The Curious Life of Robert Hooke by Lisa Jardine (HarperCollins).
Review / Roger Hainsworth

THE 17th century saw the birth of the modern world and a major contributor was the birth and lusty growth of modern science. The early century featured Galileo, Descartes, Dr Dee and Bacon. Later came a remarkable efflorescence and particularly in England: Newton, Boyle, Halley, Flamstead – and Robert Hooke. Of these luminaries of scientific discovery, Hooke’s name is probably the least likely to be recognised by today’s intelligent reader – unless they have read Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits (1999), her study of science in Stuart England, where I found him popping up frequently and tantalisingly. Now she has set out to do him justice in full.

Her biography is subtitled The Man Who Measured London, a reference to Hooke’s remarkable labours in surveying the acres of streets and building sites across the City of London following the Great Fire. In this work, which lasted for years and which involved architectural work as well as surveying, he was closely associated with Sir Christopher Wren. So closely, indeed, that much of Hooke’s achievements were subsumed into Wren’s creative work. It is now known that many of the famous “Wren churches” were really designed by Hooke. The collaboration of these scientists-turned-architects was so close that Dr Jardine omits from this biography of Hooke much relevant detail because she has already described their collaboration in her massive study of Wren, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren (2002).

Jardine sees this life of Hooke as a companion to her book on Wren and to Ingenious Pursuits, the three books forming a remarkable triptych. The daughter of Professor Jacob Bronowski, a famous scientific populariser, Jardine grew up in a household that recognised no gulf between the sciences and the arts. Throughout these three studies she has been concerned to explore what she called in Ingenious Pursuits “an intellectual anthropology” by examining how scientists actually work, how and why they make their discoveries and how they interact with each other and with the society in which they live. This is particularly true of this third volume.

Hooke was, like Wren, the son of a Royalist clergyman. He was born on the Isle of Wight, an intensely Royalist island. He had the good fortune in a time of misfortune for his family to be at Westminster School under the benevolent tutelage of the famous Dr Busby. Later he entered Oxford University and became an assistant to that remarkable aristocrat turned scientist, Robert Boyle. He early demonstrated an extraordinary ingenuity in inventing and fabricating all manner of scientific apparatus, including Boyle’s famous air pump (which created a vacuum). Boyle provided the theory, Hooke provided the pump. Later Hooke became Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, which gave him a salary and rooms in Gresham College. Happily for Hooke and the Royal Society the Great Fire was halted yards from the College.

When he became the official surveyor of the City of London for the rebuilding in 1666, Hooke did not surrender his Royal Society position, or indeed any others he might have picked up, and it was unfortunate for his later fame that he spread himself too widely, starting hares he could never find the time to chase. This often resulted in bitter quarrels over priority in scientific discoveries: Priority was as obsessively valued then as it is in today’s era of the Nobel prize and other passports to fame and fortune. Newton most ungenerously gave Hooke no credit for the discovery of gravity although it was not a falling apple but a brilliant suggestion in a letter from Hooke that set him on the track. Hooke theorised that the gravitational attraction between two bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. It was only an unproven postulate but Newton had both the time and the intellectual capacity to do the complex calculations (although it took him seven years) and Hooke possessed neither.

In his last years, Hooke changed. His pioneering work in gravity, in inventing the coil spring watch and in microscopy, seemed insufficiently acknowledged. Even his remarkable architectural achievements (including the Royal College of Physicians and the magnificent Bethlehem Hospital) did not earn him fame. Like most architectural masterpieces of that period, they tended to be ascribed to Wren. He was also often ill. Hooke was an extraordinarily resilient man who was a perpetual invalid because he was a hypochondriac who experimented with every medical fad and nostrum of his day, and they were legion – and dangerous.
In middle-life he was affable, gregarious, good-natured, with many friends. His self-poisoning, combined with his anxieties about his own fame, later gave him a reputation for cantankerousness, bitterness and secretiveness. Lisa Jardine has rescued him from himself and restored him to a deserved fame. Along the way we experience a vivid recreation of life in 17th century London. This book enriches as well as informs.