Robert Hooke

Born on the Isle of Wight in 1635, Robert Hooke was the son of a curate who was a royalist sympathiser. As a sickly child, his father decided to teach Robert at home rather than send him away to school, but after initial lessons in grammar, the health of Hooke senior went into decline and Robert was left to educate himself. An inquisitive child, he enjoyed watching and imitating local craftsmen, leading him to build his own clocks, as well as miniature ships that could be sailed across Freshwater harbour and even fire their guns.

Robert was also a talented self-taught artist and, after his father’s death, family friends arranged for him to move to London to become an apprentice to the Flemish-born painter Peter Lely (who was to later paint the portraits of many of the royal court after the Restoration). Although his time with Lely was apparently quite successful, after only a short period he left to enrol as a pupil at Westminster School under the headmastership of Dr. Richard Busby. The strong disciplinarian led the school for almost sixty years throughout the 17^th century, where boys were generally taught Latin and Greek grammar, mathematics and physical education. After Hooke joined Westminster, Busby recognised in him an extraordinary student who was able to learn to play the organ within just a few lessons and with a talent for mathematics. Robert also continued his hobby for creating mechanical objects and – unusual within a grammar school – was encouraged in such extra-curricular activities by Busby, who became a life-long friend with a mutual passion for geometry and architecture.

Dr. John Wilkins of Oxford University published his book Mathematicall Magick, or the wonders that can be performed by mechanical geometry in 1648. At Westminster School Hooke was experimenting with flying machines and Wilkins sent him a copy of the book, which became a great inspiration to the young student. In 1653 Hooke was awarded a place at Christ Church, Oxford as a choral scholar on reduced fees in return for regular participation in college activities. To pay his way he initially took paid employment as a chemical assistant to the anatomist, Dr. Thomas Willis, and as a servitor to a more prosperous student. Gaining a reputation for his practical talents he became known to the wealthy Robert Boyle, son of the Earl of Cork, who had a passion for chemistry. Boyle was at that time looking for ways to create accurate instruments for his experiments and Hooke was able to build them. With Hooke to help him, the aristocrat created what has become known as Boyle’s Law, one of the basic laws of physics. In turn Hooke learnt how useful scientific data and knowledge could be gained through accurate measurements. During his time in Oxford he also befriended one of the students with whom he had much in common, Christopher Wren.

The Royal Society was formed in London in the early 1660s to observe and share information about new discoveries and scientific development. A number of disastrous experiments took place and, already known to most of the members, Hooke was appointed Curator of Experiments in order to carry out analysis as directed by the members. He was given a salary of thirty pounds per year. In 1665 he was elected as Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, with accommodation in the south-east corner of the quadrangle within Gresham College at Bishopsgate, comprising a set of rooms, including a workshop and a garret that provided access through the roof for a telescope. Hooke was to live there for over forty years until his death. A condition of this post was that he remained celibate, and he therefore never married.

Although awarded an annual salary, the Royal Society was lacking in funds during its early times and it was some years later that Hooke finally received retrospective payment for his work. In the meantime, the wealthy grocer Sir John Cutler offered to pay him fifty pounds annually to give weekly lectures at the college on the subject of the History of Trades, known as the Cutlerian Lectures. In fact, Hooke gave the lectures prior to the weekly meetings of the Royal Society, normally to announce his own scientific work, and relations with his sponsor became strained until the point when Cutler stopped paying during the late 1660s. In 1683 Sir William Petty was requested to arbitrate between Hooke and Petty in the matter and Petty ruled that Hooke should receive his money provided he gave the lectures.

As well as work for the Society, Hooke continued as a part-time employee of Boyle and with studies of his own. In 1665 he published a book entitled Micrographia, one of the best-selling science books of the time, in which he detailed in illustrations what he had discovered of plant and animal life through a microscope, inspired by earlier such drawings by his friend Wren.

Throughout much of his adult life Hooke had a fascination with the effects of Earth’s gravity. As part of his work for the Royal Society he made inconclusive experiments in 1662 on the difference in weight of an object at ground level and the roof of Westminster Abbey. During the 1650s he attempted to create accurate time-keepers to fix longitude at sea, which led him to experiments with pendulums. In 1664 he carried out experiments inside the tower of the old St.Paul’s Cathedral with the longest-possible pendulum. In early 1666 Hooke presented a summary of his speculations on gravitational attraction before the Royal Society.

Hooke was a man who took a lively interest in every kind of intellectual matter, whether it was science, nature, the arts, literature, music or current affairs. He was a sponge for information and thoroughly enjoyed debate. During his adult life he threw himself enthusiastically into his work for the Royal Society, his own experiments and observations, as well as duties for the City of London. He could also be found on a daily basis in London’s taverns and coffee shops – particularly Garraways – or private houses, meeting with friends and discussing all the day’s news. He could be a quarrelsome man who offended easily and held grudges, but he could also be intensely loyal to those friends he respected such as Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle.

Of the two men it was Boyle with whom Hooke first created a close working partnership, but one of employer and employee. From the early 1660s Wren and Hooke forged a working partnership and friendship that was to last for several decades. The two often discussed an idea that they then presented at a Society meeting, following which Hooke carried out experiments and reported on the results at a subsequent meeting. Wren was better at theorisation and draughtsmanship and Hooke more able to carry out the practical experiments. Sometimes Hooke took credit for the final results (as with their long-running observations of cometary motion, published in his Cometa of 1678) and at other times Wren (such as their joint invention of a weather-gauge).

Following the setting up of a Royal Commission to look into reforming London’s streets and buildings, Hooke took a lively interest in debating the subject with members of the Society such as Christopher Wren and John Evelyn and forming very like-minded opinions. Within days of the Great Fire all three presented similar plans for an idealised and well-ordered new City to replace the haphazard one of old. Whereas Wren and Evelyn had the personal authority to present theirs directly to the King, Hooke first showed his to other members of the Society and they in turn recommended it to the City of London. The aldermen were well-pleased, and although none of the plans were ever turned into reality, when it was decided that a committee of six eminent men should be formed to oversee the rebuilding, the City chose Hooke as one of their three representatives despite his lack of experience in matters of planning and building work.

The three chosen to represent the City in matters to do with the rebuilding were known as City Surveyors. One of them, Edward Jerman, never took up the post, leaving just Hooke and the elderly Peter Mills, a man of great experience in building work within London but of failing health. After all the major decisions had been made, approved by the King and enshrined into law in the form of the various Rebuilding Acts, it was the task of Mills (and after his death John Oliver) and Hooke to put things into practice on the ground. The appointment of Mills is understandable, but the amount of trust shown by the City in Robert Hooke to take on such a heavy burden of responsibility is remarkable. It was a massive task and for at least seven years from 1667 until 1674 he juggled his work, generally spending the mornings staking out properties for the City and the afternoons on his tasks for the Royal Society at Gresham College. His work for the City Lands Committee dealing with compensation claims for loss of land lasted for almost twenty years, between July 1668 and March 1687 and he was making viewings on behalf of the City in cases of dispute until at least the end of 1693. Most issues that began with a complaint to the Court of Aldermen about a property until that date resulted in a written report by Hooke, which typically began: “We have met upon this place and viewed a certain building…”. Over the years Hooke made at least five hundred such viewings within the City.

While Hooke was working on staking out London’s streets in his capacity as City Surveyor his mind dwelt on the subject of the circumference of the Earth’s surface and the question of how it could be measured. While looking through a sight from one stake to a distant other, the further one would appear slightly lower due to the spherical shape of the surface. In April 1667 he proposed to the Royal Society an experiment that could be undertaken to make such a measurement.

When Christopher Wren was given the task of rebuilding fifty-one of the City’s former parish churches that had been destroyed, he appointed Hooke as one of his two assistants in the task. Hooke undertook many of the day-to-day tasks on numerous churches, particularly in relation to the design work. Evidence suggests that St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf and St. Edmund the King and Martyr in Lombard Street were primarily his work, with Dutch influence. He most probably spent much time visiting each of the many sites to give instructions and inspect the progress of work. Wren received twice the salary of Hooke by the Rebuilding Commission but from 1670 began paying Hooke an additional salary for his work. His contribution must have been substantial because he received payment of almost three thousand pounds for his work on the rebuilding of churches between 1671 and 1693, which was approximately equal to the entire salary he earned from Gresham College and his work as a City Surveyor. When Hooke retired from the work in 1693 he was replaced by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

Three other projects that Hooke was involved in with Christopher Wren after the Great Fire were the canalisation of the Fleet Channel, the construction of a new Thames-side quay upstream of London Bridge, and the building of the Monument. Technically the Fleet was by far the most difficult of the projects, eventually taking the two men three and a half years. The riverside quay was problematic when it became bogged down in legal and financial arguments between the City and the landowners. At one point Hooke was put in a difficult position when the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Shaftesbury, held him directly responsible for the lack of progress, even though he was simply stuck between the various arguing parties. The matter resulted in Hooke having to attend several meetings with the Chancellor and the Lord Mayor. In the end the only sections of the quay that were completed were around the mouth of the Fleet, Blackfriars, Puddle Dock and Dowgate Dock.

In addition to his work in conjunction with Wren, Hooke also oversaw repair and rebuilding work on the City gates at Moorgate and Newgate during 1672 and 1673 in his capacity as City Surveyor. He helped create new rules for setting street gradients that were used for drainage and made recommendations for the siting of public latrines, laystalls (public compost storage), slaughterhouses and cisterns.

Hooke worked closely with the Lord Mayor of 1668-1669, Sir William Turner, who in the 1670s was to invite him to rebuild Bridewell Prison and Bethlehem Hospital. The Governors were so pleased with Hooke’s work on Bethlehem that they voted to increase his fee from two hundred to three hundred pounds. The building became influential in later hospitals such as Wren’s at Chelsea. Other London buildings designed by Hooke included the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane between 1672 and 1678, the Merchant Taylors’ school in Suffolk Lane in 1674-1675, and Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hospital in Hoxton.

From an early age Hooke had a weak constitution and his continual labours began to take their toll by his forties, suffering from insomnia, nausea, headaches and vomiting. Furthermore, during the 1670s he began to use his own body for medical experiments, with suggestions from physician friends, particularly Jonathan Goddard. Around that time much of the early enthusiasm from members of the Royal Society had waned and there was less demand on Hooke’s time from that direction, so from 1674 until 1680 he began publishing his Cutlerian Lectures. In scientific terms Hooke is probably best remembered for his Law of Elasticity (Fs = -kx) which was published in the Cutlerian Lecture De Potentia Restitutiva (Of Spring) in 1679.

Long-running animosity between Hooke and Royal Society member Isaac Newton began in 1672 when Hooke sharply criticised the younger Newton for claiming to make discoveries in optics that he believed he had already written about. In 1679 Hooke was elected to the post of Secretary of the Royal Society and in that capacity attempted to engage Newton in a debate regarding planetary motion. Newton refused to be drawn into the spirit of co-operation, claiming that he knew nothing of the work of other members on the subject. It was clear from certain mistakes he had copied that he was not being truthful, and Hooke was greatly angered when in 1686 Newton published his acclaimed work on force and motion, Principia, without acknowledgement of Hooke’s earlier work. Yet on the other hand Hooke was never able to substantiate that he had fully proved his theories earlier than Newton.

By the 1690s Hooke’s health had seriously deteriorated, many of his old colleagues from the early days of the Royal Society were either dead or themselves infirm, and he was often mocked by younger men for his many theories that science was not yet able to prove. Yet despite all that he continued almost all of his former activities for as long as possible, including supervising various building works for Westminster Abbey and private clients.

Hooke died in 1703, aged sixty eight, and his funeral at his local parish church of St.Helen, Bishopsgate was a grand occasion, attended by many distinguished members of the Royal Society. He was buried there alongside his great friend Sir John Lawrence and his beloved niece Grace who had died in 1687 aged only twenty nine. Over the decades other bodies were buried on top, crushing those below, until all record of over seven hundred individuals were lost in a mass of bones by 1891 when the nave of the church was excavated.

Hooke had amassed a small fortune of ten thousand pounds. In his unsigned will, drafted five days before his death, Hooke showed that he intended the money to be shared between four people named only as A, B, C, and D. His closest friend at the time was Richard Waller and he took care of Hooke’s affairs, editing Posthumous Works, which was published in 1705 and included a biography of Hooke. Henry Hunt, a protégé of Hooke was the clerk and demonstrator at the Royal Society. Certainly the major part of his estate went to an illiterate cousin who only signed her name with a cross in the probate documents. However, almost a decade later both Waller and Hunt each contributed a large sum of money – out of proportion to their earnings – to the creation of the new home of the Royal Society at Crane Court, Fleet Street (ironically during the presidency of Isaac Newton) and it therefore seems likely they had been given money and instructions by Hooke before his death.

Robert Hooke was one of the pioneers of scientific study, the methodology of scientific experimentation and of the creation of optical lenses and other scientific measuring instruments. In the years after his death scientific experiments were largely abandoned at the Royal Society and the many instruments he had built left to fall into disrepair. Despite years of study, experiments and observations he published little in his own lifetime other than Micrographia and the Cutlerian Lectures. Many of the experiments he undertook to prove theories (most of which would be proved correct by others long after his death) remained inconclusive at the time due to the lack of technology to create accurate measurements.

No portrait of Hooke is known to exist. His library was auctioned a month after his death. His papers were handed to Waller and some published posthumously, but many were lost, probably discarded as worthless. Hooke had kept his surveys rather than hand them over to the City where they would have been kept for posterity and they have been almost entirely lost. Although he wrote diaries from the age of thirty-seven, in 1672 many went missing for two hundred years, eventually coming into the possession of the City of London. Some were published on the tercentenary of his birth in 1935 by the historian R.T.Gunther. The surviving remainder were published in the same year by Taylor & Francis, edited by H.W. Robinson and W. Adams.

Sadly none of Hooke’s buildings in London have survived into modern times. The London landmark for which he should be most famous is the Monument which was largely his work. However when Parentalia, the biography of Sir Christopher Wren, was written by Wren’s son and published by his grandson in 1750 they wrongly attributed the design to Wren, giving the impression that he had rebuilt London almost single-handedly. That continued to be believed for the following three hundred years, largely obscuring Hooke’s many contributions to the rebuilding of London.