Curator of Experiments
Robert Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635, the son of a curate, and reached Oxford as a poor scholar who paid his way by serving wealthier students. There he joined the circle around Robert Boyle and built the improved air pump with which Boyle established the relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas. The instrument was Hooke's engineering; the law carries Boyle's name. It was an early instance of a pattern that would shape his career and his temper.
In 1662 the new Royal Society appointed him Curator of Experiments, a post that obliged him to demonstrate three or four fresh experiments at every weekly meeting. No one before or since has held quite such a job. It made him extraordinarily versatile and left him permanently short of time to develop any single line of work. He lectured as Gresham Professor of Geometry, kept a detailed diary of London life, and lived for decades in rooms at Gresham College.
Micrographia and a Burned City
Micrographia, published in 1665, was the first scientific bestseller. Its fold-out engravings of a flea, a louse and the compound eye of a fly were drawn by Hooke himself and stunned readers who had never seen the small world rendered at scale. Examining a thin slice of cork, he found it divided into tiny chambers that reminded him of the cells of a monastery, and named them accordingly. The word survives in biology, though what he saw were empty plant cell walls rather than living units.
The following year London burned. Hooke was appointed one of the surveyors for the rebuilding and worked for years alongside Christopher Wren, settling boundary disputes between property owners and helping set out the new street lines. He designed the Monument to the Fire as a working instrument for astronomical observation as well as a memorial, and produced buildings including the Bethlem Hospital and the Royal College of Physicians. Much of the practical reconstruction of the city passed through his hands.
The Arithmetic of Credit
Hooke announced his law of elasticity in 1676 as a Latin anagram, publishing the solution two years later, a common device for claiming priority while withholding detail. The habit reflected his environment. He fought with the astronomer Hevelius over telescopic sights, with the Society's secretary Henry Oldenburg over the spring watch, and above all with Isaac Newton, first over the theory of light and later over gravitation. In 1679 he wrote to Newton suggesting an attraction falling off as the inverse square of distance.
He could not derive the elliptical orbits that followed, and Newton could. Hooke wanted acknowledgement in the Principia and received almost none, and the feud outlived him. No authenticated portrait survives, which has generated a persistent story that Newton, as president of the Royal Society, had one destroyed. There is no evidence for it. The likelier explanation is ordinary neglect, which is its own comment on how a difficult, indispensable man was remembered. Historians generally treat his claim as genuine but incomplete, which is exactly why it has never been settled.
