LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Hooke: Christiaan Huygens
built 628 days ago
In addition to Micrographia and Hooke's Law, Hooke invented the anchor escapement and may ... have invented the balance spring before Christiaan Huygens. An escapement is a device for regulating the rate of a watch or clock, and the anchor escapement was a major step in accurate watch design. The balance spring is also used to regulate the flow of energy from the mainspring. It coils and uncoils with a natural periodicity, allowing for fine adjustment of the period of ticks. Modern spring watches still use balance springs, and the most common escapement today is the double roller Swiss anchor escapement, which is a nineteenth-century modification of Hooke's design.
Source:
In many ways, the problems between Hooke and Newton could be attributed to the traits they had in common, rather than to their differences of opinion on scientific matters. Both were short tempered. Both were quick to make someone an enemy. Newton once threw a colleague out of his office and refused to speak with him for years because the man had made a joke about a nun. And Newton refused to speak with Flamsteed for years because Flamsteed refused to surrender raw data on comet observations. (Actually it made both Newton and Halley mad, they needed the data for their studies and did not want to wait for "finished data," but while Newton ranted and raved, Halley took matters into his own hands, literally; he stole the data!) Hooke became enemies of Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in 1658 because Oldenburg had taken Christian Huygens side of an argument over a claim to the invention of spring balanced watches.
Source:
It is interesting from a twentieth-century vantage point that Hooke first announced his law of elasticity as an anagram. This was a method sometimes used by scientists, such as Hooke, Huygens, Galileo, and others, to establish priority for a discovery without revealing details.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Christiaan Huygens