Robert Hooke, FRS (18 July 1635 – 3 March
1703) was an English
natural philosopher, architect and polymath who
played an important role in the scientific revolution, through both
experimental and theoretical work.
His life
divides roughly into three parts: early life as a brilliant but
impecunious scientific inquirer; the period after the great fire of
1666
in which he achieved great wealth and standing due
to his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty; and later
life dogged by ill-health and dominated by jealous intellectual
disputes. This last is primarily responsible for his
relative obscurity in the centuries since his death.
Hooke is known for his law of elasticity (
Hooke's Law), his work as "the father of
microscopy", and for coining the term
"
cell" to describe the basic unit of
life.
Even
now there is much less written about him than might be expected
from the sheer industry of his life: 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
fire of
1666, 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".
Hooke
studied at Wadham
College
during the Protectorate where he became one of a
tightly-knit group of ardent Royalists
centred around 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, observed the
rotations of Mars and Jupiter, and, based on his observations of
fossils, was an early proponent of
biological evolution. 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 deducing that
gravity
follows an
inverse square law,
and that such a relation governs the motions of the planets, an
idea which was subsequently developed by Newton. 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.
Hooke was
also irascible, at least in later life, proud, and prone to take
umbrage with intellectual competitors, though he was by all
accounts also a staunch friend and ally and was loyal always to the
circle of ardent Royalists with whom he had
his early training at Wadham College, particularly Christopher Wren. His reputation
suffered after his death and this is popularly attributed to a
dispute with
Isaac Newton over credit
for his work on gravitation and to a lesser degree light; Newton,
as President of the Royal Society, did much to obscure Hooke,
including, it is said, destroying (or failing to preserve) the only
known portrait of the man. It did not help that the first life of
Wren,
Parentalis,
was written by Wren's son, and tended to exaggerate Wren's work
over all others. Hooke's reputation was revived during the
twentieth century through studies of
Robert Gunther and Margaret 'Espinasse, and
after a long period of relative obscurity he is now recognized as
one of the most important scientists of his age.
Life and works
Much of what is known of Hooke's early life comes from an
autobiography that he commenced in 1696, but did not complete. This
was referenced by Richard Waller in his introduction to the
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 brothers and two sisters, and there
was an age difference of seven years between him and the next
youngest. Their father ecclesiastically served the Church of
England, specifically as the curate of Freshwater's Church of All
Saints ; his three brothers 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 II when he escaped to the Isle
of Wight. Robert, too, grew up to be a staunch monarchist.
As a youth, Robert Hooke was fascinated by observation, mechanical
works, and drawing, interests that would be pursued in various ways
throughout his life. He dismantled a brass clock and built a wooden
replica that, by all accounts, worked "well enough", and he learned
to draw, making his own materials from coal, chalk and ruddle (Iron
ore).
On his father's death in 1648, Robert was left a sum of one hundred
pounds that enabled him to buy an apprenticeship; with his poor
health throughout his life but evident mechanical facility his
father had it in mind that he might become a
watchmaker or
limner,
though Hooke was also interested in painting.
Hooke was an apt
student, so although he went to London to take up an
apprenticeship, and studied briefly with Samuel Cowper and Peter
Lely, he was soon able to enter Westminster School
in London, under Dr.
Busby, where he lodged his hundred pounds. Hooke quickly
mastered Latin and Greek, made some study of Hebrew, and mastered
Euclid's Elements. Here,
too, he embarked on his life-long study of
mechanics.
It appears that Hooke was one of a group of students whom Busby
educated in parallel to the main work of the school. Contemporary
accounts say he was "not much seen" in the school, and this appears
to be true of others in a similar position. Busby, an ardent and
outspoken Royalist (he had the school observe a fast-day on the
anniversary of the King's beheading), was by all accounts trying to
preserve the nascent spirit of scientific inquiry that had begun to
flourish in Carolean England but which was at odds with the literal
Biblical teachings of the Protectorate. To Busby and his select
students the Anglican Church was a framework to support the spirit
of inquiry into God's work, those who were able were destined by
God to explore and study His creation, and the priesthood
functioned as teachers to explain it to those who were less able.
This was exemplified in the person of
George Hooper, the
Bishop of Bath and Wells, whom
Busby described as "the best scholar, the finest gentleman and will
make the completest bishop that ever was educated at Westminster
School".
Oxford
In 1653,
Hooke (who had also undertaken a course of twenty lessons on the
organ) secured a chorister's place at
Christ
Church
, Oxford
. He was employed as a "chemical assistant"
to Dr
Thomas Willis, for whom Hooke
developed a great admiration. There he met the natural philosopher
Robert Boyle, and gained employment as
his assistant from about 1655 to 1662, constructing, operating, and
demonstrating Boyle's "machina Boyleana" or air pump. He did not
take his
Master of Arts until 1662 or
1663. In 1659 Hooke described some elements of a method of
heavier-than-air flight to Wilkins, but concluded that human
muscles were insufficient to the task.
Hooke himself characterised his Oxford days as the foundation of
his life-long passion for science, and the friends he made there
were of paramount importance to him throughout his career,
particularly
Christopher Wren.
Wadham was then under the guidance of
John
Wilkins, who had a profound impact on Hooke and those around
him. Wilkins was also a Royalist, and acutely conscious of the
turmoil and uncertainty of the times. There was a sense of urgency
in preserving the scientific work which they perceived as being
threatened by the Protectorate. Wilkins' "philosophical meetings"
in his study were clearly important, though few records survive
except for the experiments Boyle conducted in 1658 and published in
1660. This group went on to form the nucleus of the
Royal Society. Hooke developed an air pump for
Boyle's experiments based on the pump of
Valentine Greatorex, which was
considered, in Hooke's words, "too gross to perform any great
matter."
It is known that Hooke had a particularly keen eye, and was an
adept mathematician, neither of which applied to Boyle. Gunther
suggests that Hooke probably made the observations and may well
have developed the mathematics of
Boyle's
Law. Regardless, it is clear that Hooke was a valued assistant
to Boyle and the two retained a mutual high regard.
A chance surviving copy of Willis' pioneering
De anima
brutorum, a gift the author, was chosen by Hooke from Wilkins'
library on his death as a memento at
John
Tillotson's invitation. This book is now in the
Wellcome Library. The book and its
inscription in Hooke's hand are a testament ot the lasting
influence of Wilkins and his circle on the young Hooke.
Watch escapement
In 1655, according to his autobiographical notes, Hooke began to
acquaint himself with astronomy, through the good offices of John
Ward. Hooke applied himself to the improvement of the
pendulum and in 1657 or 1658, he began to improve
on pendulum mechanisms, studying the work of
Riccioli, and going on to study both gravitation
and the mechanics of timekeeping. Hooke recorded that he conceived
of a way to determine
longitude (then a
critical problem for navigation), and with the help of Boyle and
others he attempted to patent it. In the process, Hooke
demonstrated a pocket-watch of his own devising, fitted with a
coil spring attached to the arbour of
the balance. Hooke's ultimate failure to secure sufficiently
lucrative terms for the exploitation of this idea resulted in its
being shelved, and evidently caused him to become more jealous of
his inventions. There is substantial evidence to state with
reasonable confidence, as Ward,
Aubrey,
Waller and others all do, that at the very least Hooke developed
the
spring escapement independently of and some fifteen
years before
Huygens, who published his own
work in
Journal de Scavans in February of 1675. Henry
Sully, writing in Paris in 1717, described the
watch escapement as "an admirable invention of which
Dr. Hooke, formerly professor of geometry in Gresham College at
London, was the inventor."
Derham
also attributes it to Hooke.
Royal Society
The
Royal Society was founded in 1660,
and in April 1661 the society debated a short tract on the rising
of water in slender glass pipes, in which Hooke reported that the
height water rose was related to the bore of the pipe (due to what
is now termed
capillary action).
His explanation of this phenomenon was subsequently published in
Micrography Observ. issue 6, in which he also explored the
nature of "the fluidity of gravity". On November 5, 1661, Sir
Robert Moray proposed that a Curator be
appointed to furnish the society with Experiments, and this was
unanimously passed with Hooke being named. His appointment was made
on 12 November, with thanks recorded to Dr. Boyle for releasing him
to the Society's employment.
In 1664, Sir John Cutler settled an annual gratuity of fifty pounds
on the Society for the founding of a
Mechanick Lecture,
and the Fellows appointed Hooke to this task. On June 27, 1664 he
was confirmed to the office, and on 11 January 1665 was named
Curator by Office for life with an additional salary of
£30 to Cutler's annuity.
Hooke's role at the Royal Society was to demonstrate experiments
from his own methods or at the suggestion of members. Among his
earliest demonstrations were discussions of the nature of air, the
implosion of glass bubbles which had been sealed with comprehensive
hot air, and demonstrating that the
Pabulum vitae and
flammae were one and the same. He also demonstrated that a
dog could be kept alive with its thorax opened, provided air was
pumped in and out of its lungs, and noting the difference between
venous and
arterial
blood. There were also experiments on the
subject of gravity, the falling of objects, the weighing of bodies
and measuring of
barometric
pressure at different heights, and
pendulums up to 200 ft long.
Instruments were devised to measure a second of arc in the movement
of the sun or other stars, to measure the strength of
gunpowder, and in particular an engine to cut
teeth for watches, much finer than could be managed by hand, an
invention which was, by Hooke's death, in constant use.
In 1663 and 1664 Hooke produced his
microscopical observations, subsequently
collated in
Micrographia in
1665.
On March 20, 1664, Hooke succeeded Arthur Dacres as
Gresham Professor of Geometry.
Hooke received the degree of "Doctor of Physic" in December,
1691.
Personality and disputes
Much has been written about the unpleasant side of Hooke's
personality, starting with comments by his first biographer,
Richard Waller, that Hooke was "in person, but despicable" and
"melancholy, mistrustful, and jealous." Waller's comments
influenced other writers for well over two centuries, so that a
picture of Hooke as a disgruntled, selfish, anti-social curmudgeon
dominates many older books and articles. For example, Arthur Berry
said that Hooke "claimed credit for most of the scientific
discoveries of the time." Sullivan wrote that Hooke was "positively
unscrupulous" and possessing an "uneasy apprehensive vanity" in
dealings with Newton. Manuel used the phrase "cantankerous,
envious, vengeful" in his description. More described Hooke having
both a "cynical temperament" and a "caustic tongue." Andrade was
more sympathetic, but still used the adjectives "difficult",
"suspicious", and "irritable" in describing Hooke.
The publication of Hooke's diary in 1935 revealed other sides of
the man that 'Espinasse, in particular, has detailed carefully. She
writes that "the picture which is usually painted of Hooke as a
morose and envious recluse is completely false.". Hooke interacted
with noted craftsmen such as
Thomas
Tompion, the clockmaker, and Christopher Cocks (Cox), an
instrument maker. Hooke met often with Christopher Wren, with whom
he shared many interests, and had a lasting friendship with
John Aubrey. Hooke's diaries also make
frequent reference to meetings at coffeehouses and taverns, and to
dinners with Robert Boyle. He took tea on many occasions with his
lab assistant, Harry Hunt. Within his family, Hooke took both a
niece and a cousin into his home, teaching them mathematics.
Robert Hooke spent his life largely on the Isle of Wight, at
Oxford, and in London. He never married, but his diary shows that
he was not without affections, and more, for others. On 3 March
1703, Hooke died in London, having amassed a sizable sum of money,
which was found in his room at Gresham College.
He was buried at
St Helen's
Bishopsgate
, but the precise location of his grave is
unknown.
There is little doubt that Hooke was prone to intellectual
jealousy. His disputes with Newton over credit for work on
gravitation and the planets, and with Oldenburg over credit for the
watch escapement, are but two well-known examples, and he was apt
to use
ciphers and guard his ideas. As
curator of Experiments to the Royal Society he was responsible for
demonstrating many ideas sent in to the Society, and there is
evidence that he would subsequently assume some credit for these
ideas. Hooke also was immensely busy and thus unable – or in some
cases unwilling, pending a way of profiting from the enterprise via
letters patent – to develop all of his own ideas. This was a time
of immense scientific progress, and numerous ideas were developed
in several places simultaneously.
None of this should distract from Hooke's inventiveness, his
remarkable experimental facility, and his capacity for hard work.
His ideas about gravitation, and his claim of priority for the
inverse square law, are outlined below. He was granted a large
number of patents for inventions and refinements in the fields of
elasticity, optics, and barometry. The Royal Society's Hooke papers
(recently discovered after disappearing when Newton took over) will
open up a modern reassessment.
Hooke the scientist
Mechanics
In 1660, Hooke discovered
the law of
elasticity which bears his name
and which describes the linear variation of
tension with extension in an
elastic spring. He first
described this discovery in the anagram "ceiiinosssttuv", whose
solution he published in 1678 as "Ut tensio, sic vis" meaning "As
the extension, so the force." Hooke's work on elasticity
culminated, for practical purposes, in his development of the
balance spring or hairspring, which
for the first time enabled a portable timepiece - a watch - to keep
time with reasonable accuracy. A bitter dispute between Hooke and
Christiaan Huygens on the
priority of this invention was to continue for centuries after the
death of both; but a note dated 12 June 1670 in the Hooke Folio
(see
External links below), describing a demonstration of
a balance-controlled watch before the Royal Society, has been held
to favour Hooke's claim.
It is interesting from a twentieth-century vantage point that Hooke
first announced his law of elasticity as an
anagram. This was a method sometimes used by
scientists, such as Hooke, Huygens,
Galileo,
and others, to establish priority for a discovery without revealing
details.
Hooke's microscope
Hooke became Curator of Experiments in 1662 to the newly founded
Royal Society, and took responsibility
for experiments performed at its weekly meetings. This was a
position he held for over 40 years. While this position kept him in
the thick of science in Britain and beyond, it also led to some
heated arguments with other scientists, such as Huygens (see above)
and particularly with
Isaac Newton and
the Royal Society's
Henry Oldenburg.
In 1664
Hooke also was appointed Professor of Geometry at Gresham College
in London and Cutlerian Lecturer in
Mechanics.
On 8 July 1680, Hooke observed the
nodal
patterns associated with the
modes of
vibration of glass plates. He ran a bow along the edge of a
glass plate covered with flour, and saw the nodal patterns
emerge.
Gravitation
While many of his contemporaries believed in the aether as a medium
for transmitting attraction or repulsion between separated
celestial bodies, Hooke argued for an attracting principle of
gravitation in
Micrographia of 1665.
Hooke’s 1666 Royal society lecture “On gravity” added two further
principles - that all bodies move in straight lines till deflected
by some force and that the attractive force is stronger for closer
bodies. Hooke’s 1670 Gresham lecture explained that gravitation
applied to “all celestiall bodys” and added the principles that the
gravitating power decreases with distance and that in the absence
of any such power bodies move in straight lines.
Hooke published his ideas about the "System of the World" again in
somewhat developed form in 1674, as an addition to "An Attempt to
Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations". Hooke announced
in 1674 that he planned to "explain a System of the World differing
in many particulars from any yet known", based on three
"Suppositions": that "all Coelestial Bodies whatsoever, have an
attraction or gravitating power towards their own Centers" [and]
"they do also attract all the other Coelestial Bodies that are
within the sphere of their activity"; that "all bodies whatsoever
that are put into a direct and simple motion, will so continue to
move forward in a straight line, till they are by some other
effectual powers deflected and bent..."; and that "these attractive
powers are so much the more powerful in operating, by how much the
nearer the body wrought upon is to their own Centers". Thus Hooke
clearly postulated mutual attractions between the Sun and planets,
in a way that increased with nearness to the attracting body.
Hooke's statements up to 1674 made no mention, however, that an
inverse square law applies or might apply to these attractions.
Hooke's gravitation was also not yet universal, though it
approached universality more closely than previous hypotheses.
Hooke also did not provide accompanying evidence or mathematical
demonstration. On these two aspects, Hooke stated in 1674: "Now
what these several degrees [of gravitational attraction] are I have
not yet experimentally verified" (indicating that he did not yet
know what law the gravitation might follow); and as to his whole
proposal: "This I only hint at present", "having my self many other
things in hand which I would first compleat, and therefore cannot
so well attend it" (i.e. "prosecuting this Inquiry").
In November 1679, Hooke initiated a remarkable exchange of letters
with Newton (of which the full text is now published). Hooke's
ostensible purpose was to tell Newton that Hooke had been appointed
to manage the Royal Society's correspondence. Hooke therefore
wanted to hear from members about their researches, or their views
about the researches of others; and as if to whet Newton's
interest, he asked what Newton thought about various matters,
giving a whole list, mentioning "compounding the celestial motions
of the planetts of a direct motion by the tangent and an attractive
motion towards the central body", and "my hypothesis of the lawes
or causes of springinesse", and then a new hypothesis from Paris
about planetary motions (which Hooke described at length), and then
efforts to carry out or improve national surveys, the difference of
latitude between London and Cambridge, and other items. Newton's
reply offered "a fansy of my own" about a terrestrial experiment
(not a proposal about celestial motions) which might detect the
Earth's motion, by the use of a body first suspended in air and
then dropped to let it fall. The main point was to indicate how
Newton thought the falling body could experimentally reveal the
Earth's motion by its direction of deviation from the vertical, but
he went on hypothetically to consider how its motion could continue
if the solid Earth had not been in the way (on a spiral path to the
centre). Hooke disagreed with Newton's idea of how the body would
continue to move. A short further correspondence developed, and
towards the end of it Hooke, writing on 6 January 1679|80 to
Newton, communicated his "supposition ... that the Attraction
always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center
Reciprocall, and Consequently that the Velocity will be in a
subduplicate proportion to the Attraction and Consequently as
Kepler Supposes Reciprocall to the Distance." (Hooke's inference
about the velocity was actually incorrect.)
In 1686, when the first book of
Newton's '
Principia' was
presented to the
Royal Society, Hooke
claimed that Newton had had from him the "notion" of "the rule of
the decrease of Gravity, being reciprocally as the squares of the
distances from the Center". At the same time (according to
Edmond Halley's contemporary report) Hooke
agreed that "the Demonstration of the Curves generated therby" was
wholly Newton's.
A recent assessment about the early history of the inverse square
law is that "by the late 1660s," the assumption of an "inverse
proportion between gravity and the square of distance was rather
common and had been advanced by a number of different people for
different reasons". Newton himself had shown in the 1660s that for
planetary motion under a circular assumption, force in the radial
direction had an inverse-square relation with distance from the
center. Newton, faced in May 1686 with Hooke's claim on the inverse
square law, denied that Hooke was to be credited as author of the
idea, giving reasons including the citation of prior work by others
before Hooke. Newton also firmly claimed that even if it had
happened that he had first heard of the the inverse square
proportion from Hooke, which it had not, he would still have some
rights to it in view of his mathematical developments and
demonstrations, which enabled observations to be relied on as
evidence of its accuracy, while Hooke, without mathematical
demonstrations and evidence in favour of the supposition, could
only guess (according to Newton) that it was approximately valid
"at great distances from the center".
On the other hand, Newton did accept and acknowledge, in all
editions of the 'Principia', that Hooke (but not exclusively Hooke)
had separately appreciated the inverse square law in the solar
system. Newton acknowledged Wren, Hooke and Halley in this
connection in the Scholium to Proposition 4 in Book 1. Newton also
acknowledged to Halley that his correspondence with Hooke in
1679-80 had reawakened his dormant interest in astronomical
matters, but that did not mean, according to Newton, that Hooke had
told Newton anything new or original: "yet am I not beholden to him
for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave
me from my other studies to think on these things & for his
dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the
Ellipsis, which inclined me to try it ...".)
One of the contrasts between the two men was that Newton was
primarily a pioneer in mathematical analysis and its applications
as well as optical experimentation, while Hooke was a creative
experimenter of such great range, that it is not surprising to find
that he left some of his ideas, such as those about gravitation,
undeveloped. This in turn makes it understandable how in 1759,
decades after the deaths of both Newton and Hooke,
Alexis Clairaut, mathematical astronomer
eminent in his own right in the field of gravitational studies,
made his assessment after reviewing what Hooke had published on
gravitation. "One must not think that this idea ... of Hooke
diminishes Newton's glory", Clairaut wrote; "The example of Hooke"
serves "to show what a distance there is between a truth that is
glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated".
Microscopy
In 1665 Hooke published
Micrographia, a book describing his
microscopic and
telescopic observations, and some original work in
biology. Hooke coined the term
cell for describing biological
organisms, the term being suggested by the resemblance of plant
cells to
monks' cells. The hand-crafted,
leather and gold-tooled microscope he used to make the observations
for
Micrographia, originally constructed by Christopher
White in London, is on display at the National Museum of Health and
Medicine in Washington, DC.
Micrographia also contains Hooke's, or perhaps Boyle and
Hooke's, ideas on combustion. Hooke's experiments led him to
conclude that combustion involves a substance that is mixed with
air, a statement with which modern scientists would agree, but that
was not widely understood, if at all, in the seventeenth century.
Hooke went on to conclude that respiration also involves a specific
component of the air. Partington even goes so far as to claim that
if "Hooke had continued his experiments on combustion it is
probable that he would have discovered
oxygen".
Astronomy
One of the more-challenging problems tackled by Hooke was the
measurement of the distance to a star (other than the Sun). The
star chosen was
Gamma Draconis and
the method to be used was
parallax
determination. After several months of observing, in 1669, Hooke
believed that the desired result had been achieved. It is now known
that Hooke's equipment was far too imprecise to allow the
measurement to succeed. Gamma Draconis was the same star
William Bradley used in 1725 in discovering
the
aberration of light.
Hooke's activities in astronomy extended beyond the study of
stellar distance. His
Micrographia contains illustrations
of the
Pleiades star cluster
as well as of
lunar craters. He
performed experiments to study how such craters might have formed.
Hooke also was an early observer of the
rings of Saturn, and discovered one of the
first double-star systems,
Gamma
Arietis, in 1664.
Hooke the architect
Hooke achieved fame in his day as Surveyor to the City of London
and chief assistant of
Christopher
Wren.
Hooke helped Wren rebuild London after the
Great
Fire in 1666, and also worked on designing London's
Monument to the fire
, the Royal Greenwich Observatory
, Montagu House in Bloomsbury
, and the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital
(which became known as 'Bedlam').
Other
buildings designed by Hooke include The Royal
College of Physicians
(1679), Ragley Hall
in Warwickshire
, and the parish church at Willen
in Milton
Keynes, Buckinghamshire.
Hooke's
collaboration with Christopher Wren
also included St Paul's
Cathedral
, whose dome uses a method of construction conceived
by Hooke.
In the reconstruction after the Great Fire, Hooke proposed
redesigning London's streets on a grid pattern with wide boulevards
and arteries, a pattern subsequently used in the
renovation of Paris,
Liverpool, and many American cities. This proposal was thwarted by
arguments over property rights, as property owners were
surreptitiously shifting their boundaries. Hooke was in demand to
settle many of these disputes, due to his competence as a surveyor
and his tact as an arbitrator.
For an extensive study of Hooke's architectural work, see the book
by Cooper.
Likenesses
No authenticated portrait of Robert Hooke exists, a situation
sometimes attributed to the heated conflicts between Hooke and
Isaac Newton. In Hooke's time, the
Royal Society met at Gresham College, but within a few months of
Hooke's death Newton became the Society's president and plans were
laid for a new meeting place. When the move to new quarters finally
was made a few years later, in 1710, Hooke's Royal Society portrait
went missing, and has yet to be found.
Time magazine published a portrait,
supposedly of Hooke, in its 3 July 1939 issue. However, when the
source was traced by
Ashley Montagu,
it was found to lack a verifiable connection to Hooke. Moreover,
Montagu found that contemporary written descriptions of Hooke's
appearance agreed with one another, but that neither matched
Time's alleged picture of him.
In 2003,
historian Lisa Jardine claimed that a
recently-discovered portrait was of Hooke, but this claim was
disproved by William Jensen of the University
of Cincinnati
. The portrait identified by Jardine, in
fact, depicts the Flemish scholar
Jan Baptist van Helmont.
Other possible likenesses of Hooke include the following:
- A seal used by Hooke displays an unusual profile portrait of a
man's head, which some have argued portrays Hooke.
- The engraved frontispiece to the 1728 edition of Chambers' Cyclopedia shows a
drawing of a bust of Robert Hooke. The extent to which the drawing
is based on an actual work of art is unknown.
- A
memorial window existed at St Helen's Bishopsgate in London, but it was a formulaic rendering, not a
likeness. The window was destroyed in the 1993
Bishopsgate bombing
.
Portrait of Hooke by history painter
Rita Greer, 2004.
In 2003 history painter
Rita Greer embarked
on a self-funded project to memorialize Hooke. The Rita Greer
Robert Hooke project aimed to produce credible images of him, both
painted and drawn, that fitted his contemporary descriptions drawn
from two sources: John Aubrey and Richard Waller. Greer's images of
Hooke, his life and work have been used for TV programmes in UK and
USA, in books, magazines and for PR.
Commemorations
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