Robert Hooke was one of the most gifted men of his age. His misfortune was to live in the same age as Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren, pushing Hooke into the historical shadows. Yet with a new book revealing just how much this ‘English Leonardo da Vinci’ contributed to the science and architecture of the 17th century*, a three century old injustice is being redressed.
Hooke’s place in East End history is sealed by his design for the rebuilding of the infamous Bedlam hospital, eventually demolished to make way for Liverpool Street rail station in the 1870s.
But Hooke achieved much more than that, being an architect, scientist, inventor and working closely with his friend Wren on building a new London in the wake of the Great Fire.
Hooke was born the son of a curate at All Saints Church in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, in 1635. Here his father John ran a small school attached to the church.
Nobody expected Robert to reach maturity. Constantly sick, he suffered blinding headaches which made studying hard; the boy was excused lessons and left to his own devices.
But if he had a weak body, Robert had a keen eye and brain. He made detailed sketches of the plants, animals, farms, rocks, cliffs and sea of the island. And he was fascinated by mechanical toys and clocks. Observing a watchmaker dismantling and fixing the family timepiece, Robert built his own clock, entirely from wooden parts. The boy began to view nature itself as a complex machine, and determined to unlock its secrets.
Moving to London, Hooke enrolled at Westminster School, and had read the first six books of Euclid’s Elements by the end of his first week. He then quickly worked his way through the school library, learning Latin and Greek and especially geometry.
Music was another interest and he learnt to play the organ. In 1653, he felt he had learned all he could at school, and entered Christ College, Oxford where he won a chorister’s place.
There was an explosion of talent at Oxford at that time, with Thomas Willis, Seth Ward, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, John Wallis, Christopher Wren and William Petty regularly meeting as the ‘philosophical college’. Hooke learnt astronomy from Ward and Wilkins gave him a copy of his book Mathematical Magick, on the wonders of mechanical geometry.
Leaving Oxford, Hooke went to work with Boyle, who employed him to construct an air pump. The design that Hooke devised is the basis for air pumps to this day.
Simultaneously he was thinking about how clocks could to measure longitude at sea, trying to develop a timepiece based on springs rather than pendulums. But though it could have made him a fortune, when Hooke realized that a patent would allow anyone who improved on his design to receive the royalties, he sulkily scrapped the work. It was an attitude that was to blight his later years.
He was now made curator of the newly formed Royal Society. Hooke’s energy was prodigious and his flow of ideas and inventions gave the Society huge impetus in its first years.
He invented the conical pendulum and was the first to build a Gregorian reflecting telescope. By observing spots on its surface, he discovered that Jupiter revolves on its axis. And in 1666 he proposed gravity could be measured using a pendulum.
In 1665 Hooke achieved worldwide scientific fame. His Micrographia contained beautiful pictures of objects Hooke studied through a microscope he made himself. Samuel Pepys wrote ‘I sat up till two o’clock reading Mr Hooke’s Microscopical Observations, the most ingenious book ever I read.’
Physicist, artist, astronomer … and Hooke also held the post of City Surveyor. A fine architect, he was chief assistant to Wren in his project to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666.
At the height of his fame, Hooke was about to undergo a long and bitter decline – at least partly of his own making.
Isaac Newton produced his theory of light and colour in 1672 to general acclaim. But Hooke claimed the good bits in Newton’s theory were stolen from Hooke’s work, and the original bits were wrong. Picking a fight with the most brilliant, original and ambitious scientist England had ever seen was a bad move. Newton removed all reference to Hooke – once a friend – from his Principia.
He would increasingly wander out for walks alone in the fields around Spitalfields. Troubled by headaches, giddiness, and fainting he kept away from fellow scientists, emerging only to complain they’d ripped off his ideas. Huygens’ ideas on gravity were dismissed, along with Newton.
Hooke died in 1703. Written out of the history books, he was described as a ‘lean, bent and ugly man’. For centuries it was believed he avoided having his portrait painted – none were found and some grotesque hook-nosed cartoons stood in their stead.
For one of the great creative and scientific minds of the 1600s it was a dramatic decline. But in recent years, a portrait painted for the Royal Society was found, drawing a less caricatured image. And with Michael Cooper’s fascinating new book a full picture emerges of the lost genius.
A More Beautiful City by Michael Cooper, Sutton Publishing, £20, ISBN 0750929596