Robert Hooke

Wikipedia Biographical Summary:

"...Robert Hooke ( 28 July [O.S. 18 July] 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.

His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but eventually becoming ill and party to jealous intellectual disputes. These issues may have contributed to his relative historical obscurity.

He was at one time simultaneously the curator of experiments of the Royal Society and a member of its council, Gresham Professor of Geometry and a Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire of London, in which capacity he appears to have performed more than half of all the surveys after the fire. He was also an important architect of his time – though few of his buildings now survive and some of those are generally misattributed – and was instrumental in devising a set of planning controls for London whose influence remains today. Allan Chapman has characterised him as "England's Leonardo".[1]

Robert Gunther's Early Science in Oxford, a history of science in Oxford during the Protectorate, Restoration and Age of Enlightenment, devotes five of its fourteen volumes to Hooke.

Hooke studied at Wadham College during the Protectorate where he became one of a tightly knit group of ardent Royalists led by John Wilkins. Here he was employed as an assistant to Thomas Willis and to Robert Boyle, for whom he built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's gas law experiments. He built some of the earliest Gregorian telescopes and observed the rotations of Mars and Jupiter. In 1665 he inspired the use of microscopes for scientific exploration with his book, Micrographia. Based on his microscopic observations of fossils, Hooke was an early proponent of biological evolution.[2][3] He investigated the phenomenon of refraction, deducing the wave theory of light, and was the first to suggest that matter expands when heated and that air is made of small particles separated by relatively large distances. He performed pioneering work in the field of surveying and map-making and was involved in the work that led to the first modern plan-form map, though his plan for London on a grid system was rejected in favour of rebuilding along the existing routes. He also came near to an experimental proof that gravity follows an inverse square law, and hypothesised that such a relation governs the motions of the planets, an idea which was subsequently developed by Isaac Newton.[4] Much of Hooke's scientific work was conducted in his capacity as curator of experiments of the Royal Society, a post he held from 1662, or as part of the household of Robert Boyle..."

"...Much of what is known of Hooke's early life comes from an autobiography that he commenced in 1696 but never completed. Richard Waller mentions it in his introduction to The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M.D. S.R.S., printed in 1705. The work of Waller, along with John Ward's Lives of the Gresham Professors and John Aubrey's Brief Lives, form the major near-contemporaneous biographical accounts of Hooke.

Early life
Robert Hooke was born in 1635 in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight to John Hooke and Cecily Gyles. Robert was the last of four children, two boys and two girls, and there was an age difference of seven years between him and the next youngest. Their father John was a Church of England priest, the curate of Freshwater's Church of All Saints, and his two brothers (Robert's uncles) were also ministers. Robert Hooke was expected to succeed in his education and join the Church. John Hooke also was in charge of a local school, and so was able to teach Robert, at least partly at home perhaps due to the boy's frail health. He was a Royalist and almost certainly a member of a group who went to pay their respects to Charles I when he escaped to the Isle of Wight. Robert, too, grew up to be a staunch monarchist...."

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke

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http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke
Robert Hooke (Isle of Wight, 18 juli 1635 – Londen, 3 maart 1703) was een Engels sterrenkundige, natuurkundige en architect. Hij is voornamelijk bekend door zijn wet van Hooke, die het verband aangeeft tussen de kracht op een lichaam en de vervorming van dat lichaam. Hooke was een begenadigd uitvinder en bracht ons zowel de spiraalveer als de fotografische iris. Hij introduceerde de term 'cel' in de biologie na zijn microscopische waarnemingen van kurkweefsel. Hij was een tijdgenoot van de architect Christopher Wren met wie hij samenwerkte aan de heropbouw van Londen na de Grote brand van Londen, en eeuwig rivaal van Isaac Newton. Toch bereikte hij nooit de roem van die laatste.

Other References

• "Robert Hooke", Westminster Abbey

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History Today - Death of Robert Hooke. Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today Volume 53 Issue 3 March 2003

The English polymath died in London on March 3rd, 1703.

One of the most brilliant and versatile figures of his time, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) died a disappointed man. His own law, Hooke’s Law, has to do with elasticity, but he brought a piercing intelligence and inventiveness to bear on a remarkable range of fields – anatomy, astronomy, geometry and geology among them – at a time when science was young and not yet compartmentalised. Hooke proved the rotation of Jupiter on its axis and determined the rotation period of Mars. He discovered that light rays bend round corners (diffraction) and put forward the wave theory of light to account for it. He investigated the action of the lungs and identified the role of air in combustion. He studied the crystal structure of snowflakes and the honeycomb structure of cork. He was interested in music and acoustics, and he designed balance springs for watches. He suggested the manufacture of artificial fibres by copying the action of silkworms. He examined fossils and tried vainly to get the history of the Earth examined in a non-Biblical light.

Stephen Inwood’s recent biography, The Man Who Knew Too Much, shows Hooke interested in virtually everything. He devised improved scientific instruments – thermometers, telescopes, microscopes, pendulums and pumps – as well as a pedometer, a marine barometer, a depth sounder and various navigational instruments. He made advances in the study of insects and lectured on the medicinal properties of cannabis. He worked on machines for making cider and measuring the wind. He considered the possibilities of flying machines, long-distance signalling systems and bouncing shoes, which would shoot the wearer twelve feet up in the air. Not content with all this, he was also a practising architect who worked with Christopher Wren on the rebuilding of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666.

The other side of the coin was that Hooke, who was fiercely competitive, became eaten away with resentment because he believed that he was denied proper credit for his achievements and made too little money out of his inventions. People grew weary of his complaints that practically every new invention or idea that came along had been anticipated by him years before, but ignored. He was the Royal Society’s curator of experiments from 1662 and a fellow from 1663, but the Society’s failure for many years to elect him to its council rankled and he had a long, bitter wrangle with Isaac Newton, whom he accused of stealing his work without acknowledgement. It was not until Hooke died that it became possible to elect Newton to the Royal Society’s council.

Hooke’s last years were pitiful. His health deteriorated sharply in 1697, his sight and his legs began to fail him and he became increasingly ill-tempered and miserly. Stooped, short of breath, unwashed and sleeping in his ragged clothes, he finally died in his rooms at Gresham College in the City, alone in the middle of the night, at the age of sixty-seven. His emaciated body so swarmed with lice that no one wanted to touch it, but in an iron chest in the room there was a hoard of coins worth, in today’s money, close to £1 million.

https://archive.org/stream/publicationsv28p4thor#page/457/