One of the preeminent scientists of the seventeenth century, Robert Hooke is perhaps best remembered for the wide variety of fields to which he contributed, including physics, astronomy, microscopy, biology, and architecture, among others. Although Hooke introduced many concepts that were previously unimagined or unexamined, his ability to formulate these ideas usually did not match his intuition, and the credit for many scientific breakthroughs inspired by Hooke's ideas is often given to such scientists as Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens, who brought the work to its fruition. Still, Hooke remains an important pioneer of science.
Born on Britain's Isle of Wight on July 18, 1635, Hooke was a sickly child who was not expected to see his fifth birthday. As a youth, his perpetual ill health made it impossible for him to attend classes regularly, and he was unable to enter the ministry as his father, a minister, had wished. Once freed from his father's agenda, Hooke was allowed to pursue his interest in mechanics, which he first demonstrated as a small child by constructing wonderfully elaborate toys. He attended Westminster School and later Oxford, where he became the laboratory assistant to Robert Boyle. It was in Boyle's lab that Hooke's talent for designing scientific instruments was noticed, as he constructed the improved air pump used to establish Boyle's gas laws. In fact, it has been speculated that Hooke himself may have been the author of Boyle's law, since, customarily, any findings from research done in the lab would have been credited to the professor.
Along with some of his colleagues from Oxford and the surrounding area, Hooke helped to establish what would soon become the Royal Society, to which he was appointed Curator of Experiments. This position gave Hooke the forum and the finances to conduct years of wide-ranging research. Around this same time, many European inventors were vying to develop the first accurate device to determine longitude on a sailing ship. Already in use, the chronometer, essentially a modified clock, was unreliable since the pendulum used to regulate its motion was thrown off by the ship's rocking. Sometime near 1660, Hooke introduced a chronometer design based upon a spring rather than a pendulum. Although his design was sound, he was unable to find investors to back him, and it was not until 1674 that Christiaan Huygens patented his own spring-driven chronometer. Hooke immediately claimed that Huygens's invention was a derivative of his own, beginning a dispute that remains unresolved to this day. During his time as Curator, Hooke had many other successes attributed to him, such as the compound microscope, an improved barometer, the reflecting telescope, and the universal joint.
Although Hooke was not the first to do experiments using a microscope, he was the first to dedicate a major intensive volume to microscopy. His 1665 publication, Micrographia, describes the structures of insects, fossils, and plants in unprecedented detail. While studying the porous structure of cork, Hooke noted the presence of tiny rectangular holes that he called cells--a word that has been adopted as the cornerstone of microbiology. Micrographia also contains illustrations in Hooke's own hand that remain among the best renderings of microscopic views.
A difficult man, Hooke was described as quarrelsome, miserly, and a dedicated hypochondriac. One of the most notorious tales about him concerns rivalry with Isaac Newton, which began in 1672. In that year Newton, then an unknown student, sent a paper to the Royal Society detailing his theory of colors, which contrasted greatly with that of Hooke. After Hook quickly dismissed the young scientist's theory as irrelevant, Newton sent a scathing response to Hooke in a letter later published in the Royal Society's periodical. Newton published a second paper on light in 1675, introducing a theory of light as an undulatory wave; Hooke's reply was that Newton had stolen this wave theory outright from his own earlier publication, Micrographia. Hooke later made a similar claim to Newton's theory of gravitation. The feud between Hooke and Newton escalated, though the latter's increasing reputation in the British scientific community forced them to act cordially--at least in public. The two scientists' dislike for one another culminated in 1686, when Newton introduced to the world his theory of universal gravitation, a theory very similar to one Hooke had outlined in a letter seven years earlier. Though Hooke's theory was fundamentally flawed and was not supported mathematically, he insisted that Newton had plagiarized his idea. Modern scientists now credit Hooke with the ideas that inspired Newton to develop his own theory of gravitation. The verbal battles between these two scientists were very bitter, several times driving Newton to a nervous breakdown.
One theory that Hooke clearly can take full credit for concerns elasticity. While experimenting with systems of springs, he found that the amount of weight added is proportional to the distance the spring stretches--that is, a four-pound weight will stretch a spring twice as far as a two-pound weight. Strictly speaking, Hooke's law states that, in an elastic system, the stress is proportional to the strain.
In the years following the great London fire of 1666, Hooke became a surveyor and, eventually, an architect, constructing numerous beautiful and famous buildings. Because his architectural interests took much time away from his scientific work, he was ultimately forced to retire as Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society in favor of his new vocation.
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