The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London

Natural History, March, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

by Lisa Jardine HarperCollins, 2004; $27.95

According to Robert Hooke's diaries, in the first five days of September 1672 he invented a musical instrument; constructed a device to view the upcoming passage of the Moon in front of a star; surveyed half a dozen lots for the reconstruction of buildings destroyed in the Great Fire of London; observed the planet Mars through a telescope; discussed the rental of a stable with a tenant; performed several optical calculations for designing microscopes (a time-consuming process in the pre-electronic age); visited a coffeehouse to catch up on the latest gossip; sampled a friend's bottle of absinthe; and dosed himself with a wide variety of nostrums ranging from raw milk to an emetic made, apparently, from the scrapings of rusty iron. It was a typical week for a man who, like his more famous contemporary Isaac Newton, was "never at rest," and who seamlessly blended intellectual tours de force with the practical labor of the workaday world.

Hooke was one of the great public figures of seventeenth-century London. Yet he is rather obscure today, remembered mainly by physics students for the law of elastic deformation that bears his name, and by book collectors for his magnificent Micrographia, first printed in 1665. The book, a large folio-size volume illustrated with exquisite drawings by the author, made Hooke an instant celebrity. What's more, it raised public awareness of the intricate, minute worlds that lie unseen below the resolution limit of the unaided eye. (A CD-ROM edition of the original volume, available from Octavo Editions at octavo.com, includes the book's stunning oversize foldout plates.)

Jardine, who teaches history at Queen Mary University of London, places Hooke squarely at the center of the intellectual ferment of his time. Hooke came into his prime at the height of the scientific revolution in Great Britain, when the newly formed Royal Society was meeting every week. Hooke, an exceptional craftsman, became the official curator for the meetings: it was his job to build the equipment suggested by others and to run the shows. But he was also expected to come up with his own ingenious ideas. Both the chemist Robert Boyle and the architect Christopher Wren sought his advice and friendship, and London's intellectual elite held him in the highest regard.

The Royal Society provided both an outlet for Hooke's writings and a showcase for his many projects. He gained even greater renown, however, in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London. Hooke was appointed chief surveyor for the rebuilding project, and he and Wren set about designing many of the buildings that are now part of reconstructed London.

Many of their works--including the official monument to those who died in the fire--are still standing. Wren is the more well known of the pair, in large part because of his design of Saint Paul's cathedral. Hooke was no less responsible for raising London from the ashes, yet he managed, at the same time, to run the regular shows at the Royal Society and carry on with a variety of other enterprises.

It was Hooke's exceptional energy, Jardine suggests, that was his eventual undoing. He picked up on things so clearly, and got involved in projects so quickly, that he was often unable to carry them through to completion. In his later years he felt an unremitting pressure to perform, and tried to allay his anxiety with a variety of drugs that probably killed him in the end. He became increasingly paranoid, quarreling bitterly with Newton over the discovery of the law of gravitation. Newton, as vindictive as he was brilliant, did his best to ensure that Hooke would not be remembered kindly by future generations. Yet Hooke (like Newton, an eccentric bachelor) left a legacy in architecture, invention, and ideas that stands to this day.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.