Robert Hooke

About this figure

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was an English polymath and one of the most versatile experimental scientists of the seventeenth century, whose work spanned microscopy, mechanics, astronomy, and architecture. Educated at Oxford, he became an assistant to the chemist Robert Boyle, helping design the air pump used in Boyle's famous experiments on the properties of gases, before becoming the Royal Society's first Curator of Experiments, a role that required him to demonstrate new experiments at nearly every weekly meeting for decades.

Hooke's best-known work, Micrographia (1665), was a lavishly illustrated book of observations made with compound microscopes and other optical instruments he built or improved himself, and it introduced many readers for the first time to the previously invisible structure of ordinary objects: the compound eyes of flies, the sting of a bee, and, in its most lasting contribution to scientific vocabulary, the honeycomb-like structure he observed in a thin slice of cork, whose small compartments he named "cells," a term borrowed from monks' quarters that has remained the basic word for the fundamental unit of life ever since. The book was an immediate popular success and helped establish microscopy as a legitimate scientific pursuit.

Beyond microscopy, Hooke formulated the law of elasticity that bears his name, describing the proportional relationship between the force applied to a spring and its extension, and he did extensive work on the mechanics of springs and clocks, on the wave theory of light, and on gravitation, where he corresponded with Isaac Newton and later claimed, bitterly and to lasting controversy, that Newton had taken the idea of an inverse-square law of gravity from him without sufficient credit. As a surveyor, Hooke played a major practical role in rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666, working alongside Christopher Wren on the design of numerous buildings, including the Monument to the fire itself. Few portraits of Hooke survive, and his reputation suffered for generations partly because of his long rivalry with the far more celebrated Newton, though modern historians of science have restored much of his standing as one of the era's most original experimentalists.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.