"He was of an active, restless, indefatigable Genius even almost to the last, and always slept little to his death, seldom going to sleep till two three, or four a Clock in the Morning, and seldomer to Bed, often continuing his Studies all Night, and taking a nap in the day. His temper was Melancholy...."
These words were intended to describe Robert Hooke, but have been said to equally describe Isaac Newton. Both men played vital roles in the development of science in the seventeenth century, though at first glance Newton appears to outshine and outclass Robert Hooke. When Hooke is mentioned to this day, we usually speak of Newton as well, but not the other way around. They influenced one another far more than either would ever admit and, though each deserves his own separate identity, Hooke has rarely been granted his. This is largely because, though Newton and Hooke had much in common, they were bitter enemies, and Newton was able to exert far more influence over the Royal Society and, thereby, over the entire scientific community of his day. Robert Hooke's genius is hidden in shadows created partly by Hooke himself, but largely by Isaac Newton, a man who could not speak without contempt for Hooke, even long after Hooke's death, and who may well have taken steps to obliterate much of Hooke's contributions to science. Hooke's reputation is riddled by exaggerated accusations and misconceptions.
Robert Hooke was a significant influence in the advancement of science as well as Newton. An established physicist and astronomer, Hooke was with the Royal Society from its inception, and served it tirelessly and loyally for over forty years; it was he who had worded the society's credo "To improve the knowledge of natural things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments (not meddling with divinity, Metaphysics, Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logic)." But the rancor between Newton and Hooke did much to tarnish Hooke's reputation.
Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight, July 18, 1635. As a child he survived smallpox, but was scarred physically and emotionally for life. When Hooke was thirteen years old, his father, John Hooke, a clergyman hanged himself. Young Robert had much emotional pain in his youth. Receiving a 100 pound inheritance from his father, Robert Hooke became an orphan of sorts, being sent off to London. In London was the painter Sir Peter Lely, and there, Hooke was to develop his artistic skills.
As a boy, Robert Hooke had shown considerable interest and skill in mechanical things, and this, along with Hooke's intelligence, did not escape the notice of Richard Busby, the most feared man of Westminster School. Busby had a reputation for "flogging sense into them," but there was no threat here for Robert Hooke. Busby saw great genius in Hooke, and got involved to the extent of taking the boy into his own home.
Hooke moved through Westminster, to Oxford University, working his way through as a servant as had Newton in Cambridge. At Oxford, Hooke met Physicist Robert Boyle, becoming his paid assistant. During his time with Boyle, their greatest accomplish-ment was the construction of the air pump. Hooke stayed with Boyle until 1662 when Boyle helped Hooke secure the job as Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society.
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.
Testimony to Hooke's stamina, and ability to handle a tremendous workload lay in the endeavors of the next few years of his life after being appointed curator. In 1663, Hooke was elected a Fellow of the Society. In 1665, he was appointed Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. The same year he published his Micrographia, a book with elaborate drawings of various things under the microscope.
And while it is Flamsteed, Cassinni and Halley who usually get the credit for getting Newton involved with comets, a great deal of interest was sparked in Newton by a book entitled "Cometa," published around 1666, the author, Robert Hooke. Newton had made mention of the book in his notes, and later mentioned it in his correspondences. Hooke had taken close observations of the comets of 1664 and 1665, as well as collecting data from other astronomers. The only thing Hooke could not decide on was what type of motion the comet would take, straight line, circular orbit, or ellipse. By 1666, Hooke had put it aside for the time, apparently because of the necessity of pursuing other matters. In 1666, after the Great Fire of London, Hooke was appointed surveyor of London, designing many buildings including Montague House, the Royal College of Physicians, Bedlam and Bethlehem Hospital. Hooke was indeed a very busy man.
In 1677, after Henry Oldenburg's death, Hooke succeeded him to the post of Secretary of the Royal Society while still maintaining his responsibilities as Curator. Hooke continued in this capacity until 1683 when the post of secretary was filled by Richard Waller who would eventually write Hooke's biography.
Hooke continued as curator and with his interest in architecture, an interest he shared with Christopher Wren, though Wren practiced it far more diligently as an occupation. The two conversed often about the subject of architecture. While Wren was constructing St. Paul's Cathedral, his greatest work, Hooke assisted in modifying the great arches of the structure. And when the Royal Observatory was under construction, references appear about Hooke's connection with that, though precisely to what degree is not known.
While Hooke never married, there was only one instance where he seemed to be in love, that was with his niece, Jane Hooke, who took over the duties of housekeeper at Gresham. But though he became obsessed with her, she would not be faithful to him. Hooke was ever a lonely person.
Though Hooke outwardly may have seemed arrogant and self assured, underlying this seemed to be a great deal of insecurity. Perhaps his physical condition had much to do with it. While physical deformities and scars were far more common in those days, Hooke seems to have been an extreme case. Descriptions of him such as "scarred to the point of ugliness" and his condition of "twistedness, which grew worse with age" and references to a great deal of pain, seem to imply a tortured person. Certainly there were those who avoided him because of his condition, some even mocked him, Newton once made a reference to a "dwarf" that was most certainly a barb directed at Hooke.
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.
Hooke anticipated some of the most important discoveries and inventions of his time. Among Hooke's contributions are the correct formulation of the theory of elasticity, the kinetic hypothesis of gases and the nature of combustion. He was the first to use the balance spring for the regulation of watches and devised improvements in pendulum clocks and invented a machine for cutting the teeth of watch wheels. An expert micro-scopist, his microstudies of the composition of cork led him to suggest the use of the word cell (meaning a tiny bare room, like a monk's cell), and the word survived as the name for living cells. The publication of his Micrographia in 1665, published in English, with its engraved magnifications of minute bodies, was a major milestone of English science.
Hooke was the first to report the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and the first to establish the rotation of the giant planet. He formulated the theory of planetary motion as a problem in mechanics, and pioneered the scientific trail that led Newton to his goal in the formulation of the law of gravitation. As a scientist, Hooke made useful contributions to the wave theory of light. His interests ranged from these matters to pre-Daltonian atomic studies, astronomy, earthquakes and the physics of spring mechanisms. He set the thermo-metrical zero at the freezing point of water and studied the relationship of barometrical readings to changes in the weather; he invented a land carriage, a diving bell, a method of telegraphy and he and ascertained the number of vibrations corresponding to musical notes.
The first confrontation between Hooke and Newton came in 1672. Newton had written a paper on his demonstration of white light being a composite of other colours. It was presented to the Royal Society just prior to Newton's reception as a Fellow of the Society. Newton thought a great deal of his demonstration, referring to it as "the oddest if not the most considerable detection wch hath hitherto beene made in the operations of Nature."1 But Newton was met with a strong rebuff by Hooke. Hooke had his own wave theory of light, he had gone into some detail about it in the Micrographia, and he still believed in it strongly. He claimed Newton had not proven his idea clearly, and needed more detail.
Newton had the equivalent of a temper tantrum. The situation was made worse for Newton because Hooke was not the only one attacking Newton's theory, he had been joined by Christian Huygens, Ignace Pardies and the Jesuits of Liege. Newton had since childhood, reacted strongly to criticism. He constantly challenged authority, and to rebuff him, was to become an enemy. Newton demonstrated this over and over during his lifetime; his response was often either complete withdrawal, or open battle. On this occasion, Newton chose withdrawal (though usually for Newton withdrawal was some form of manipulation in battle plans.) In March 1673, Newton wrote to Henry Oldenburg, the current secretary of the Royal Society. Newton requested to withdraw from the Society. It took much gushing of admiration, respect, etc. on Oldenburg's part, as well as an offer to wave dues to the Society to get Newton to change his mind. Oldenburg also offered an apology for the behavior of an "unnamed member." The stage was set. Newton had successfully established his place in the Society, and had scored a victory, of sorts, over Hooke.
In many ways, the problems between Hooke and Newton could be attributed to the traits they had in common, rather than to their differences of opinion on scientific matters. Both were short tempered. Both were quick to make someone an enemy. Newton once threw a colleague out of his office and refused to speak with him for years because the man had made a joke about a nun. And Newton refused to speak with Flamsteed for years because Flamsteed refused to surrender raw data on comet observations. (Actually it made both Newton and Halley mad, they needed the data for their studies and did not want to wait for "finished data," but while Newton ranted and raved, Halley took matters into his own hands, literally; he stole the data!) Hooke became enemies of Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in 1658 because Oldenburg had taken Christian Huygens side of an argument over a claim to the invention of spring balanced watches.
Both Newton and Hooke were suspicious of other people's motives, (especially each other's), to the point of paranoia. Newton seems to have always been that way. But Hooke seems have developed this trait later in life. Richard Waller, who knew Hooke quite well, and was with him until his death wrote this of Hooke: "He was in the beginning of his being made known to the Learned, very communicative of his Philosophical Discoveries and Inventions, till some Accidents made him to a Crime close and reserv'd. He laid the cause upon some Persons, challenging his Discoveries for their own, taking occasion from his Hints to perfect what he had not; which made him say he would suggest nothing until he had time to perfect it himself, which has been the Reason that many things are lost, which he affirm'd he knew."2
In other ways Hooke and Newton were opposite, almost as if they had all the wrong things in common. While Newton was a recluse, seldom dining out, Hooke was gregarious and loved nothing better than the coffee house. He often dined there and stayed until one or two in the morning, drinking some, and smoking and talking to friends. When it came to experiments and work, they were opposite also. Newton would work on one project relentlessly until he had defeated it. Hooke, and it must be said this attribute would be required of him if he was to do a proper job as curator of Experiments, flitted from one topic to another. He was, similar to Halley, curious to a fault about everything. It was quite probably the demands of his job as Curator of Experiments that kept Hooke from concentrating adequate time on any one subject. The very job at which he had worked so diligently and so faithfully would be the cause of later accusations of Hooke's work being "broken" and "disjointed."
The next major confrontation between Hooke and Newton surfaced openly in 1684. It concerned Newton's Principia, and the involvement Hooke had in it. Newton claimed Hooke had none, and quite a few historians have agreed; but a closer look at the events prior to the Principia's publication, leave little doubt that Hooke was indeed involved.
The idea of gravity and its force of attraction was a common topic of interest in those days. Newton, Halley, Wren and Hooke all played with the concept. In 1679, there were several letters exchanged between Hooke and Newton. Both had made a slight attempt to work out their differences. Hooke had suggested it was other people (namely Oldenburg) who had made problems, and they should correspond with each other in order to avoid misunder-standings. Newton seemed agreeable. The topic of the first letters between them was the old trajectory problem. What path would an object follow falling to the Earth. Newton had suggested an experiment to prove it. But Newton made a mistake, suggesting that the trajectory would be a spiral. Hooke grabbed this and ran with it. He announced to the Society that Newton was wrong.
Newton was incensed, he felt Hooke had no right to take their correspondence to the Society, and that the major issue was one of a conduct problem on the part of Hooke. Hooke had no right to announce Newton wrong to the Society. It is entirely possible that Hooke was making the most of it, but one can hardly blame him when one considers the godlike esteem in which many people held Newton. Newton may have been the "giver of laws" but he often upstaged the others of his time, and was not inclined to give credit to anyone else.
Newton refused to correspond with Hooke any further, Hooke had written a third letter to Newton, that Newton refused to answer. And it is this third letter that is of particular interest. This letter was written January 6, 1680, and in it, Hooke spoke of his theory of gravity. Hooke wrote; "But my supposition is that the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocal, and Consequently that the Velocity will be in a subduplicate proportion to the Attraction and Consequently as Kepler supposes Reciprocal to the Distance." This was the main letter Hooke used as evidence when he claimed Newton had robbed him of his theory, but Hooke had no answer from Newton acknowledging Hooke's theory.
Hooke first appealed to Halley saying that Newton had taken all credit for the theory of gravity, when in fact, he, Hooke, had given the idea to Newton. This put Halley in a difficult situation. Halley was himself paying for the Principia to be published, and the last thing he needed was for Newton to get temperamental. However, Halley had to know first hand, because of previous communication with Hooke, that Hooke was not unreasonable in his claims. Halley and Hooke had long before discussed the idea that the force of gravitation must diminish by the square of the distance across which it is propagated and agreed that the inverse square law could explain Kepler's discovery that the planets move in elliptical orbits, each sweeping out an equal area within its orbit in equal time. Halley wrote Newton and told him, "He sais you had the notion from him, though he owns the Demonstration of the Curves generated thereby to be wholly your own: how much of this is so you know best, as likewise what you have to do in this matter, only Mr. Hooke seems to expect you should make some mention of him in the preface, which, it is possible, you may see reason to prefix."3
Newton vehemently denied any such accusation to Halley. A second letter to Newton from Halley pointed out that Hooke had not made a formal complaint of the matter, and that he felt that others had made Hooke's conduct seem worse than it was. Halley further pointed out again that Hooke was not trying to lay claim to the entire theory. It must have been a terribly uncomfortable situation for the easy going Halley.
Newton had another temper tantrum and told Halley he would not write the third book of the Principia. Halley thought this an incredible loss to mankind, and he had already invested much of his own resources in the publication of the first two books; he stopped at nothing to appease Newton. This incident only served to further harm Hooke's reputation. Newton still maintained Hooke was wrong; Newton would share his credit with no one, most certainly not with Hooke, and refused to do anything for him. The Principia was formally presented to the Royal Society in 1687 with no mention of Hooke in the preface; clearly, Newton had scored another victory over Hooke.
The year 1687 was indeed a dark year for Robert Hooke. The Principia was published, without recognition to Hooke. As if that was not enough, Hooke's niece also died that year. She was the niece who had captured the heart of the aging scientist. After the Principia publication and the death of Hooke's niece, his health declined at a greater rate. It is possible, judging by some descriptions, that Hooke was inflicted with Scoliosis, a crippling degenerative disease that causes an unnatural curvature of the spine and would account for his "incurvature" and stooping posture. But he stayed active until the last year of his life when he possibly had a stroke and was confined to bed. But Waller reported that his mind stayed clear until his death, though he became increasingly melancholy and disagreeable.
Hooke died on March 3, 1703, having been blind and bedridden the last year of his life. There had been little justice for Hooke during his life, and there would be little to follow after his death. His grave location is not even known. Moreover, Richard Waller published some of Hooke's works in 1705, dedicated to none other than Isaac Newton. This posthumous insult did little for Hooke and it is quite doubtful Newton appreciated it anyway. What remained of Hooke's works then passed to the Reverend William Derham, who was an old friend of Newton's and took until 1725 to publish any more of Hooke's works.
What part Newton played in the events that took place in the moving of the Royal Society from Gresham is unknown for sure. However it was during the move, that Hooke's portrait, the only one known, disappeared, as did most of Hooke's instruments, papers and scientific contrivances which Hooke had fashioned with his own hands. Derham commented that even twenty years after Hooke's death, Newton could still not speak of him and remain calm. There may be no evidence to prove Newton was responsible, but the motive is damning.
It was also probably due to Newton's spite that one of Hooke's gifts to the Society fell through. Hooke had spent little of his money, keeping it locked away in an iron chest. When he was a dying man he told Waller he wanted to give his money after his death, to the Society, so that new quarters, meeting rooms, laboratories, and a library might be constructed. But Hooke had unfortunately not made a will, or at least one was never found. It seems logical that, had Newton wanted to assert the Society's right to the money, based on Waller's testimony, he undoubtedly would have gotten it. Newton, who after becoming president of The Royal Society in 1703 had severed all ties that bound the Society to Hooke, wanted nothing of him.
Those who charge Robert Hooke with, habitually and without justification, accusing others of stealing his work need only consider that Wren's name had been attached to the architecture of the Royal College of Physicians, Willen Church in Buckingham-shire. Perhaps the only justice Hooke ever received, albeit posthumously, is that Robert Hooke was eventually recognized as the true architect.
Newton once wrote Halley and referring to his (Newton's) works, said they were a garden, and that Hooke had pilfered from it. Sometimes we need to take a look at the facts rather than to judge someone by a reputation his enemies helped create in order to grasp the true picture. Robert Hooke may have had his faults, and he may have been too quick to make assertions, but he most certainly does not deserve his fate or lack of recognition. Newton's actions in severing all ties between Hooke and the Society did nothing to further the knowledge of science and its development and denied the rest of us of the opportunity to know all the contributions to the advancement of science Hooke really made. Newton once said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on ye sholders of giants." There can be little doubt that one of those giants was Robert Hooke. It seems that it would apparently be more appropriate to consider Hooke as the sower of many of the seeds in Newton's garden.
This page is best viewed when using Netscape 2.0.