire, it was he who was employed by the City of London to arbitrate over the most bitter land disputes, and there are many records of how well he was regarded by those who used his services.
You will also find that Hooke designed many of the buildings that were previously credited to Wren. If he was as ego-bound as the Newtonists would have had us believe, he would undoubtedly have publicly claimed them for himself. But he didn't because he believed in due procedure - and as Wren was the principal architect (as opposed to the actual architect), it was right that his name appeared on the drawings.
Hooke took a lot of stick for the Huygens issue - but when the missing volume of the Proceedings of the Royal Society were discovered in the bottom of an old cupboard of a house in Hampshire, his claims were found to be fully validated.
Likewise, Hooke's initial argument with Newton was caused when he simply pointed out a mathematical error - in the correct scientific manner of the day. He could not have known that Newton was a paranoid schizophrenic, and that this otherwise trivial incident would cause a lifetime (or in the case of his reputation, several lifetimes) of woe.
Hooke's diary entries show that he performed his scientific studies sporadically throughout the day, interspersing it with work for Wren, the City of London, or others. It is, I hope you will agree, highly unlikely that he was irascible from, say 06:30 to 09:00, while he had his scientist’s hat on, then a really fair man from 09:30 to 11:00 while he arbitrated a dispute, then back to being argumentative the moment he returned to his lab.
Hooke also liked to spend time in the then-fashionable coffee houses drinking mugs of hot chocolate. There, he liked to converse animatedly with what today would be most unlikely accomplices for an academic – namely, artisans. One of the main reasons that he was able to achieve so much in the scientific field was that he was a hugely talented craftsman himself. He made all his own instruments – microscopes, telescopes, and so on. Show me a professor that could do this today – I certainly don’t know any. I believe it was this shared knowledge that allowed Hooke to communicate on an equal level with many of the leading gun makers, glass blowers, cabinet makers and other artisans. People who would have otherwise given him short-shrift.
One of the main reasons that Boyle became so famous was that a young Hooke built him a vacuum pump – something that no-one had managed to achieve before. In order to do this, it required the boundaries of knowledge to be pushed in several directions at the same time, and I am convinced that it was only by allying craftsman techniques from several widely-differing disciplines that he was able to do so. For instance, it may be that he used the latest gun barrel-turning machinery to bore the glass cylinders which were at the heart of the pump.
The point that I am trying to make is that such skilled craftsmen don’t tend to take prisoners. They also don’t give away their secrets easily – and, I suspect that this was even more true back in the seventeenth century when livelihoods were often entirely dependant on the retention of closely-guarded knowledge. Having spent much of my like working around such people, I know only too well that you have to be able to connect with them or they won’t give you the time of day. Typically, the only way to get them to really open up is to freely give them fresh knowledge that they can see is of value to their interests. One thing is for sure - irascible men don’t get far in such circles!
Good points all
Thank you for that. A fascinating and lengthly look at Hooke's issues.
You are preaching to the converted however. I would have loved to have address the issues you raise but, as I'm sure you can understand, there is only so much that I can squeeze on to two pages of news paper. I always have to find a compromise and, in this case, I chose to include as many of his achievements as I possible could.
As you say, there are many good books biographicalising Hooke - but I don't have the luxury of 200+ pages to explore all the nuances of history.
All I can hope to do is spark enough interest in a reader that he (might) want to go on and dig deeper.
But I did enjoy reading you comment!
As Apu (from The Simpsons) would say: "thankyou, please come again"
Robert Hooke
I thank you, Kind Sir. One of my life's missions is to see Robert Hooke's full ancestry established. Aubrey recorded that Hooke was 'of the family of the Hookes of Hooke in Hants, in the road from London to Salisbury, a very ancient family and in that place for many (three or more) hundred years'.
This refers to Bramshott House - the family of which used the same coat of arms as mine. Somewhere along the line we lost the 'e' (the spelling of my surname is 'Hook') - but how nice would it be to prove that the great man shared the same bloodline?!
It's also amusing to note how many of Robert Hooke's interests I share - pretty well all of which I'd developed well before I'd ever heard of him. It's also interesting to wonder what he'd be 'into' in today's age!
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