Science

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.

  • 'Robert Hooke's 'universal joint' and its application to sundials and the sundial-clock', by Allan Mills in Notes and records: the Royal Society journal of the history of science, vol.61 (2007), pp.219-236. Full text available

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:

  • Hooke's books: a blog post about Hooke's microscopy based on an exhibition curated by Stephen Greenberg held at the National Library of Medicine in the United States in 2007. Greenberg was Head of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts for the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine.
  • The Micrographia microscope: Jane Desborough, then Associate Curator of Science at the Science Museum in London, explores the Museum's collection of Robert Hooke microscopes.
  • Famous scientists
  • Wikipedia

 
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Hooke on springs

An image from Hooke's Lectiones Cutlerianae, 1679 (Image 1)

Cell structure

Hooke's drawing of cells in cork, 1665 (Image 2)

Hipparchus

Hooke's drawing of the moon crater now called Hipparchus, 1665. (Image 3)

Hooke's microscope

Hooke's compound microscope, 1665 (Image 4). 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)

Hooke's air pump

The air pump that Hooke built for Robert Boyle (Image 5).

Boyle and Hooke plaque in Oxford

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 6).

Hooke's drawing of ammonites

Hooke's drawing of ammonites (Image 7). 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

Hooke's zenith telescope (Image 8).


References

  1. Ashworth (2022): William B. Asworth, Jr., 'Scientist of the day – Robert Hooke' . (Ashworth is Consultant for the History of Science at the Linda Hall Library, Kansas City, Missouri, and this article is on the Library's blog.)
  2. Chapman (2005): Allan Chapman, 'Hooke's telescopic observations of Solar System bodies', in Paul Kent and Allan Chapman, Robert Hooke and the English renaissance (Gracewing, 2005), pp.106-107.
  3. Drake (2006): Ellen Tan Drake, 'Hooke's ideas of the terraqueous globe and a theory of evolution', in Robert Hooke: tercentennial studies, edited by Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter (Routledge, 2016).

 
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Image acknowledgments

So far as we know, all of the images reproduced on this page are in the public domain. We shall immediately take down on demand any that are still in copyright.

  1. Drawing of a spring, extracted from Robert Hooke's Lectiones Cutlerianae published in 1679. From Wikimedia Commons.
  2. Hooke's drawing of cells in cork, from Micrographia (1665), schem.XI, facing p.115. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
  3. Hooke's drawing of the moon crater now called Hipparchus, from Micrographia (1665), schem.XXXVIII, facing p.244.
  4. Drawing of Robert Hooke's microscope from Micrographia (1665), schem.I, facing p.1. Photograph © Wellcome Trust, reproduced under this licence.
  5. Drawing of the air pump that Hooke built for Robert Boyle. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
  6. Plaque on a wall in High Street, Oxford, now part of University College. Image by Peter King.
  7. Drawing of ammonites from The Posthumous works (1705) edited by Waller. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
  8. Robert Hooke's zenith telescope, from An Attempt to prove the motion of the Earth from observations (1674), plate 1, figure 4. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

 
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Page last amended 12th December 2024