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Robert Hooke: Microscopes
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Robert Hooke’s Micrographia is one of the earliest books about the use of a microscope to view the world of the minescule. Published in 1664, it’s really quite astounding, and includes some very nice drawings, such as the flea pictured on the right.
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Robert Hooke left no clear drawings or even descriptions for either a complete flying machine or for any kind of 'artificial muscle'. His most detailed treatment of actual flight came from his descriptions of insects in Micrographia. In his account of the Blue Fly (Observation 38, p.172) one finds Hooke's genius for observation, experiment, and mechanical analysis at its finest. What especially interested Hooke were the different wing-velocities of flies and bees on the one hand, and butterflies and moths on the other. Under the microscope, those insects that buzzed as they flew had hard 'glassy' wings, whereas moths were silent and had downy, or 'feathered' wings. These 'feathers', Hooke considered, could trap air and help the creature to float, so that less energy was needed to fly, and they made no sound.
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Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses by Robert Hooke (1635 - 1703) is the most influential work in the history of microscopy. Containing the discoveries which Hooke made with his newly perfected compound microscope, Micrographia was not only the first book devoted entirely to microscopic observations, but ... the first to pair its descriptions with profuse and detailed illustrations. This graphic portrayal of a hitherto unknown micro world had an impact rivaling that of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (1610) which had been the first publication to show drawings of the macro world beyond the earth through drawings of the moon made through the newly invented telescope.
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As the first to examine fossils with a microscope, Hooke noted the remarkable similarities between petrified wood and rotten oak wood in addition to fossilized shells and living mollusk shells. These observations helped move science past Aristotle's misconceived notion that fossils formed and grew with the Earth and only imitated living things in nature, rather than the processes of speciation, fossilization, evolution, and extinction. Hooke's archaic language certainly described processes that explained the mineralization of living tissue into fossils and hinted at extinction and evolution, two and a half centuries before Charles Darwin. Micrographia ... included a wave theory of light, which compared the spreading of light vibrations to undulating waves of water. Hooke followed the publication with a series of lectures on light to the Royal Society and was first to describe thin film phenomena and the associated periodicity using membranes and thin plates of mica. In 1672, he noted that light vibrates perpendicularly to the direction of its propagation.
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This microscope that Hooke devised looked rather like a telescope. This kind of microscope consisted of two lenses at opposite ends of a long tube attached to a stand. When Hooke, an inventor of the microscope, prepared to examine a plant or an insect, he would stick it on a pin or mounted in front of the lower lens of his microscopes. At the start, he had to work underneath the sun. He did this because only sunlight was bright enough to show him his object clearly under the microscope. Later on, he added to a flaming oil lamp and a mirror to the microscope assembly.
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Hooke was ... a keen observer of fossils and geology. In the seventeenth century, a number of hypotheses had been proposed for the origin of fossils; one widely accepted theory stated that fossils were formed within the Earth by some sort of "extraordinary Plastick virtue," or force giving rise to stones that looked like living beings but were not. Hooke examined fossils with a microscope -- the first person to do so -- and noted close similarities between the structures of petrified wood and fossil shells on the one hand, and living wood and living mollusc shells on the other. He concluded that the shell-like fossils that he examined really were "the Shells of certain Shel-fishes, which, either by some Deluge, Inundation, earthquake, or some such other means, came to be thrown to that place." Hooke observed that many fossils represented extinct organisms, writing "There have been many other Species of Creatures in former Ages, of which we can find none at present. . . 'tis not unlikely also but that there may be divers new kinds now, which have not been from the beginning."
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