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Robert Hooke: Experiments
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Robert Hooke was a figure of extraordinary and diverse creativity. With his grasp of ancient languages, the quality of his draughtsmanship as shown in the plates of Micrographia, and his success as an architect, he clearly possessed high artistic talents. And his craft skills enabled him to build an airpump where the country's leading pumping engineer had failed. But most of all, he was the man who showed that the 'experimental philosophy' actually worked and could be used to extend the bounds of natural knowledge. He was Europe's last Renaissance man, and England's Leonardo.
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On July 8th, 1860 Hooke formed the experiment of glass vibrating in 6.4.8 places. This was done by putting flour on a glass plate, and bowing the edge of glass. The experiment states that Hooke oberved that the motion of the glass vibrated perpendicular to the surface of the glass, and that the circular figure of the flour changed into an oval one way, and the reciprocation of it changed it into an oval the other way. This phenomenon was rediscovered by Ernst Chladni in the 18th century. Its importance is that it influenced Faraday in thinking about lines of force in magnetic and electrical experiments. Hooke was quiteacquainted with the properties of sound and had already experimented with sound amplication through the use of shape and structure.
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Hooke's scientific achievements were considerable. He developed, but never fully expounded, a unique system of mechanical philosophy that depended upon supposed incessant vibrations of matter. Ingeniously explaining solidity, for example, in terms of particles vibrating so rapidly that they could beat off any intruding body; and chemical reactions in terms of vibrations of two substances in harmony (in cases of combination) or in discord (in cases of disaggregation), Hooke's main problem was to explain such putative vibrations. Although he never succeeded in this, he was led to many suggestive experiments on the nature of vibrations and what he called "simple harmonic motions." His theory and practice was closely linked not only to the first statement of what is now known as Hooke's Law (stress is proportional to strain), and his awareness of the dynamic equivalence of vibrating springs and pendulums, but ... to his insight in 1658 that a clock might be driven by a spring instead of a pendulum—an idea that was first made to work in practice by Huygens in 1674 but that Hooke believed should have been acknowledged as his invention. The influence of his vibratory physics can even be seen in Hooke's recognition that light was a periodic phenomenon, as demonstrated in his analysis of colors produced in soap bubbles and other thin films.
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No job could have suited Robert Hooke more, and most other scientists less, than the job of Curator of Experiments. His task, three to four major experiments each week to be reported on and/or demonstrated to the Royal Society. The experiments varied in topic greatly, some of chemical nature, some of astronomy, some of biology, all were considered Natural Philosophy. All had to be understood. It was not a menial task, but Hooke performed it excellently for forty one years until his death.
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Like many of Hooke's researches, his work on spring and elasticity was done at scattered intervals stretching over several decades. In the late 1650s, he had been experimenting in Oxford with spring-regulated timepieces, and his 'pendulum watches' attempted to apply the isochronal principle of the pendulum clock to a portable timepiece in 1660. [32] His fullest discussion of the use of springs to produce isochronal swings within a watch balance was published in 1676, and was intended to develop a timepiece whereby a ship could find its longitude at sea. Though Hooke's timepieces were not sufficiently accurate to 'be used as marine chronometers (nor would such a device be practicable for nearly a century), his application of spring tension and release to produce equal rotations of a watch balance-wheel provided the fundamental principle on which all portable time-keepers would be based down to the invention of electronic chip watches in our own time.
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Hooke started work in 1662 as Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society. For this he was required to demonstrate “three or four considerable experiments” each week for the members – quite a challenge! An apparent Jack of all Trades, Hooke covered a wide variety of areas including magnetism, the nature of light, astronomy, geology and anatomy (he is said to have been particularly good at gruesome public anatomical dissections of animals), but because of his demanding schedule he was not always able to follow his work to conclusion. This was later to cause him problems.
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