• Born: 18 July 1635
• Birthplace: Freshwater, Isle of Wight
• Died: 3 March 1703
• Best Known As: The author of 1665's Micrographia

Robert Hooke was the English scientist and inventor who wrote the 1665 book Micrographia, in which he coined the term "cell" for a basic biological structure. A gifted student with a particular talent for mechanics, Hooke was educated at Oxford, where he assisted Robert Boyle with his successful air pump experiments. A member of the Royal Society from 1663, Hooke was accomplished in astronomy, biology, physics and architecture, and his skill as an instrument maker gave him an edge over his contemporaries. He argued with Isaac Newton over the nature of light and gravity, and their long-running debate is said to have left both men forever bitter toward each other. Hooke's studies of springs and elasticity led to his enunciation of "Hooke's Law" (a spring's extension is proportional to the weight hanging from it), and he is credited with inventing the balance spring that allowed for the making of small, accurate timepieces. He also invented a reflecting microscope, the universal joint, and a variety of clocks, barometers and optical devices. Although not a surveyor or architect by profession, Hooke was named London's Surveyor after the Great Fire of 1666 and, with Christopher Wren, given the task of rebuilding the city.

Hooke discovered in 1664 that Gamma Arietis was a binary star... It was in a letter to Hooke that Isaac Newton wrote his famous line, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

[b. Freshwater, Isle of Wight, England, July 18, 1635, d. London, March 3, 1703]

Hooke, like most other scientists of the 17th century, investigated what are now regarded as several different branches of science. Hooke's law is that stretching is directly proportional to force, a discovery in materials science. Hooke introduced the word cell to describe tiny compartments in cork. His invention of a compound microscope with a separate light source enabled him to observe not only "cells" but also the tiny parts of insects and to confirm the existence of microbes. Hooke's theory of combustion preceded the phlogiston idea by 35 years or so and was closer to what we now know to be true. Hooke's correct guess that gravity obeys an inverse square law contributed to a famous feud with Newton, who had actually proved this result. Hooke was one of the first to recognize a double star; he also proposed a wave theory of light.

The English physicist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was one of the most ingenious and versatile experimenters of all time.

Robert Hooke, the son of a clergyman in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, was born on July 18, 1635. He was too sickly for regular schooling until he was 13, when, left an orphan with a modest inheritance, he entered Westminster School. Later he earned his way as a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, and attended Westminster College, graduating with his master's degree in 1663. Hooke remained at Oxford, where he became assistant to Robert Boyle. Together they conducted many experiments on the effects of reduced air pressure, using an air pump that had been designed and constructed by Hooke.

In 1662 Hooke became curator of the newly founded Royal Society, his duties being to produce three or four significant experimental demonstrations for each weekly meeting of the society. He was ideally suited for such work, and his career thereafter was immensely active and fertile. He founded microscopic biology with his pioneering Micrographia (1665). He invented the first practical compound microscope, the spring balance wheel and anchor escapement mechanism, the universal joint, improved barometers, a screw-divided quadrant for astronomical measurements, a simple calculating machine, and a sounding device. He devised and performed numerous experiments to investigate the laws of gravity and suggested the inverse-square relationship for the decrease of gravity with distance. He proposed in rudimentary form a wave theory of light, a dynamical theory of heat, a theory of combustion, and even an evolutionary theory, all of which were accepted as scientific orthodoxy only in the 19th century. He made careful astronomical observations to try to prove the motion of the earth from stellar parallax, lectured on comets and earthquakes, and noted the relationship between a falling barometer and an approaching storm. After the great fire of London in 1666, he was engaged by the city in rebuilding projects and proved himself a skilled architect. For a time he also served as secretary and treasurer of the Royal Society.

Unfortunately, Hooke's many concurrent projects, and the necessary haste with which he did everything, meant that many of his ideas were never developed in depth. This led to several priority disputes, the most notable of which were with Isaac Newton. Hooke claimed that most of Newton's optical researches and his system of universal gravitation, which obeyed the inverse-square law, were in his own works. Hooke was no more belligerent or aggressive in pushing his claims than was common at the time, but Newton remained bitter. Hooke died in London on March 3, 1703, and during the 24 years after Hooke's death, when Newton was the dominant figure in the British scientific community, Hooke's reputation suffered. His true greatness was not generally recognized until the 20th century.

Further Reading

Most of Hooke's published writings are reprinted in Robert W. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford (15 vols., 1920-1945). The standard recent work on Hooke, rehabilitating his reputation after 2 centuries, is Margaret 'Espinasse, Robert Hooke (1956). A convenient short review of Hooke's life is in the Scientific American's publication Lives in Science (1957).

For more information on Robert Hooke, visit Britannica.com.

Hooke, Robert (1635-1703). Hooke made the microscope well known as a scientific instrument, publishing his Micrographia in 1665. Its splendid engraving of the fleamade a tremendous impression. Previously, Hooke had worked with Robert Boyle on the air pump, and in 1662 had been appointed curator to the Royal Society, with the duty of performing experiments at the meetings.

(1635–1703)

English scientist and colleague of Wren, he became one of the three Surveyors (the others were Edward Jerman and Peter Mills) for the reconstruction of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666, and was the author of a plan (now lost) for a new layout (not implemented). He seems, with Wren, to have designed the Monument (1671–6), and collaborated on some of the City churches (he was probably responsible for St Benet, Paul's Wharf (1678–84)). He designed Bethlehem Hospital, Moorfields, London (1675–6—demolished), Escot House, Devon (1677–88 demolished, illustrated in vol. 1 of Vitruvius Britannicus); the Royal College of Physicians, Warwick Lane, London (1672–8—demolished); Ragley Hall, Warwicks. (1679–83), subsequently altered by Gibbs (1750–5) and James Wyatt (c.1780); and many other buildings, most of which have been demolished or altered beyond recognition. His planning was strongly influenced by French precedents. He was one of the first to assert the true principles of arcuated construction, notably in relation to catenary curves and ellipses.

Bibliography

• Bradley & Pevsner (1997)
• Colvin (1995)
• Downes (1966)
• Early Science in Oxford, x (1935), 69–265
• 'Espinasse (1962)
• Jardine (2003)
• Keynes (1960)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

(hʊk) , 1635–1703, English physicist, mathematician, and inventor. He became curator of experiments for the Royal Society (1662), professor of geometry at Gresham College (1665), and city surveyor of London after the great 1666 fire. Considered the greatest mechanic of his age, he made many improvements in astronomical instruments and in watches and clocks, was the first to formulate the theory of planetary movements as a mechanical problem, and anticipated universal gravitation. In 1684 he devised a practicable system of telegraphy. He invented the spiral spring in watches and the first screw-divided quadrant and constructed the first arithmetical machine and Gregorian telescope. He also stated Hooke's law (see elasticity), and in his pioneering book Micrographia (1665) he described his microscopic observations of plant tissues and coined the term cell.

Bibliography

See biography by L. Jardine (2004); studies by M. 'Espinasse (1956) and F. F. Centore (1970).

Hooke, Robert (1635–1703), English natural philosopher, microscopist, experimenter, surveyor and architect, and pioneer palaeontologist. A sickly child who grew into a crookbacked, pale, lean, and anxious hypochondriac, Hooke was a gifted mechanic who became, arguably, the leading natural philosopher in England before Isaac Newton, perhaps rivaled only by his patron, Robert Boyle. Hooke attended Westminster School before entering Christ Church, Oxford, as a chorister in 1653. He soon became part of the circle of experimental natural philosophers brought together by John Wilkins, warden of Wadham College. Here he met, and in 1658 became assistant to, Robert Boyle, and embarked upon his career as an experimental philosopher. The work they did together, using an air pump designed and built by Hooke, proved important and highly influential. In 1662 Boyle allowed Hooke to take up the post of curator of experiments for the newly founded Royal Society of London. Hooke's brief was not only to try experiments suggested by the fellows, but also to bring three or four "considerable Experiments" to each meeting. Few could have managed this at all, but Hooke made an astonishing success of it, and was quite literally the mainstay of the society for well over a decade. In 1666 Hooke was appointed by the city as one of the surveyors on the rebuilding committee established after the Great Fire of London. His friend Sir Christopher Wren was appointed by the king. Like Wren, Hooke did not confine his activities to surveying but also proved to be a highly gifted architect, although never achieving the recognition accorded to Wren. In the early 1670s Hooke became embroiled first with Newton and then with the leading Dutch mathematician, Christiaan Huygens, and the secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, in bitter priority disputes. Even though the fellows tended to support Oldenburg, after his death in 1677 they appointed Hooke to succeed him. However, this seems to have marked the point of Hooke's intellectual decline. He was ejected from the post after five years and received scant consideration in 1686 when he tried (with some justification) to claim priority for the planetary dynamics expounded in Newton's soon-to-be-published Principia Mathematica (1687). In 1687 his niece and mistress, Grace, died and left Hooke emotionally devastated and reclusive. He produced no more significant work and died embittered and alone even though he left over £9,000 in cash (money that he must have accrued as surveyor for the City of London).

Hooke's scientific achievements were considerable. He developed, but never fully expounded, a unique system of mechanical philosophy that depended upon supposed incessant vibrations of matter. Ingeniously explaining solidity, for example, in terms of particles vibrating so rapidly that they could beat off any intruding body; and chemical reactions in terms of vibrations of two substances in harmony (in cases of combination) or in discord (in cases of disaggregation), Hooke's main problem was to explain such putative vibrations. Although he never succeeded in this, he was led to many suggestive experiments on the nature of vibrations and what he called "simple harmonic motions." His theory and practice was closely linked not only to the first statement of what is now known as Hooke's Law (stress is proportional to strain), and his awareness of the dynamic equivalence of vibrating springs and pendulums, but also to his insight in 1658 that a clock might be driven by a spring instead of a pendulum—an idea that was first made to work in practice by Huygens in 1674 but that Hooke believed should have been acknowledged as his invention. The influence of his vibratory physics can even be seen in Hooke's recognition that light was a periodic phenomenon, as demonstrated in his analysis of colors produced in soap bubbles and other thin films. Hooke was inspired by his optical theories to develop the idea that planetary motions could be explained in terms of a single attractive force from the sun bending the straight-line motion of a planet into an elliptical orbit. Furthermore, he guessed that this force would vary in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between the sun and the planet. He published this speculation in 1666 and drew it to Newton's attention in correspondence in 1679. Hooke couldn't prove it mathematically, but when Newton subsequently proved it, at the request of Edmund Halley in 1684, he did not correct Halley's assumption that Newton had hit on the idea himself. This proof, of course, was to be the centerpiece of Newton's Principia Mathematica, which Halley now persuaded him to write. Small wonder that Hooke was outraged when he heard that his original idea was not acknowledged in the Principia.

Hooke was undoubtedly an insightful and ingenious theorist of great influence even though he never quite succeeded in establishing the truth of any of his theoretical ideas. His industry and ingenuity has, nevertheless, ensured his position in the history of science. He invented the universal joint, the iris diaphragm, a calibrated screw adjustment for telescopes, and the wheel barometer. He was also one of the first to take seriously the idea that fossils represented the genuine remains of ancient creatures (previously it was assumed they were simply features in the rocks which accidentally mimicked living forms), and was led by his knowledge of them to conclude that the surfaces of the earth could change, land giving way to sea and vice versa, and that the number and kinds of species of plants and animals were not fixed. Perhaps his most lasting monument, however, is his one major book, Micrographia (1665), the first major work of microscopy. Although justly famous for its meticulous and genuinely surprising descriptions of microscopic phenomena, and for its superb illustrations, Micrographia also includes some of Hooke's most fruitful theoretical speculations and his most profound comments upon good practice in natural philosophy.

Bibliography

Bennett, Jim, M. Cooper, M. Hunter, and L. Jardine. London's Leonardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke. Oxford, 2003.

'Espinasse, Margaret. Robert Hooke. Berkeley, 1956.

Gal, Ofer. Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures: Hooke, Newton and the "Compounding of the Celestial Motions of the Planetts." Dordrecht, 2002.

Hunter, Michael, and Simon Schaffer, eds. Robert Hooke: New Studies. Wolfeboro, N.H., 1989.

—JOHN HENRY

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