Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke FRS (18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) is an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath who plays an important role in the scientific revolution, through both experimental and theoretical work.

His adult life comprises three distinct periods: as a brilliant scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but eventually becoming ill and party to jealous intellectual disputes.

These issues may have contributed to his relative historical obscurity.

Hooke is known for his law of elasticity (Hooke's law), his book, Micrographia, and for first applying the word "cell" to describe the basic unit of life.

Even now there is much less written about him than might be expected from the sheer industry of his life: he is at one time simultaneously the curator of experiments of the Royal Society and a member of its council, Gresham Professor of Geometry and a Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire of London, in which capacity he appears to have performed more than half of all the surveys after the fire.

He is also an important architect of his time, though few of his buildings now survive and some of those are generally misattributed, and is instrumental in devising a set of planning controls for London whose influence remains today.

Allan Chapman has characterized him as "England's Leonardo".

Hooke had studied at Wadham College during the Protectorate where he became one of a tightly-knit group of ardent Royalists centered around John Wilkins.

Here he is employed as an assistant to Thomas Willis and to Robert Boyle, for whom he built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's gas law experiments.

He builds some of the earliest Gregorian telescopes, observes the rotations of Mars and Jupiter, and, based on his observations of fossils, is an early proponent of biological evolution.

He investigates the phenomenon of refraction, deducing the wave theory of light, and is the first to suggest that matter expands when heated and that air is made of small particles separated by relatively large distances.

He performs pioneering work in the field of surveying and mapmaking and is involved in the work that leads to the first modern plan-form map, though his plan for London on a grid system is rejected in favor of rebuilding along the existing routes.

He also comes near to deducing that gravity follows an inverse square law, and that such a relation governs the motions of the planets, an idea which is subsequently developed by Newton.

Much of Hooke's scientific work is conducted in his capacity as curator of experiments of the Royal Society, a post he holds from 1662, or as part of the household of Robert Boyle.

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