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Robert Hooke: Springs
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Robert Hooke was an Anglican. His father and three brothers were all Anglican clergymen. Hooke himself was expected to become an Anglican clergyman, but was unable to do so because of poor health.
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Robert Hooke is one of the most neglected natural philosophers of all time. The inventor of, amongst other things, the iris diaphragm in cameras, the universal joint used in motor vehicles, the balance wheel in a watch.
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By the early 1660s, Robert Hooke had developed a theory of combustion in which the elastic medium of air possessed two quite separate properties. It contained a 'nitrous' part, which was capable of reacting with substances to produce combustion or explosion, and a 'fixed' or inert part. He outlined the theory and the experiments by which he tried to substantiate it in 'Observation 16; Of Charcoal' (p. 103) in Micrographia. Hooke envisaged air as a powerful dissolving agent, or, in the nomenclature of the early chemists, a menstruum. Whenever 'sulphureous', or potentially inflammable, substances like wood were heated to a particular point, their atoms were furiously descended upon by the menstruum of 'nitrous air' or 'aerial nitre'.
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Robert Hooke kept a personal diary from March 1672 to May 1683. As few records about his hectic professional and private life survive, the diary provides valuable and unique insight into his life and character. He documents his ideas and conversations with colleagues alongside details of his meals, ailments and sex life.
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Hooke came to Westminster School during the first decade of Dr Busby's 55 year incumbency as Head Master. He remained on good terms with Busby, indeed the only remaining building that is certainly Hooke's architecture alone is the parish church at Willen, in Buckinghamshire, which was Busby's living. At Westminster Hooke was said to have acquired mastery of ancient languages, learned to play the organ, 'contrived severall ways of flying', and mastered the first six books of Euclid's Elements in a week.
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Hooke died in 1703, probably of diabetes and heart disease, having become blind and bedridden during the last year before his death. He was buried at the Church of St Helen Bishopsgate ... curiously his bones are now missing. They appeared to have ended up in a common grave during the restoration of the church nave in 1891.
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