Hooke

Robert Hooke

Born: 18 July 1635 in Freshwater, Isle of Wight, England
Died: 3 March 1702 in London, England

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Hooke went to school in Westminster where he learnt Latin and Greek, but unlike his contemporaries he never wrote in Latin. In 1653 he went to Christ College, Oxford where he won a chorister's place.

At Oxford Hooke met Boyle and in 1655 he was employed by Boyle to construct his air pump. In 1660 he discovered Hooke's law of elasticity. Hooke worked on optics, simple harmonic motion and stress in stretched strings. For 30 years he was professor of geometry at Gresham College, London, being appointed there in 1665.

The year 1665 was the one when Hooke first achieved worldwide scientific fame. His book Micrographia , published that year, contains beautiful pictures of objects Hooke had studied through a microscope he had made himself. The book also contains a number of fundamental biological discoveries. Pepys wrote in his diary

Before I went to bed I sat up till two o'clock in my chamber reading Mr Hooke's Microscopical Observations, the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.
Hooke invented the conical pendulum and was the first person to build a Gregorian reflecting telescope. He made important astronomical observations including the fact that Jupiter revolves on its axis and his drawings of Mars were later used to determine its period of rotation. In 1666 he proposed that gravity could be measured using a pendulum.

In addition to his post as professor of geometry at Gresham College, London Hooke held the post of City Surveyor. He was a very competent architect and was chief assistant to Wren in his project to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666.

In 1672 Hooke attempted to prove that the Earth moves in an ellipse round the Sun and six years later proposed that inverse square law of gravitation to explain planetary motions. His priority claim over the inverse square law led to a bitter dispute with Newton who, as a consequence, removed all references to Hooke from the Principia .

No portrait of Hooke is known to exist. A possible reason for this is that he has been described as a

lean, bent and ugly man
and so he may not have been willing to sit for a painting of his portrait.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me more about Hooke's dispute with Newton

Other Web sites:

Rice University, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. M E Ehrlich, Mechanism and Activity in the Scientific Revolution : The Case of Robert Hooke, Annals of Science 52 (1995), 127-152.
  4. E N da C Andrade, Robert Hooke, Proc. Roy. Soc. London 201A (1950), 439-473.
  5. J G Crowther, Founders of British science : John Wilkins, Robert Boyle, John Ray, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton (London, 1960).
  6. M Hunter and S Schaffer (eds.), Robert Hooke : new studies (Eoodbridge, 1989).
  7. M Espinasse, Robert Hooke (London, 1956).
  8. F F Centore, Robert Hooke's contributions to mechanics : a study in seventeenth century natural philosophy (The Hague, 1970). 
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