Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
HOOKE, ROBERT (b. Freshwater, Isle of Wight,
England, 18 July 1635; d. London, England, 3 March
1702), physics.
Richard Waller called “his first and last
Mistress”—mechanics. His role in the history of science
is inextricably bound to his skill in mechanics
and his allied perception of nature as a great machine.
When his father died in 1648, Hooke inherited
£100. Since he had displayed some artistic talent, his
family packed him off to London, where his legacy
was to finance an apprenticeship to Sir Peter Lely.
Hooke decided to save his money; and it was his good
fortune that Richard Busby, the master of Westminster
School, befriended him and took him into
his home. The teacher had recognized the pupil. Not
only did Hooke learn Latin, the staple of the secondary
curriculum, together with Greek and a smattering
of Hebrew; he also discovered mathematics. By his
own account he devoured the first six books of Euclid
in a week, and he proceeded to apply geometry to
mechanics. Nor was mathematics all. By his own
account again, he learned to play twenty lessons on
the organ and invented thirty ways of flying. Having
exhausted the resources of Westminster, he moved
on to Oxford, where he entered Christ Church as a
chorister in 1653.
Apparently Hooke never took a bachelor's degree.
The only Oxford degree associated with his name is
the Master of Arts, to which he was nominated in
1663. Meanwhile, Oxford had given him more than
a thousand degrees could match. At the time of his
arrival the university was the home of the brilliant
group around which the Royal Society later crystallized.
John Wilkins, Thomas Willis, Seth Ward, William
Petty, John Wallis, Christopher Wren, Robert
Boyle—these and others, some already recognized
scholars, some still students, some merely resident
near the university—convened regularly for the discussion
of scientific matters. Hooke soon found his
place in the circle. They recognized and drew upon
his talent in mechanics, and they gave him in return
his introduction to the new world of thought then
fomenting the scientific revolution. For a time Hooke
was an assistant to Willis. Willis introduced him to
Boyle, and as Boyle's assistant Hooke launched his
independent career.
Typically, Hooke's initial triumphs were mechanical
inventions. Although Boyle's interest focused
primarily on chemistry, the report of Guericke's air
pump caught his attention. He instructed Hooke to
devise an improved instrument, and the modern air
pump duly appeared. With the air pump and with
Hooke's assistance, Boyle conducted the experiments
that concluded in Boyle's law, published in 1662. As
with so much, Hooke's role in the investigation is
unclear. Boyle never suggested that he played any
part; and Hooke, who was not reluctant to assert
himself, never claimed that he did. Hooke was Boyle's
paid assistant at that time, however, and the position
of assistant may well have seemed to both to preclude
any rights of discovery. A number of historians assign
the discovery to Hooke without further ado, and
almost no one wants to deny outright that he participated
in it.
In 1658, at the same time that he developed the
air pump, Hooke turned his attention to chronometers.
It was widely recognized that an accurate portable
clock could solve the critical navigational problem
of determining longitude. Hooke reasoned that one
might be constructed by the “use of Springs instead
of Gravity for the making of a Body vibrate in any
Posture.” That is, by attaching a spring to the arbor
of the balance wheel, he would replace the pendulum
with a vibrating wheel that could be moved because
it oscillated around its own center of gravity. This
is, of course, the principle of the watch, and on this
principle a marine chronometer with which longitude
could be determined was constructed in the eighteenth
century. Once again, the exact nature of
Hooke's contribution to clockmaking is shrouded in
mystery. About 1660 three men of means—Boyle,
Robert Moray, and William Brouncker, all later
prominent in the Royal Society—considered backing
Hooke's invention. Should the clock have worked, the
profits might well have been immense. A patent was
drawn up; but before the agreement was completed,
Hooke withdrew, apparently demanding of his backers
assurances they were unwilling to give.
In 1674 Christiaan Huygens constructed a watch
controlled by a spiral spring attached to the balance;
and Hooke, suspecting that his invention had been
peddled to Huygens, cried foul. Working with the
clockmaker Thomas Tompion, he made a similiar
watch to present to the king; and on it he defiantly
engraved the assertion “Robert Hook inven. 1658.
T. Tompion fecit 1675.” Despite his contentions,
there is no evidence that his watch of 1658, if indeed
it worked, employed a spiral spring, the device of
crucial importance. On the other hand, his pamphlet
that pronounced Hooke's law, De potentia restitutiva
(1678), employed a spiral spring as one example and
offered a demonstration (faulty, to be sure) that the
vibrations of springs obeying Hooke's Law are isochronal.
It is worth adding that neither Hooke's nor
Huygens' watch worked satisfactorily enough to determine
longitude. Although the exact nature of
Hooke's contributions cannot be determined with any
assurance, knowledgeable men at the time considered
him to have made important inventions in chronometry;
and historians are unanimous in agreement.