A very detailed history of the life and works of Robert Hooke, the 17th Century natural philosopher, scientist, inventor, architect, builder, teacher. He was a man of boundless energy who was interested in everything and who, in his early works "Micrographia" suggested many early ideas that were later attributed to others.
A very interesting book, but perhaps not 100% engaging for those not interested in how experiments worked. ( )

This book is a detailed and complete biography of Robert Hooke, a 17c. English genius whose name is connected for the layperson to the extension of springs. Indeed, before reading the book, Hooke was known to me through what is called Hooke's law in elasticity and continuum mechanics. I also knew that he spent much of his life arguing with Newton about the discovery of the gravitation law. In my mind—and this was what I told my students in geophysics when I taught them elasticity—this argument with Newton explained why Hooke was so cautious in revealing his inventions. I told my students that he used an anagram to establish his priority with the elasticity law, publishing his idea on the subject by just printing ceiiinosssttuu, which meant ut tensio, sic uis [extension is proportional to force], but I didn't know he systematically used this trick to warrant his other (brilliant) ideas. I knew he had invented the microscope and he had been an architect. However, Stephen Inwood's book allowed me to discover many other facets of this fascinating man.

It was interesting for me to discover the type of what could be called outreach education as it existed in London at the turn of the 17c. Hooke was appointed Gresham Professor of Geometry in the 1660s, which meant he had, as all lecturers in the Gresham college, to deliver a weekly lecture in English or Latin 'for the education and practical benefit of the citizens of London'. (This brilliant idea was conceived by Gresham, an extremely wealthy 16c. London merchant.) I found that Inwood's opinion that 'as lecturers do [my italics], they [the other Gresham professors] at once set about reducing the number and length of the lectures they had to deliver' is a rather harsh statement. But Inwood being himself an academic must know what he speaks about.

Hooke was also a Curator at the then nascent Royal Society, which meant he had to entertain the otherwise rather lazy members with new experiments and lectures. This Curator position was rather bad paid both by the RS and by another rich merchant, Cutler (30£+50£ a year). The book explains in details that Cutler soon stopped his sponsorship and Hooke spent many years in justice courts to recover part of what was due to him.

I also discovered some passages with funny word associations. For instance, it is reported that, in August 1672, Hooke 'had his carpenter, Coffin, make a frame for it [a nine-foot telescope]'. Or, as many pages of the book are devoted to various spring devices Hooke invented for clockworks, this excerpt from Hooke's diary: 'Told him [Tompion, his favourite clockmaker] of my way of springs by a hammer and anvill', soon followed by Inwood's comment that 'Tompion was kept busy in the spring repairing the watches he and Hooke had made.' (It sometimes happens that clockmakers need to repair springs in May...)

Inwood's book also details Hooke's life as an architect, which is very impressive. Besides the many churches he rebuilt with Wren in the City after the 1666 Great Fire, I noted that he built Montagu House, on Great Russell Street. But this Montagu 'seems to have been a self-seeking knave in private as well as public life. [He] paid for the work by marrying the very wealthy but exceedingly insane dowager Duchess of Albermale, who thought he was the Emperor of China. So two of Hooke's greatest buildings were used for the confinement of lunatics', the other being the Bedlam Royal Hospital.

Of course much of the book is filled by Hooke's lifelong confrontation with Newton, but also—and I didn't know that—with Huygens (and many other European scientists). Hooke's argument for keeping secret most of his inventions—for instance the spring watch he claims to have designed in the early 1660s—was that it is easy to add to an invention: Facile inventis addere. But he used this trick himself many times: when something new was presented, he was very prompt in adding a spring somewhere, so that he could claim the invention for himself. I wonder how annoying it could have been for Hooke's friends to keep company to a man who seemed to have invented everything and who systematically complained that no credit was given to him.

His argument with Newton about the discovery of the gravitation law is also very instructive. I had never realised that the inverse square variation of the attraction with distance was so difficult to establish, but it's easy to understand that it was. Inwood explains that it was first intuitively discovered by Hooke (but, to my opinion, with a far-fetched analogy with the variation of light intensity), before beeing fully demonstrated by Newton. Newton is said to have reported that Hooke invented nothing new, since 'the French mathematician Bullialdus [Boulliau in French] had already revealed the [inverse square] rule in 1645'. Although I am a bit aware of the history of Science, I was intrigued by this Boulliau. I didn't know even his name! A quick Web search states that his work bridges Kepler's and Newton's. However, I had difficulties (and no time) to track Newton's affirmation on the very complete Boulliau Web site. An interesting figure in the text concerns Newton's income at Cambridge: 300£ a year for a professorship, the equivalent of roughly 30,000 actual pounds, which is very close to what a professor at Cambridge now earns. (Even with a less brilliant brain!)

One final point: Hooke's ideas on fossils and earthquakes were of particular interest to me as a geophysicist. In Gabriel Gohau's Histoire de la Géologie (1987), only Hooke's early original understanding of fossils is mentioned. But one should not forget what he wrote in his posthumous works: ask yourself 'whether the latitudes of places might have changed' and 'whether Ireland and America might not have been formerly joyned'. Although mapmakers had already noted the coincidence of contours between South American and African coastlines, it seems to be the first example of the idea of continental drift in the North Atlantic, more than 3 centuries before Wegener. I checked in Wegener's Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (1928) if there were any reference to Hooke's premonition. There is none. Poor Hooke. ( )

Inwood’s book is complementary to Lisa Jardine’s The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London. It covers much of the same material, but from a slightly different perspective, and includes some details not in Jardine’s book.

I continue to believe that Hooke was amazing. I first got interested in him through Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books, but really grew to appreciate him while reading Jardine’s On a Grander Scale. While primarily about Christopher Wren, the great English architect credited with rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666, Hooke, Wren’s longtime friend and collaborator (responsible for many of the designs, and almost all of the actual construction, of post-Fire London), emerges from Wren’s shadow as a mysteriously overlooked genius.

Exactly why Hooke has failed to get his due isn’t entirely clear. He wasn’t stunningly attractive or rich, and his abrupt attitude and lack of sufficient social connections prevented him from achieving as much socially as many of his peers and colleagues. His long feud with Newton, who refused to acknowledge Hooke’s contributions to many of the theories he expanded or proved mathematically, and who lived long after Hooke’s death and continued to nurse his grudge throughout the remainder of his life, probably also played a part.

But scholars have been studying Hooke and his work for years now, and the importance of his work and influence is more and more well known. Yet Hooke remains largely obscure. Even institutions that owe him a great debt continue to overlook Hooke in favor of his more illustrious peers. Without Hooke there probably would have been no Royal Society, London would be a much different place, and many of the churches credited to Wren might never have been built, or might have been much different.

Still, this book, along with Jardine’s and other recent publications, are doing their part to resurrect Hooke from obscurity. It’s about time some light was cast in his direction. ( )