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History hasn't been particularly kind to Robert Hooke. Inescapably linked to Sir Isaac Newton, with whom he famously feuded, Hooke was also a notable associate of surveyor Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry. Gifted in everything from architecture to anatomical dissection, he perhaps spread his knowledge too thin to have had a towering impact on any one field. His versatility combined with an impolitic personality damaged Hooke's standing in his lifetime and, author Lisa Jardine convincingly contends, in the centuries since his death. Jardine, the author of On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life and Tumultuous Times of Christopher Wren , once again delves deep into the 17th century to resurrect the reputation of "a founding figure in the European scientific revolution." A London-based professor of renaissance studies, Jardine brings great enthusiasm to her task, even embarking on some detective work to discover what she convincingly contends is a long-lost painting of Hooke, whose appearance had heretofore been limited to unflattering descriptions by his contemporaries. As readable as it is thoroughly researched, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke will stand for some time as the definitive account of one of history's great dabblers. --Steven Stolder
From Publishers Weekly
English scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) is known to history more for losing quarrels with better-known scientists than for his achievements. He dared challenge Newton for credit as discoverer of the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction and lost. In his dispute with Dutch scientist Christaan Huygens over who invented the isochronous pendulum clock, Hooke fared slightly better, since it was discovered that unfriendly members of the fledging Royal Society were slipping word of his discoveries to Huygens. Cambridge Renaissance scholar Jardine follows up her 2002 biography of Christopher Wren with this satisfying rehabilitation of Hooke, Wren's colleague in rebuilding London after the devastating fire of 1666. Jardine argues that Hooke played an equal role in many of the projects attributed to Wren, most notably the dome of Saint Paul's and the Monument to the Fire of London. Hooke never made the leap into greatness by adequately working out and proving his "hunches," in large part because of other scientists' demands on his time. As a young man, he was Robert Boyle's trusted assistant. At the Royal Society, which he helped found, he served as curator of experiments and secretary. After the fire he was forced to juggle society members' increasingly unreasonable demands with his work as surveyor and associate to Wren. Hooke grew ill-tempered in his later years and was finally removed from his Royal Society posts. Jardine convincingly attributes his physical deterioration to decades of self-medicating and overwork. Sure to become the standard life of Hooke, Jardine's sympathetic study will please readers interested in the early years of modern science and scientific biographies. Illus. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Robert Hooke is usually remembered, when he is remembered at all, for having lost out in arguments with Isaac Newton over who should be credited for theories about the nature of light and the law of gravity. Hooke also had lesser-known quarrels, including one with the Dutch physicist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens over the design of a balance-spring watch, which was developed to solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. In fact, Hooke was engaged in so many different areas of 17th-century science and engineering -- and left so many ideas unrealized -- that he has been referred to as England's Leonardo. Rather than resort to mirror writing, Hooke employed another secretive device. To reserve credit for his original ideas while at the same time perhaps buying time to work further on them, he engaged in the then-current conceit of announcing discoveries in (Latin) anagrams. Among the most famous is the one that concealed Hooke's law of elasticity, which states that a force exerted by a spring is proportional to its extension, a fundamental concept in structural engineering. Born on the Isle of Wight in 1635, Hooke spent most of his adult life in London, where he became associated with the Royal Society, founded "for the promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning." In 1662, Hooke, who had served as assistant to the Oxford chemist Robert Boyle, was appointed curator of the all-important experiments for the new society, whose motto was Nullius in Verba, i.e., "Take no man's word for it." He soon also was made professor of geometry at Gresham College, an independent institution of the City of London dedicated to offering free public lectures, of which Hooke delivered many. After the Great Fire of 1666, Hooke was appointed surveyor to represent the interests of the City of London in the reconstruction. Christopher Wren, whom Hooke knew from Oxford, represented the interests of King Charles II. Hooke and Wren worked so closely together on the monumental project that their individual contributions are difficult to separate. But it was Hooke's surveying that essentially laid out the City of London streets in their present configuration. Lisa Jardine, who two years ago published a biography of Wren, now turns to Hooke, offering a clear sense of how harried he became at times, as he juggled his many interests, duties, obligations and anxieties. In describing his "curious life" she quotes liberally, if sometimes repetitiously, from his diaries to flesh out his personality. Among the many themes Jardine develops in this necessarily selective biography are Hooke's hypochondria and his seeming obsession with what went into and came out of his body.Hooke was such a visceral experimentalist that he himself became an extension of the store of equipment for which he was curator. He was also an insomniac, and so he sought correlations between what he ingested before bedtime and how he slept. When he slept "pretty well and pleasantly" he reported dreaming of "riding and eating cream." Jardine also makes clear that Hooke's using himself as an experimental vessel included taking a good many drugs and purgatives. He evidently believed that what Jardine calls his "pharmaceutical experimenting" enhanced and sharpened his mental ability, and she reads his morning-after dairy entries as showing "a consistent pattern of association of purging with mental alertness."Hooke was not the only member of the Royal Society who saw his own body as the ultimate curiosity and mystery of nature. Evidently many Fellows made their bodies available for experimentation after death -- the "Great Experiment." In one case, the results of an autopsy on a member who died of what was thought to have been a severe kidney stone were reported to a group of members at dinner. According to Hooke's diary entry on the case, it was "believed his opiates and some other medicines killd him, there being noe visible cause of his death."The range of visible observations had been extended in the 17th century by the microscope and telescope, both of which Hooke was very familiar with. Indeed, perhaps his most significant and enduring published work is Micrographia, a classic treatise on how to make and use the magnifying device. Jardine reproduces several illustrations from the book, including Hooke's illustration of fine "gravel" in urine and the more famous engraving of a flea, reduced from the original 18- by 12-inch plate to a still dramatic two-page spread in this well-illustrated biography.Unfortunately, no likeness of Hooke at any reduction or magnification has been known to survive, even though a portrait hung in the Royal Society during his lifetime, perhaps displaced after his death in 1703 by one of newly elected president, Newton. However, in a jarring but engaging first-person "postscript" to her introduction, Jardine reveals her long-held belief that Hooke's portrait was "more likely to have been mislaid or overlooked than destroyed." Indeed, she reports that she has found what she believes to be the portrait -- in London's Natural History Museum, where it had been mislabeled as one of John Ray, a Royal Society naturalist five years Hooke's senior. Since the likeness does not match the many other representations of Ray, but does match written descriptions of Hooke by his contemporaries, Jardine convincingly claims it to be of her subject. Even without the image, her lucid and easy-reading prose paints a vivid portrait of a curiously overlooked historical figure. Reviewed by Henry PetroskiCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
Because victors write history, Newton looms large in the chronicles of Western science while the contentious hunchback who once challenged him for primacy survives as a mere footnote. In this lucid biography, Jardine acknowledges that Hooke erred in attacking Newton, but she refuses to let Hooke's contentiousness eclipse his considerable contributions to British culture. Highlighting the obstacles facing a fatherless boy from a family of ruined fortunes, Jardine chronicles Hooke's plucky rise as a maker of precision scientific instruments, a keen-eyed illustrator, and a geometrically acute architect and surveyor. Readers see a remarkable man parlay diverse gifts into a career that included serving as lead surveyor of London after the Great Fire of 1666, collaborating with Wren on landmark architectural projects, and creating Micrographia, a sensationally illustrated work of microscopic research. But Jardine also discerns pathos in the career of a man who pursued so many disciplines that he finally frustrated his own ambition to join Copernicus, Kepler, and, yes, Newton in the pantheon of theoretical scientists. A remarkably coherent portrait of a kaleidoscopic figure. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Book News, Inc.
Jardine (Renaissance studies, Queen Mary- U. of London) draws on Hooke's diaries to chronicle the life of a quirky but under-rated polymath who contributed to many fields including the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666. The book includes period illustrations. It was first published by HarperCollins in Great Britain in 2003, and this is the first US edition.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Book Description
The brilliant, largely forgotten maverick Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor, architect, and inventor who worked tirelessly with his intimate friend Christopher Wren to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666.He was the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, and his engravings of natural phenomena seen under the new microscope appeared in his masterpiece, the acclaimed Micrographia, one of the most influential volumes of the day.
But Hooke's irascible temper and his passionate idealism provedfatal for his relationships with important political figures, most notably Sir Isaac Newton: their quarrel is legendary. As a result, historical greatness eluded Robert Hooke. Now, eminent historian Lisa Jardine does this original thinker of indefatigable curiosity and imagination justice and allows him to take his place as a major figure in the seventeenth century intellectual and scientific revolution.
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