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Robert Hooke: Royal Society
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ROBERT HOOKE (1635-1703), English experimental philosopher, was born on the 18th of July 1635 at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, where his father, John Hooke, was minister of the parish. After working for a short time with Sir Peter Lely, he went to Westminster school; and in 1653 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as servitor. After 1655 he was employed and patronized by the Hon. Robert Boyle, who turned his skill to account in the construction of his air-pump. On the 12th of November 1662 he was appointed curator of experiments to the Royal Society, of which he was elected a fellow in 1663, and filled the office during the remainder of his life. In 1664 Sir John Cutler instituted for his benefit a mechanical lectureship of £50 a year, and in the following year he was nominated professor of geometry in Gresham College, where he subsequently resided. After the Great Fire of 1666 he constructed a model for the rebuilding of the city, which was highly approved, although the design of Sir C. Wren was preferred.
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Robert Hooke (1635-1703) gave a series of lectures to the Royal Society of London over a period of some thirty-odd years that essentially laid down the foundation of the modern science of geology. These lectures were published posthumously in 1705. He recognized the true nature and importance of fossils at a time when the prevailing thought was that fossils were a trick of nature, a product of some magical or astrological force, or at best mere relicts of Noah's Flood. His studying of fossils he collected led him to express a theory of biologic evolution that was startlingly on target. His examination of the rocks and sediments on the shores of his native Isle of Wight convinced him of the cyclic nature of terrestrial processes and that the time needed to accomplish all that he witnessed in these cycles of erosion, sedimentation, consolidation and uplift had to be much longer than was allowed by the Scriptural Chronology. He insisted that the Earth had to be older than the 6000 years allowed by the Bible, and most of his contemporaries considered his attitude tantamount to a derogation of God.
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As Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society of London, Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was too busy to have been considered a ‘geological traveller’. Yet he made fundamental geological observations whenever he did travel. He set these observations in a series of lectures he gave at the Royal Society over a period of some thirty years. These lectures were published posthumously by Richard Waller in 1705 as Lectures and Discourses of Earthquakes and Subterraneous Eruptions. Although his contemporary Nicolaus Stenonis, or Steno, has been recognized as the founder of geology, Hooke's more profound and compelling observations and explanations have been largely ignored by the geological community. There is ... evidence that Hutton benefited considerably from Hooke's ideas.
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No authenticated portrait of Robert Hooke exists, a situation sometimes attributed to the heated conflicts between Hooke and Isaac Newton. In Hooke's time, the Royal Society met at Gresham College, but within a few months of Hooke's death Newton became the Society's president and plans were laid for a new meeting place. When the move to new quarters finally was made a few years later, in 1710, Hooke's Royal Society portrait went missing, and has yet to be found.
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As England's version of Leonardo da Vinci, Hooke's reputation suffered greatly during his lifetime because of intellectual property disputes and his apparent conflicts with other prominent scientists (who often had much more influence in the Royal Society). As an example, Hooke clashed with Christiaan Huygens over the spring regulator, and he had numerous battles with Sir Isaac Newton, first over optics in 1672 and then again in 1686 over the inverse square law of gravitation. Tragically, Hooke died intestate in 1703 with 9,580 pounds to his name. His health had severely deteriorated during his last seven years of life, and he was plagued with an illustrious career that was greatly overshadowed by his mortal enemy, Isaac Newton. Historians investigating Newton's Principia, and Hooke's involvement in the early development of this famous volume, have since yielded some overdue credit and helped restore his reputation. Unfortunately, Hooke's only known portrait and many of his inventions and papers have not survived the centuries.
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Hooke acquired a place as chorister at Christ Church Oxford, leaving Westminster in 1653. The chorister role may have been simply that Hooke received a modest endowment, since the Anglican Church was abolished between 1643 and 1660. In Oxford Hooke met those who would go on to form the Royal Society, and where he was encouraged in a wide variety of scientific endeavours. In 1658 he became assistant to Robert Boyle, where his mechanical skills were of use especially in the construction of the improved version of the air pump of Otto Guericke described in Boyle's New Experiments PhysicoMechanicall (1660). In 1662 Hooke was appointed Curator of Experiments to the newly founded Royal Society, being responsible for the experiments performed at its weekly meetings. This role was as that of an employee, not at that time as an equal to the Fellows.
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