LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Hooke: Christopher Wren
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Robert Hooke was one of the most gifted men of his age. His misfortune was to live in the same age as Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren, pushing Hooke into the historical shadows. Yet with a new book revealing just how much this ‘English Leonardo da Vinci’ contributed to the science and architecture of the 17th century*, a three century old injustice is being redressed.
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Robert Hooke was born at Freshwater, Isle of Wight, son of John Hooke, curate at All Saints' Church. The church stands at the end of what is now Hooke Road, which ... has the Hooke Museum. Robert Hooke was one of the most brilliant and versatile of seventeenth-century English scientists, but he is also one of the lesser known; his persona and his contributions are far outweighed in public perception by those of Newton and of Wren. This is unfair.
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Hooke actually took over Micrographia from Wren, whom he credited for the original work. Many of the illustrations were, if not Wren's own work, certainly inspired by his drawings. Micrographia covered the newly magnified terrain of flies, fleas, fossils, fungi, fish scales, razor blades, snowflakes, stinging nettles, Kettering stone, and bodily fluids. One of the most commonly used terms in biology — "cell" — was actually coined by Hooke, based on highly magnified chambers he saw in cork and other specimens. When it came to wriggling specimens, he applied the same ingenuity he had used in improving light sources to getting his tiny subjects to lay still. He had particular trouble with the ant:
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The symposium took the form of a meeting in which some of the present-day holders of the positions Hooke occupied will take part. The Speakers included Dr Allan Chapman, Professor Michael Cooper, Dr Ellen Tan Drake, Professor John Enderby (Secretary of the Royal Society), Sir Roger Penrose, Sir Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) and Sir Christopher Zeeman.
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