The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hook 1653 - 1703

by Stephen Inwood

Two great figures, Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren, dominate the histories of science and architecture in the late seventeenth century. We assume that every building constructed in London after the Great Fire was designed by Wren, and every step on the way to the understanding of universal gravitation and the nature of light was taken by Newton. Newton himself, in a letter to Robert Hooke, made the famous observation that every great scientist builds on the work of those who preceded him: ‘If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. But it is the man on the top of the pile, not those under his feet, who wins the glory. Pope’s famous couplet, written in 1730, was an early contribution to the reduction of the story of late seventeenth-century science:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton Be! And all was light.

In 1652 Pasqua Rosee, a Turkish Greek, opened London’s first coffee house, Pasqua Rosee’s Head, in St Michael’s Alley off Cornhill, in the middle of the City. By the end of the decade there were more than eighty coffee houses in the City, and for many Londoners they rivalled taverns as centres of social life.

Robert Hooke, Gresham Professor of Geometry, Cutler Lecturer, Fellow and Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, was established as England’s first professional research scientist in a world occupied almost entirely by ‘virtuosi’, physicians, aristocratic dilettantes and gentleman scholars of independent means.

Hooke recognized that precise measurement of time, weight, air pressure, angles and distance was a key to advancement in the new science, and he devoted much of his energy to developing the accurate instruments he needed – spirit levels, clocks, pendulums, hydrostatic balances, dividing engines, telescopic sights, quadrants and barometers.

Garraway’s was the first place in London to sell tea (in leaf and liquid form), and it was becoming a well-known centre of commerce.

Newton possessed many of the characteristics usually ascribed to Hooke, but in an intensified form. He was neurotic, self-centred, ambitious, intolerant, oversensitive, secretive, unforgiving and highly argumentative. It is hard to imagine Newton spending his evenings drinking coffee with a large group of congenial companions, or forming lifelong friendships with laundresses, sea captains, clerks and scientists. None of this should affect our opinion of Newton’s matchless scientific genius one jot, but it is essential to our understanding of his relationship with Hooke.

Hooke, more than any other English natural philosopher of his day, was proud of his strictly rational and scientific approach to his subject. Nobody was freer from the clutter of medieval beliefs and superstitions – alchemy, astrology, magic spirits – that still confused and preoccupied other intelligent men of his time.

LET US NOT HURRY Robert Hooke into his grave. In the middle of the 1690s he remained an important architect and builder, and was probably involved in some private commissions which are unknown to us.

In the world of natural philosophy he was still an active figure, defending his reputation as an inventor, struggling to convince a sceptical or indifferent Royal Society that the Earth had been shaped by floods and earthquakes, reporting on the work of others, and contributing some new ideas of his own.

Hooke was worried by the fact that the French Academy was better at publishing its achievements than the Royal Society, and that academicians were taking credit for English or Italian ideas.

issued a challenge to his timid and conservative colleagues to live up to the ideals of observation and open-mindedness that had motivated the founders of their Society:

If he had won a reputation for himself, it was as an eccentric inventor of useless or impractical gadgets, who gave lectures that nobody came to and had to chase spies and schoolboys from his rooms. Still, love of science or force of habit drove him on, and he continued to present experiments and ideas to the Royal Society,

Nobody had served the early Royal Society longer or better than Robert Hooke,

The 1660s, when Hooke (alongside Henry Oldenburg) had kept the Royal Society alive with his almost limitless energy and intellectual fertility, and produced in Micrographia one of the greatest and most exciting scientific books of the century, seemed a very long time ago.

All references to his debt to Hooke’s work on light and colours were removed.

Newton achieved an extraordinary dominance over the Royal Society, of which he was President for almost twenty-four years, and over the whole scientific community in England. His personal hegemony, along with the triumph of his highly mathematical approach to science, almost completely eclipsed Hooke’s posthumous reputation.

The significance of his speculations on combustion, light waves, elasticity, fossils, the formation of continents and the development of species was not grasped in the early eighteenth century, and by the time scientists had moved in his direction they had all but forgotten his work in these fields.

If we followed Swift and Shadwell in thinking of Hooke as the archetype of the unworldly scholar, fiddling about in his laboratory on projects which never had the slightest chance of doing any good to anyone, we would be utterly misunderstanding Hooke’s life and work. More than any other scientist of his day, except perhaps Wren, Hooke turned his skills to practical ends, directing the rebuilding of the centre of one of Europe’s greatest cities, designing and constructing colleges, hospitals, churches, suburban mansions and West End town houses, and discovering and publicizing a range of important craft skills in pottery, glassware, metalwork and textiles. The mighty Monument, still standing straight on its clay and gravel foundations after over three hundred years, was not the work of a laboratory-bound eccentric.

In the study of insects, friction, the strength and elasticity of materials, meteorology, oceanography, comets, evolution, geology, crystals, light, heat, sound, combustion and respiration, his work was seminal.

Hooke combined outstanding mechanical skills with a commitment to accuracy in measurement and observation, he was able to make an almost unparalleled contribution to the development of scientific instrumentation.

This optimism about what science might achieve was typical of the age, but it reached its highest point in Hooke, whose mind was remarkably free of the magical and religious superstitions that muddled and constricted some of the best brains of his day. This freedom enabled him to make suggestions about the changing shapes of continents, climatic change, the formation of rocks and the development of species which anticipated and perhaps influenced the ideas of James Hutton in the eighteenth century and Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth.

This is why Robert Hooke enjoyed the sustained friendship of such a wide variety of Londoners: the Mercers’ clerk John Godfrey, the needlewoman Nell Young, the linguists Theodore Haak and Francis Lodwick, the sea captain Robert Knox, the ‘operator’ Henry Hunt, the clergymen John Wilkins; and Seth Ward, the watchmaker Thomas Tompion, the antiquarian John Aubrey, the schoolmaster Dr Richard Busby, the landowner Sir Robert Southwell, and the scientists Robert Boyle, Edmond Halley, Thomas Henshaw and Christopher Wren.