{"id":652,"date":"2008-09-17T14:16:06","date_gmt":"2008-09-17T14:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=652"},"modified":"2008-09-17T14:16:06","modified_gmt":"2008-09-17T14:16:06","slug":"hump-day-history-robert-hooke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2008\/09\/17\/hump-day-history-robert-hooke\/","title":{"rendered":"Primer: Robert Hooke"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Popular history rarely communicates the fullness of scientists’ careers, concentrating instead on key “contributions” as they are often called.\u00a0 In the case of Robert Hooke (1635-1703), this would be an especially unfortunate approach, because he is an unusually vibrant figure in the “Scientific Revolution” era, a cultural-intellectual force who cannot be easily boiled down to a certain discovery or insight.\u00a0 The casual\u00a0observer\u00a0may\u00a0be familiar with\u00a0Hooke’s Law, which states the proportionality of the force of a spring to\u00a0the distance it\u00a0is\u00a0stretched.\u00a0 Others might know a few other points, such as his authorship of Micrographia <\/em>(1665), which was essentially a lavishly illustrated work of popular science extolling the importance of the activities of the then-new Royal Society of London, focusing on his own observations using a microscope he designed (above).\u00a0 Recently, the literature seems to be encapsulating his diverse skills and interests by packaging him as\u00a0a Leonardo da Vinci-type character.<\/p>\n

Hooke initially gained a strong reputation as a designer of machinery and scientific instruments, and, beginning in 1655, he\u00a0was employed by the royalist Robert Boyle in Oxford to design air pumps and air pump experiments, while the Cromwellian regime was still in place.\u00a0\u00a0The effects of reduced air in an evacuated chamber\u00a0in\u00a0various kinds of experimental set-ups\u00a0quickly became\u00a0emblematic of the power of experimental inquiry.\u00a0 After\u00a0Charles II was restored to the\u00a0throne in 1660, the enthusiasm for new modes of inquiry moved its center to London where the Royal Society was established.\u00a0 Robert Hooke was named to the full-time paid position of curator of experiments for the Royal Society in 1662, where he lent his mechanical expertise as well as his showmanship to public performances of experiments, often with visiting dignitaries in the audience, when it was important that everything go according to design.<\/p>\n

Hooke also became a fixture in the London technical and philosophical vanguard.\u00a0 He\u00a0struck up relationships with several London instrument-makers, who constructed instruments according to his specifications, and with whom he shared his thoughts on technique and design.\u00a0 His relationship with the clockmaker Thomas Tompion was especially productive as Hooke entered into\u00a0a heated competition with the Dutch natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens to produce more accurate timepieces, which were especially crucial to solving the problem of determining longitude at sea, for which there was a cash prize on continual offer.\u00a0 It is this activity that resulted in Hooke’s formulation of his law, encoded as an anagram so as to ensure secrecy while guaranteeing priority (he unscrambled it two years later).\u00a0 Hooke, who had a difficult personality, was continually suspicious that his ideas were being stolen, and he bore grudges against particular individuals, such as the Royal Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, whom he accused of being a spy on behalf of Huygens.<\/p>\n

Hooke participated in a wide swathe of London society.\u00a0 The king took a personal interest in the work of Hooke and Tompion.\u00a0 After the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Hooke was hired by another intellectual fixture of London in that period, Christopher Wren, to partake in the surveying and reconstruction of the City.\u00a0 Hooke was a key figure in the design of the dome of the new St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Wren designed.\u00a0 On the other end of the formality spectrum, Hooke was also a fixture of London’s new and boisterous coffee shop scene, where lively debates ranging from natural history to philosophy to invention took place, and where the latest “intelligences” were shared.<\/p>\n

Hooke’s interests varied widely.\u00a0 In addition to his mechanical ingenuity, he participated actively in natural philosophical and mathematical debates, ranging from what fossils were to the way the universe works—he later became a bitter enemy of Isaac Newton, whom he suspected stole the inverse square law of gravitation from him.\u00a0 He held a private interest in medicine, experimenting constantly with the ingestion of various substances, which he hoped would cure him of his incessant ills, although they certainly did him more harm than good.<\/p>\n

One thing Hooke was not was a Fellow of the Royal Society.\u00a0 As he was not a member of the gentry class, and as he was <\/em>a hired employee of the Society, he was not a disinterested observer capable of reaching philosophical agreement.\u00a0 In this respect he was simply the most visible of what Steven Shapin has called the “invisible technicians”, the people whose contributions to knowledge-making were hidden when it came time to distill experimental work into philosophical “truth”.<\/p>\n

Not that it mattered much.\u00a0 Hooke’s intellectual work was well-appreciated in his time, and he was later named secretary of the Royal Society, who managed the Society’s all-important correspondence networks.\u00a0 However, later in life, his fortunes turned on his enmity with Isaac Newton, who was also a cantankerous figure who became extremely powerful in intellectual circles following the publication of the Principia Mathematica<\/em>.\u00a0 Newton became president of the Royal Society months after Hooke’s death, and some have suggested that Newton may have been somehow responsible for the fact that no portrait of Hooke survives.\u00a0 (Lisa Jardine thought she might have found one, but, as near as I can tell, the Univsersity of Cincinnati Libraries have the last word on this<\/a>, though I’m not up on this particular issue).<\/p>\n

Hooke is now an extremely well-understood figure.\u00a0 I’ve mentioned Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits<\/em> as a scholarly but accessible tour through Royal Society culture, and it contains a lot on Hooke; but Jardine has also come out with a full-scale biography: The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, the Man who Measured London<\/em> (2005).\u00a0 Also see London’s Leonardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke <\/em>(2003) by Jim Bennett, Michael Cooper, Michael Hunter, and Lisa Jardine.\u00a0 There’s plenty more out there, but that should tide over the curious.<\/p>\n

Bonus Update: Video of Jardine discussing Hooke<\/strong><\/p>\n

[googlevideo=http:\/\/video.google.com\/videoplay?docid=251952904822976995]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Popular history rarely communicates the fullness of scientists’ careers, concentrating instead on key “contributions” as they are often called.\u00a0 In the case of Robert Hooke (1635-1703), this would be an especially unfortunate approach, because he is an unusually vibrant figure in the “Scientific Revolution” era, a cultural-intellectual force who cannot be easily boiled down to<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Primer: Robert Hooke<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[961,1268,1322],"class_list":["post-652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ewp-primer","tag-lisa-jardine","tag-robert-hooke","tag-royal-society"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}