Robert Hooke
Article
by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson (University of St. Andrews, Scotland)
Robert
Hooke
No picture...why? click here
Born: 18 July 1635 in Freshwater, Isle of Wight,
England
Died: 3 March 1703 in London, England
Robert Hooke went to school in Westminster where he learnt Latin and
Greek, but unlike his contemporaries he never wrote in Latin. In 1653 he went
to Christ College, Oxford where he won a chorister's place.
At Oxford Hooke
met Boyle and in 1655 he was employed by Boyle to construct his air pump. In 1660
he discovered Hooke's law of elasticity. Hooke worked on optics, simple harmonic
motion and stress in stretched strings. For 30 years he was professor of geometry
at Gresham College, London, being appointed there in 1665.
The year 1665 was
the one when Hooke first achieved worldwide scientific fame. His book Micrographia,
published that year, contains beautiful pictures of objects Hooke had studied
through a microscope he had made himself. The book also contains a number of fundamental
biological discoveries. Pepys wrote in his diary
Before I went
to bed I sat up till two o'clock in my chamber reading Mr Hooke's Microscopical
Observations, the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.
Hooke
invented the conical pendulum and was the first person to build a Gregorian reflecting
telescope. He made important astronomical observations including the fact that
Jupiter revolves on its axis and his drawings of Mars were later used to determine
its period of rotation. In 1666 he proposed that gravity could be measured using
a pendulum.
In addition to his post as professor of geometry at Gresham College,
London Hooke held the post of City Surveyor. He was a very competent architect
and was chief assistant to Wren in his project to rebuild London after the Great
Fire of 1666.
In 1672 Hooke attempted to prove that the Earth moves in an ellipse round the Sun and six years later proposed that
inverse square law of gravitation to explain planetary motions. Hooke wrote to
Newton in 1679 asking for his opinion:-
of compounding the celestiall
motions of the planetts of a direct motion by the tangent (inertial motion) and an attractive
motion towards the centrall body ... my supposition is that the Attraction always
is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall...
Hooke seemed unable to give a mathematical proof of his conjectures.
However he claimed priority over the inverse square law and this led to a bitter
dispute with Newton who, as a consequence, removed all references to Hooke from
the
Principia.
No
portrait of Hooke is known to exist. A possible reason for this is that he has
been described as a lean, bent and ugly man and so he may not have been willing
to sit for a painting of his portrait.
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