Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke saw the cell, drew the flea, and spent his last years in a quarrel with Newton that cost him his reputation for two centuries. He was born on the Isle of Wight, went to Oxford as a servitor, and became assistant to Robert Boyle, for whom he built the air pump that produced the gas law bearing Boyle's name. As Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society he was required to demonstrate several new experiments at every weekly meeting for forty years, which is a workload no one has matched and which scattered his output across everything. Micrographia in 1665 was the result of pointing a microscope at ordinary things and drawing what he saw at a size nobody had attempted: a flea a foot long, the compound eye of a fly, and the honeycomb structure of cork which he named cells because they looked like the rooms of monks. He stated the law of elasticity that carries his name, worked out a wave theory of light, argued that fossils were the remains of living things and that species could go extinct, and after the fire of 1666 surveyed and rebuilt much of London as Wren's partner. That is also why the quarrels happened. A man demonstrating three new experiments a week states many things and finishes few, so Hooke repeatedly had a correct idea in a sentence while somebody else had it in a book. He fought with Oldenburg over the watch spring and with Huygens over the same, and priority disputes follow him through the record. The quarrel was over gravity. Hooke claimed he had proposed the inverse-square law first and asked for acknowledgement; Newton removed most references to him from the Principia and outlived him by a quarter of a century, presiding over the Royal Society throughout. No authenticated portrait of him survives, which for a man of his standing is unusual enough that it has been read as deliberate.
- Lived: 1635 CE – 1703 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: scientist
