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Robert Hooke: Great Fire
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Hooke's Discourse of Earthquakes, published two years after his death, shows that his geological reasoning had gone even further. Following in the footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci, Hooke explained the presence of fossil shells on mountains and in inland regions: "Most of those Inland Places. . . are, or have been heretofore under the Water. . . the Waters have been forc'd away from the Parts formerly cover'd, and many of those surfaces are now raised above the level of the Water's Surface many scores of Fathoms. It seems not improbable, that the tops of the highest and most considerable Mountains in the World have been under Water, and that they themselves most probably seem to have been the Effects of some very great Earthquake." Hooke continued to study fossils and compare them with living organisms -- the illustration above shows the coiled shells of three living cephalopods, Nautilus, Argonauta, and Spirula, compared with a fossil ammonite (upper right).
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The challenge to Aristotelian ideas was strengthened when Thomas Willis, who was Hooke's first Oxford employer, began to experiment with a new preparation named aurum fulminans, or exploding gold (gold fulminate), which could explode without fire. All that one needed to do was to place a little aurum fulminans on to a spoon, and cover the spoon with a heavy coin. If one gently tapped the spoon on to a table top, the chemical exploded violently and blew the coin up to the ceiling. [17]
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Hooke devoted a great deal of time to the universe and its mysteries. The search for parallax was on in the seventeenth century, and Hooke made an attempt to find it using a zenith telescope. The idea of using zenith telescopes was based on atmospheric distortion being at a minimum directly overhead, and therefore making for the most accurate measurements. Hooke used the star Gamma Draconis, but the telescope was too crude to reach any definite conclusions.
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It is important to note that Hooke took part in the great Oxford movement, which resulted in the foundation of the Royal Society, and in fact his "Micrographia," was renowned as one of the early gems of the Society. This work animated his discoveries on respiration, the composition of atmosphere, and the nature of light. It was in this work the word "cell" was first used.
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Hooke died in 1703. Three hundred years later, his universal joint is still in common use, one of the many legacies of this brilliant but largely forgotten man who, in the words of the great diarist Samuel Pepys "is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that ever I saw."
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History has, of course, sided with Newton, leaving Hooke the reputation as "a man who lacked the mathematical genius to turn a good idea into a great reality." He has since all but disappeared beneath the shadows of his scientific peers, Newton, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and others.
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