Robert Hooke

Physicist, b. 18 July 1635 (Freshwater, Isle of Wight, England), d. 3 March 1703 (London).

Robert Hooke was the son of a church minister. As a small child Robert contracted smallpox, which left him scarred for life. When he was 13 years old his father committed suicide, and Robert was sent to Westminster School. He studied at Oxford University and became the assistant of Robert Boyle. In 1662 when he was made Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society of London, responsible for the maintenance and demonstration of scientific equipment and experimental procedures during the Society's meetings.

Robert Hooke's name is related to the law of elasticity known as Hooke's Law: The amount of stretching of a solid body such as wood or metal is proportional to the applied force.

Hooke was an experienced astronomer and instrument builder. He built his own telescope and used it to suggest that Jupiter rotates on its axis. He prepared accurate repeated sketches of Mars that were used in the 19th century to determine its rate of rotation.

In 1665 Hooke was appointed professor of geometry in Gresham College. Throughout his career he made several suggestions that proved correct, such as that air is made up of particles separated by huge distances from each other. He discussed the phenomenon of diffraction of light (the bending of light around sharp objects) by describing light in terms of waves. His study of fossils under a microscope led him to propose that life forms evolved from each other.

After the great fire of London Hooke was appointed surveyor of London in 1666. Among the buildings he designed in that role were the Royal College of Physicians, Bethlehem Hospital, and Montague House. In 1667 Hooke became Secretary of the Royal Society.

Despite his insight into physical processes - he suggested correctly that gravity can be measured by determining the swinging period of a pendulum - Hooke was one of the last of the old school of natural philosophy, which thought about the character of nature, had valuable insight but did not follow it through to quantification in mathematical laws. Working out the consequences of his suggestions was mostly left to others. This lead to bitter controversy between Hooke and Newton when Newton formulated the consequences of Hooke's ideas about planetary motion into his Second Law. Hooke felt that he should have received more credit in Newton's work.

Among Hooke's published works are the Micrographia, a detailed description with drawings of some of the first observations with an early microscope, and Cometa, a description of his close observation of the comets occurring in 1664 and 1665. In his microscope work Hooke studied a wide range of organisms including insects, sponges, bryozoans, diatoms, and bird feathers. He introduced the term "cell" into biology, describing the structure of cork like a tiny, bare room or monk's cell.

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