HOOKE, ROBERT (b. Freshwater, Isle of Wight, England, 18 July 1635; d. London, England, 3 March 1702), physics.

    is studied through human remains. The pursuit of Hooke's program for geology ultimately shattered the seventeenth-century preconceptions which confined his own geological theories.

Perhaps Hooke's most important contribution to science lay in the field of instrumentation. He added something to every important instrument developed in the seventeenth century. He invented the air pump in its enduring form. He advanced horology and microscopy. He developed the cross-hair sight for the telescope, the iris diaphragm, and a screw adjustment from which the setting could be read directly. He has been called the founder of scientific meteorology. He invented the wheel barometer, on which the pivoted needle registers the pressure. He suggested the freezing temperature of water as the zero point on the thermometer and devised an instrument to calibrate thermometers. His weather clock recorded barometric pressure, temperature, rainfall, humidity, and wind velocity on a rotating drum. Although it was not a scientific instrument, the universal joint was also his invention. Writing in the eighteenth century, Lalande called Hooke “the Newton of mechanics.” One might add that he was the first mechanic of genius whose talent the mechanical philosophy of nature brought to bear directly on science.

The year 1677 brought significant changes to Hooke's life. The death of Henry Oldenburg led to his nomination as secretary of the Royal Society. For several years the two men had been mortal enemies. Convinced that Oldenburg had betrayed the secret of his spring-driven watch to Huygens, Hooke had publicly labeled him a “trafficker in intelligence”; but the Council of the Royal Society had come to Oldenburg's support. Now he sat in his enemy's position of power. It proved to be an empty triumph. Public success merely disguised private decline. Although he was only forty-two years old in 1677, and destined to survive another quarter of a century, Hooke had exhausted his scientific creativity. One year later the last of his Cutlerian lectures announced Hooke's law. From there on, everything was downhill.

His tenure as secretary was not successful, and he stepped down after five years. During that period he tried to continue Oldenburg's periodical—renamed Philosophical Collections—but he managed to bring out only seven issues in all. In 1686 Newton laid Book I of the Principia before the Society. Hooke was convinced that he had been robbed again, but hardly anyone listened to his protestations. And in 1687 his niece Grace, originally his ward and then his mistress through a prolonged and tempestuous romance, died. From that blow he never fully recovered. More and more he became a recluse and a cynic. A tone of bitterness pervades the small number of papers that survive from his final years. In the end he was almost bedfast. He died on 3 March 1702 in the room at Gresham College that he had inhabited for nearly forty years.

Hooke was a difficult man in an age of difficult men. His life was punctuated with bitter quarrels that refused to be settled. When he offered criticism of Hevelius' use of open sights for astronomical observations, he did it in such a way that the consequences dragged on for ten years. His conflicts with Oldenburg and Newton have already been mentioned. It is only fair to add that the other three men were at least as difficult in their own right, and that Hooke won and held the esteem and affection of such men as Boyle, Wren, and the antiquarian John Aubrey. Hooke's disposition was probably exacerbated by his physical appearance. Pepys said of him, while he was still a young man, that he “is the most and promises the least of any man in the world that ever I saw.” As every description testifies, his frame was badly twisted. Add to his wretched appearance wretched health. He was a dedicated hypochondriac who never permitted himself the luxury of feeling well for the length of a full day. Hooke's spiny character was nicely proportioned to the daily torment of his existence.

As for his role in the history of science, it is impossible to avoid the commonplace assessment—that he never followed up his insights. Indeed, he was incapable of exploring them in their ultimate depths—as Newton, for example, could do. Early in his career Hooke composed a methodological essay that earnestly advocates orderly procedure and systematic coverage. It appears almost to be Hooke's judgment on himself. Typically, it remained unfinished. Waller records that in his old age Hooke intended to leave his estate to build a laboratory for the Royal Society and to found a series of lectures. He procrastinated in completing his will “till at last this great Design prov'd an airy Phantom and vanish'd into nothing.” More than one of Hooke's grand designs proved an airy phantom and vanished into nothing—at least if we judge him by the standards of a Newton. Because of his claim on the law of universal gravitation, the comparison with Newton inevitably arises, but such a standard of judgment is unfair to Hooke. If he was not a Newton, his multifarious contributions to science in the seventeenth century are beyond denial; and on the crucial question of circular motion it was Hooke's insight that put Newton on the track to universal gravitation. The Royal Society honored its