Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke arrived at Oxford in 1653 as a frail, impoverished, gifted Westminster boy. He left a decade later as one of the most original experimental scientists of his generation — and one of the few who ever taught Robert Boyle anything.

Westminster, Christ Church, and the Wilkins circle

Born on the Isle of Wight in July 1635, the youngest of four siblings and not expected to live, Hooke lost his father at thirteen and used a £40 bequest to travel to London. After a brief and unsuitable apprenticeship to the painter Peter Lely — "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution" — he became a pupil at Westminster School under the formidable Richard Busby, mastering Latin, Greek, Euclid's Elements, and the organ.

In 1653 Hooke secured a place at Christ Church as a chorister-servitor — free tuition and accommodation in return for service. He did not officially matriculate until 1658 and took his MA in 1662. While a student he was employed as an assistant to Thomas Willis, the physician and chemist who would coin the word "neurology". Through Willis, Hooke was drawn into the Oxford Philosophical Club that John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham, had built into the nucleus of what became the Royal Society. The friends he made at Oxford — most importantly Christopher Wren — were the most important of his life.

The air pump and Micrographia

In 1655, when Robert Boyle moved into Cross Hall on the High Street, Hooke became nominally his assistant — in practice his co-experimenter. Boyle was working on gas pressures; Hooke was the engineer who could make the experiments work. The "Ralph Greatorex" pump Boyle had been given was, in Hooke's words, "too gross to perform any great matter." Hooke designed and built a desktop pump that could be opened to insert candles, mice, birds, bells, pendulums — anything Boyle wanted to study under partial vacuum. The pump enabled the experiments published as New Experiments Physico-Mechanical (1660) and the eventual statement of Boyle's Law (1662). As Wikipedia notes drily: "Hooke had a particularly keen eye and was an adept mathematician, neither of which applied to Boyle."

In 1660 Hooke discovered the law of elastic extension that bears his name — first published as the anagram "ceiiinosssttuv" and only resolved in 1678 as Ut tensio, sic vis ("As the extension, so the force"). In 1665 he published Micrographia, the first illustrated book of the microscopic world. Looking at a slice of cork, he saw small chambers like the rooms in a monastery and called them "cells" — the word stuck.

Curator of Experiments

On 5 November 1661, Robert Moray proposed the creation of a Royal Society post for a curator who would "furnish the society with experiments". Hooke was named on Boyle's recommendation. From 11 January 1665 he was Curator by Office for life, with a salary of £80. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1663 and appointed Gresham Professor of Geometry in March 1665. As Henry Robinson, the Royal Society's librarian, wrote in 1935: "Without his weekly experiments and prolific work the Society could scarcely have survived... It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he was, historically, the creator of the Royal Society."

After the Great Fire

When the 1666 Great Fire destroyed two-thirds of the City of London, Hooke — already a Royal Society officer — performed more than half of the property-line surveys that allowed reconstruction to proceed. The work made him wealthy. He worked closely with Wren on the city's churches and on the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which doubled as a zenith telescope to test the rotation of the Earth.

Hooke's later years involved bitter priority disputes — most famously with Isaac Newton over the inverse-square law of gravitation, which Hooke had stated in a 1666 communication to the Royal Society and again in his 1674 Gresham lecture An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth. He died blind and bedridden on 3 March 1703 in his rooms at Gresham College, where a chest containing £8,000 in money and gold was found. No portrait of Hooke is known to survive — the only contemporary description of him is John Aubrey's, recording a man of "great virtue and goodness" with a "thin and crooked body, over-large head and protruding eyes." He was buried at St Helen's Church, Bishopsgate; the precise location of his grave was lost.

Sources: Wikipedia: Robert Hooke · The Royal Society — Past Fellows: Robert Hooke

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