"Mr. Hooke, ... is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that ever I saw."
Samuel Pepys, diary entry for Wednesday 15th February 1664/65
Robert Hooke FRS (1635-1703) was a polymath. He discovered the law of elasticity, known as Hooke's law, and undertook research in a remarkable variety of scientific fields.
In 1662 he was appointed curator of experiments to the newly formed Royal Society of London, was elected a fellow in the following year, became Secretary from 1677 to 1682 and was a Council member on five separate occasions. As curator, a salaried post, he was the first professional scientist.
In 1665 Hooke became Professor of Geometry at Gresham College in London and moved into lodgings in the College which he occupied until his death. He gave a long series of free public lectures under the auspices of Sir John Cutler. He was a governor and teacher at the Royal Mathematical School of Christ's Hospital and designed a silver-plated badge for the pupils to wear on the left shoulder of the uniform bluecoat, still worn today.
Hooke undertook several architectural projects for private clients. Together with Sir Christopher Wren, he played a large part in the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire of 1666, and designed and supervised the construction of the Monument. In 1691 he was appointed Surveyor to Westminster Abbey.
He was an avid collector of books, and was involved in the publication of Robert Knox's An Historical relation of the Island of Ceylon, for which he wrote the preface, and in Moses Pitt's universal atlas project.
"It may justly be claimed for Hooke that he was, by his ingenuity, his comprehensiveness and his originality, the greatest inventive genius who ever lived." – E.N. da C. Andrade, FRS (Andrade, 1960).
References to Hooke are scattered around the Web. This is an attempt to start to bring them together in a structured way.
Except where otherwise stated, links are to freely accessible resources without the need for payment. Some items are available in full or in part on loan from the Internet Archive, which requires registration but is free of charge.
Links in this site to British Library resources may not work at the moment, owing to a cyber attack. More information
For a detailed summary of Robert Hooke's architectural career see:
The Walpole Society published an article by Marjorie Batten in 1936-37 on 'The Architecture of Dr Robert Hooke FRS' (Batten, 1936).
Only a few buildings by Hooke are thought to exist today, including:
Other buildings by Hooke have since been demolished, including:
The architectural historian Giles Worsley has suggested that, on the basis of personal and professional links and stylistic analogies, Hooke might have been the architect of various other major houses, the responsibility for the design of which has always been problematic, including Petworth and Boughton. (Worsley 2004).
Hooke's Hospital of Bethlehem [Bedlam] at Moorfields, London: seen from the north. (Image 3)
The task of leading the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666 was handed to a committee of six men. Three represented the King, of whom the best known is Sir Christopher Wren, and three represented the City of London, including Hooke.
In the aftermath of the fire, private land was taken by the City for new and widened streets, new markets, wharves alongside the Fleet River, and quays and wharves along the northern bank of the Thames. The amount of compensation paid by the City to owners of property depended on the location of the site and the area of ground lost. Hooke worked on the measuring and staking out of widened streets and new building foundations, mediating subsequent property disputes, and writing certification of the areas of ground taken away. It is estimated that he dealt with about 3,000 of the 8,394 foundations recorded by the City treasurer, and about half of the areas of ground taken away for streets and other new works.
In the next phase of the reconstruction process, Wren and Hooke together designed and supervised the building of many of the new properties. Wren is usually credited every time, but in some cases Hooke took the lead. One example is the Monument. Erected in Fish Street Hill, close to the source of the fire in Pudding Lane, this 202ft column is now thought to be principally the work of Hooke, signed off by Wren (Walker, 2011).
Lisa Jardine (Jardine 2003) states that Hooke's 1672-83 diary records his visits to about thirty of the London churches then being rebuilt after the Great Fire, and adds, "In many cases these visits are sufficiently numerous to suggest that, even if he was not the design architect, he nevertheless played a significant role in their final built form". Anthony Geraghty, who catalogued the Wren papers at All Souls College, Oxford (Geraghty, 2007), suggests that Hooke's duties within Wren's office have been exaggerated, but his analysis is based upon the authorship of the drawings rather than overall supervision of the rebuilding, and it is noteworthy that he sometimes quotes Hooke's diary in relation to designs drawn by somebody else, such as St Peter, Cornhill.
In the past, Wren has usually been credited with the rebuilding of all of these churches. It is certainly true that he led and supervised the campaign but Paul Jeffery suggests that "Wren's contribution to the rebuilding [of] the parish churches in terms of design was numerically modest, with Hooke having the greater part of the task and the greater number now to his credit" (Jeffery 1996, p.66). It now seems likely that Hooke made a major contribution to the following at least:
This document summarises a property dispute between Will Sanders, a draper, and John Rowley, a skinner. The pair had once shared a house and shop on Ludgate Hill, one of the areas destroyed by the fire. Sanders no longer wanted Rowley to occupy the second story of his house but agreed to allot him a space next door. Hooke and his fellow surveyor John Oliver approved of this plan, signing the document at lower right. (Image 8)
St Benet's, Paul's Wharf. The church avoided major Victorian remodelling, and was one of only four City churches to escape bombing in 1939-45. (Image 9)
Although he had no formal role (Geraghty, 2007), Hooke seems to have assisted Wren on the construction of the new St Paul's Cathedral.
Wren's son and biographer says of his father in Parentalia, that "He raised another structure over the first cupola, a cone of brick, so as to support a stone lantern of an elegant figure. ... And he covered and hid out of sight the brick cone with another cupola of timber and lead".
On 5th June 1675, Hooke records in his diary, "At Sir Chr. Wren ... He promised Fitch at Paulls. He was making up my principle about arches and altered his module by it". (Heyman 2006)
A pen and ink study of about 1690, drawn by Wren, which is now in the British Museum (not the one illustrated here), shows that the design for the brick cone duly employed "a formula devised by Robert Hooke in about 1671 for calculating the curve of a parabolic dome and reducing its thickness. Hooke had explored this curve, the three-dimensional equivalent of the 'hanging chain', or catenary arch: the shape of a weighted chain which, when inverted, produces the ideal profile for a self-supporting arch." (Designs for the Dome, c.1687-1708)
Construction of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, showing the internal brick cone between two cupolas (Image 10)
Memorial to Hooke in the crypt of the cathedral, next to the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren (Image 11). The quotation around the edge is from Micrographia.
Stephen Inwood mentions manuscript primary sources for Hooke studies in the archives of the Royal Society, the British Library, the City of London, Oxford University, Trinity College Cambridge and the Mercers' Company (Inwood 2002, pp.471-2).
The following links lead to search results for the phrase "Robert Hooke" in some of these archives. It should be borne in mind that:
Sample searches:
There are also Hooke manuscripts in other collections, including:
The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London has digitized and transcribed extracts from the Royal Society's journal books, together with the rough minutes for the period of Hooke's secretaryship of the Society and a number of supplementary papers, which were found with the manuscript and include contemporary indexes. The folio comprises over 500 pages in all.
The recovery in 2006 of this material, previously thought lost, has been documented by Robyn Adams and Lisa Jardine:
Facsimile of a letter to Isaac Newton, written in Hooke's own hand from Gresham College, 1679 (Image 12)
An online project is aiming to build a database of all the books known to have been in Hooke's personal library, with their current whereabouts. The website includes a searchable transcription of the Bibliotheca Hookiana (London, 1703), the auction catalogue prepared after his death, plus a list of other books that have been attributed to Hooke via his annotations but that are not listed in the auction catalogue.
Sir Geoffrey Keynes compiled the definitive account of Hooke's own published work, although it is "not without errors". (Purrington 2006)
Many of Hooke's publications have been digitized and are now freely available online, including:
On 20th March 1678, Hooke examined the scheme of bookseller and printer Moses Pitt for a universal atlas of the world, and commented, "His design for Atlas good". He took the scheme to Christopher Wren for an opinion, and then the proposal was read to the Royal Society on 28th March with Wren in the chair. A committee was appointed to supervise its preparation, including Hooke, Wren, Theodore Haak and Nehemiah Grew.
Hooke took a more active role than the other committee members, and eventually Pitt made a private arrangement with him to check the maps and text before printing in return for a fee of £200.
Hooke's "very full notes on the method and content of each regional description indicate that in his geographical concepts he was centuries before his time". The atlas was initially intended to be eleven volumes but rising costs contributed to Pitt's final bankruptcy and only four volumes were ever produced. "Apart from a few pounds on account," Hooke "never received any payment from Pitt for all the work he actually did."
Key sources for Hooke's life and work are his surviving diaries, covering the periods 1672-83, 1688-90 and 1692-93.
The manuscript of the diary for 1672-1683 is held by the London Metropolitan Archives of the City of London Corporation and has been digitized:
The diary of Robert Hooke, M.A., M.D., F.R.S., 1672-1680, a transcript edited by Henry William Robinson and Walter Adams (Taylor & Francis, 1935), is incomplete for its period of coverage. Felicity Henderson has supplied the missing entries in an article in the Royal Society's Notes and records:
R.T. Gunther covers the periods November 1688 to March 1690 and December 1692 to August 1693, but again the transcription is not entirely accurate.
The Diaries of Robert Hooke, by Richard Nichols (Book Guild, 1994), is not an edition, but an account of Hooke's life and work based on the diaries.
However, a new edition of the diaries is currently in preparation by Felicity Henderson.
After a long period of neglect, there has been an explosion in Hooke studies in recent years, as can be seen in this timeline. Some of the key general texts are available online, including:
See also the Biography.
Robert Hooke was born on 28th July 1635, in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where his father was curate of the church of All Saints.
After early home teaching by his father, he was educated at Westminster School and Oxford University. He spent most of his adult life living in Gresham College in the City of London, where he died on 3rd March 1703. He was buried in St Helen's church, Bishopsgate, London, but his remains, together with many others, were exhumed in the late 19th century and are assumed now to be buried in the City of London cemetery in Wanstead. A memorial window in the church, erected by "private subscription", was destroyed by IRA bombing in 1992. There is a blue plaque on a building nearby.
Apart from Waller's Posthumous works of 1705, which includes a "Life" (see above), accounts by Hooke's contemporaries include:
John Ward's account of the Gresham College professors (1740) includes a long biography of Hooke:
Thomas Sprat's history was "supplemented and continued" by Thomas Birch in 1756. Birch explained in his preface that "Admired as his [Sprat's] performance is in general ... the earliest and ablest members of that body, as well as their successors, still wished that the account of its institution and progress had been more full and circumstantial in the narration of the facts related by him, and inlarged by inserting many others of equal importance which were omitted".
Although now enhanced and partially superseded by more recent scholarship, R.T. Gunther's Early science in Oxford (1930-38), is still a rich source of information on Hooke's life and work, including many facsimile copies of Hooke's writing in his own hand. Of the fifteen volumes in the series, no fewer than five are wholly devoted to Hooke. The whole series is freely available online from the Internet Archive:
The diary of Robert Hooke, 1672-1680 edited by H.W. Robinson and Walter Adams (Taylor & Francis, 1935) also includes an account of Hooke's life (password required for copyright reasons).
Above: A view of Freshwater village and church, reproduced from an engraving by Thomas Barber published in 1834. The field called "Crundell" is on the left, and Hooke's childhood home is on what is now called Hooke Hill on the far side of this field. (Image 15)
Below: Robert Hooke's family home on Hooke Hill, Freshwater, pictured in about 1880 and now demolished. (Image 16)
Apart from Gunther, there are many other biographies of Hooke available online. Amongst the most useful are:
A number of talks and programmes about Hooke and his work are freely available online. As in his own day, Gresham College still offers free public lectures:
Other presentations include:
See also the books and diaries listed in the Bibliography.
Although Robert Hooke was an active researcher and experimentalist in a wide variety of scientific fields, few bear his name.
Hooke's Law is a principle of physics that states that the force needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance is proportional to that distance. "Hooke's atom", also known as harmonium or hookium, is so called because its scientific characteristic is a consequence of Hooke's law.
Hooke is recognised as having identified the cellular structure of plants, and coining the term. When he looked at a sliver of cork through his microscope, he noticed some "pores" or "cells" in it. The Hooke Medal is awarded every year by the British Society for Cell Biology and recognises an emerging leader in cell biology.
Hooke is celebrated in horological circles for helping design the balance spring regulator, an addition to the balance wheel that greatly increased the accuracy of portable timepieces. Furthermore, some have suggested that he invented the anchor escapement.
The principle of the universal joint has been known since antiquity, but in Helioscopes (1676) Hooke was the first to use the modern term: "The Universal Joynt for all these manner of Operations, ... I shall now more particularly explain" (p.14). As a result, the device is sometimes known as Hooke's joint.
As early as October 1664, Hooke had been drawing the lunar surface using 'a thirty foot Glass' (probably his well-documented 36-foot telescope), and when he gained access to a 60-foot instrument he produced even better images. "His drawing of the region around the lunar crater Hipparchus shows what a superlative astronomical draughtsman he really was" (Chapman 2005). "The fact is that this is the first detailed drawing ever of any lunar crater, and it is surprisingly accurate, as you can affirm by comparing it to a modern photo of the region" (Ashworth 2022). There are craters named after Hooke on the Moon and on Mars, and also an asteroid.
The rest of Hooke's scientific endeavours have been largely overlooked until recently. Ellen Tan Drake suggests that "Hooke was highly respected in his day, a fact that would seem to be contradicted by his extraordinarily bad luck and almost consistently 'bad press' that plagued him for too long". She points out that,
Robert Hooke "was the first to prove the Power and Towneley hypothesis by experimentation now known as Boyle's Law. He was the first to invent a pocket watch using a spring-balance wheel, but Christiaan Huygens is generally credited with the invention, and the date-inscribed pocket watch he presented to Charles II in 1675 to prove his priority is now lost. He was the first to track a comet in 1665 and propose that it was the same that came in 1618 and predicted that it would come again in another interim of the same duration. But the discovery of the periodicity of some comets is attributed to Edmond Halley who was nine years old at that time. Hooke was the first to express clearly and concisely a theory of combustion based on experimentation but John Mayow has been given the credit. He anticipated Newton in some of the fundamental ideas underlying the Universal Law of Gravitation, notably the concept of centripetal force, necessary for the full comprehension of the gravitational problem, and communicated his ideas to Newton but never received credit. He was the first to describe the iridescent interference colours seen when light falls on a layer of air between two thin glass plates but, ironically, these are known as 'Newton's Rings'. He designed both the great dome of St Paul's Cathedral and the Monument to the fire of 1666, but both are generally attributed to Christopher Wren. Finally, as has been shown in this paper, he was the true founder of the science of geology, but Steno is generally praised for this role." – Drake 2006, p.147.
Because of this, there are few online resources that highlight Robert Hooke's achievements in the scientific field. Useful summaries include:
An image from Hooke's Lectiones Cutlerianae, 1679 (Image 22)
Hooke's drawing of cells in cork, 1665 (Image 23)
Hooke's drawing of the moon crater now called Hipparchus, 1665. (Image 24)
Hooke's compound microscope, 1665 (Image 25). He used an oil lamp with flask for a light condenser and focused on a specimen by moving the whole microscope up or down. (Todd Helmenstine)
The air pump that Hooke built for Robert Boyle (Image 26).
Plaque celebrating Boyle and Hooke on a wall in High Street, Oxford, now part of University College. Behind it is the former site of Boyle's house, Deep Hall (Image 27).
Hooke's drawing of ammonites (Image 28). He recognised them as the remains of living creatures. "Most of his contemporaries thought that 'figured stones' were ... a lusu naturae, a trick of nature" (Drake 2006, p.136).
Hooke's zenith telescope (Image 29).
For three hundred years there has been no known extant portrait of Robert Hooke. Some believe that Sir Isaac Newton might have been responsible for this, whilst others doubt that such a portrait ever existed. Felicity Henderson has summarised the arguments:
There have been some attempts to reconstruct a portrait from contemporary descriptions of Hooke's appearance, including those by John Aubrey and Richard Waller. In 2003 a 'Portraying Robert Hooke' competition was run by the Library of the Royal Society to mark the tercentenary of his death. The prize was donated by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
Of these modern reconstructions, the best known are the series of paintings by Rita Greer. Examples of her work are on display at Gresham College, the Open University and Willen Church:
The Isle of Wight History Centre has conjectured that the wax seal on an assignment of a mortgage between the town of Newport and Robert Hooke, signed and sealed on 2nd February 1684/85, which is held by the County Record Office, represents Hooke himself.
Professor Lawrence Griffing of Texas A&M University has recently made the case for Portrait of a mathematician by Mary Beale (1633-99) being the missing portrait of Hooke. Beale was known to Hooke. :
Portrait of a mathematician by Mary Beale (Image 30)
The painting was sold by Sotheby's in June 2006, but the identity of the buyer has not been made public.
Griffing's argument has been described as "unconvincing", but he has responded in its defence:
Professor Michael McBride of Yale University believes that he has identified Hooke in the painting of James II receiving the Mathematical Scholars of Christ's Hospital, by Antonio Verrio (c.1636-1707), which still hangs in the school's present buildings at Horsham. Hooke was a governor of the school.
Extract from the Verrio painting at Christ's Hospital. (Image 31)
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Page last amended 19th November 2024