In Our Time - Robert Hooke

Episode Date: February 18, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Robert Hooke (1635-1703) who worked for Robert Boyle and was curator of experiments at the Royal Society. The engraving of a flea, above, is taken from his Micrographia which caused a sensation when published in 1665. Sometimes remembered for his disputes with Newton, he studied the planets with telescopes and snowflakes with microscopes. He was an early proposer of a theory of evolution, discovered light diffraction with a wave theory to explain it and felt he was rarely given due credit for his discoveries. WithDavid Wootton Anniversary Professor of History at the University of YorkPatricia Fara President Elect of the British Society for the History of ScienceAndRob Iliffe Professor of History of Science at Oxford UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, for two decades in the 17th century, Robert Hook was arguably the greatest natural philosopher in Britain, at the head of the new interest in science inspired by Copernicus and Descartes. He excelled everywhere. He studied the planets with his telescopes, the snowflakes, with his microscopes.

At the height of the Great Plague of 1665, his book, Micrographia captured the public imagination with its detailed engravings of fleas and the eyes of flies, never before seen. The finest maker of scientific instruments in Europe, he built the air pump for Robert Boyle, he devised a wave theory of light and on it went. Isaac Newton apparently acknowledged his debt to Hook with the phrase, if I've seen further, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants. That, though, was written during a long, bitter dispute, at the end of which Hook was largely written out of scientific history for about 300 years. With me to discuss Robert Hook are David Wooten, Professor of History at the University of York, Patricia Farah, President-elect of the British Society for the History of Science, and Robert Eilift, Professor of the History of Science at Oxford University.

David Wooten, in the early 17th century, natural philosophers were starting to throw of the old Aristotelian ideas. What was emerging? What was emerging? Was the new science? What were they throwing off, first of all? They were throwing off Aristotle, an Aristotelian view of the universe, which assumed that the universe was finite, that nature had purposes, and they were replacing it with a new mathematical science and a new experimental science, and a new science built on the acquisition of new information.

Bacon was the early 17th century English philosopher who'd argued that you must accumulate new information. Galileo had demonstrated the power of maths to make sense of the world. Kepler had developed a new Copernican astronomy, which was mathematically rigorous. And that's the tradition that people like Hook inherited at the middle. of the 17th century. And how did it come, well, did we arrive at the table rather late? How did it come to us? You've talked about persons who were not of this nation at the time.

Yes, we arrived at the table late. You mentioned Copernicus. There's a German tradition. Scientific Revolution really begins with Galileo in early 17th century, Italy. And it's there that the notion that you can accumulate knowledge by experimentation is developed. Torricelli, Galileo's pupil, does the first great vacuum experiments. Those are taken over in France by Pascal and Robert Boyle reads about Pascal's experiments

and wants to build equipment for making vacuum experiments in England. And so the English Revolution follows on Italian and French developments. An experiment is a key to it. Instead of theorising and going downwards from theory, you experiment and you go upwards to theory. Yes, Aristotelian philosophy had primarily been book-based. The new science is, you might say, it's an acronistic word laboratory-based.

Hook is really the first laboratory scientist. Can you briefly say where Hook came from and how he got into the gardens of one in Polish Oxford, which is our starting point? Well, we know less than we would like to. His father was a curate. He dies when Hook is 13. Hook is already or is about to be sent off to London. He inherits 50 pounds, which isn't very much,

perhaps enough to live on for a year or so. He's an originally apprentice to a painter Lily in London, but he doesn't take up that. He goes to Westminster School where he's taken in by the headmaster. How does he pay for himself there? We don't know. Right, okay.

That's the mystery. He seems to be adopted by people. He's come from the other white, which is royalist territory. The world is now governed by the Cromwellians, and it looks as if Hook is being picked up by royalists and looked after. Because he's such a bright fellow.

Because he's a bright fellow, of a sort of, but not in the classical way. I mean, they stay at Westminster School that he's never seen in lessons. So what's he doing? Later on, he says, he spends all his time bending over a lathe. Schoolboys aren't supposed to be bending over lathes in the middle of things.

Making things. He's making things. As a child, he makes a clock out of wood and he makes a ship that sails along and fires off guns. This is before the age of 13. He's made a complete model warship. So in that sense, he's always doing things with his hands. And he was taken up by a good school teacher, as so often that happens.

And then he sent off to university and to Oxford. As a servitor. Now what's that? Well, it means he's supposed to be in service to a member of a wealthy person. It's also a way of getting in cheap because servitors pay less entrance fees. So we can't actually find the person he's supposed to be serving. So we don't know if it's just... Is he actually serving him at the table, that sort of stuff?

That sort of thing. Yes, looks after him in and helps him in his studies and so. Yes, that sort of thing. But Newton also goes in as a servito, and there it seems to be just a trick for getting low fees. So we don't know quite what he's doing. What did he read at Oxford? Well, he doesn't matriculate.

He doesn't sign up, and he doesn't complete his degree. So we're still making boats and things? As far as, very soon after he gets there, he falls into the hands of these people who are setting up the first chemical laboratory and carrying out anatomical experiments. And it's even possible that he's sent from the Westminster in order to join up with these.

people. He doesn't seem to go to lectures. Instead, he finds the first laboratories and joins in with them. And at the time, we're in where at the time, the civil wars have come to an empire in the Commonwealth. There's a man called

Kahn and Wilkins, a scientist who wrote a book about flying to the moon, and he gathered around him a constellation of geniuses. That's what happened. And in Wormwood College Gardens in Oxford, they built all sorts of things like glass beehives and goodness knows what, and Hook became part of this

gang. Absolutely, and I think the most important collaboration at that stage in his life was with Robert Boyle. And as David mentioned, there was lots of... Can you explain Robert Boyle a little bit? Robert Boyle was an Irish clergyman who had... He was very, very rich, that's the important thing.

He was rich, he was very ambitious and he lived in Oxford, he wasn't at the university, and he wanted to build an air pump. An air pump is a large glass globe, about 15 inches across and it has a system at the bottom for extracting the air and it has a little lid on the top so that you can put things into the evacuated globe and the best illustration of it is the

one by Joseph Wright of Darby in the middle of the 18th century which shows a lecturer talking about an air pump and the lecturer has got a white cockatoo in the air pump and that's the sort of experiment that Boyle and hook did with their air pumps they had birds animals rabbits inside the air pump and if you take the lid off the globe then the animal can breathe if you put the lid back on and you've got a vacuum then eventually it dies so boil and hook work together on this air pump it was very difficult to do technically it's usually called boy as boils air pump but it's quite clear that it was hook that was in charge of a team of unnamed invisible assistants who were actually out there putting it all together it was very important

for several reasons. One is you could do very exciting experiments, like the one I've just described with little animals or birds. It was also very important in the debate against Aristotelianism that David was just describing, because according to Descartes and Aristotle, nature is full. There's the phrase nature abhors a vacuum. A vacuum was theoretically impossible. And what Boyle and Hook did with their air pump was to demonstrate that you can create a near vacuum. and that became conceptually very important for doing experiments because the notion is that you create a state of nature which doesn't normally exist, an artificial state of nature,

and you can infer things about the natural world from that. So you can show, for example, that if a bell is in the middle of the air pump and you can see the clapper going, but you take the air out and then you can't hear it, then you deduce that sound is carried by airwaves. This becomes the pattern in a way for Hook's life, doesn't it? He is the great instrument builder, and we're going to talk about the microscopes he amended and developed, telescopes you amended and developed all the again and again.

He's doing it on a colossal Leonardo da Vinci, as it was said at the time, scale. And yet he's not getting any credit for it. He's sufficient credit. Looking back, it doesn't seem that he was getting sufficient credit. He certainly thought he wasn't, and that was one of his constant complaints. Whenever anybody introduced something new, he said, oh, I did that 10 years ago, it. Nobody recognised that I did it. Part of the problem was that he was constantly looking for money.

So, as with Boyle, he was being paid, and he had to run around doing whatever it was that Boyle asked him to do. Boyle was paying him. Boyle was paying him, and then when Hook came to the Royal Society for a while, he was lecturing and giving demonstrations without them even having organized a salary. They eventually managed to get him a lectureship at a professorship at Gresham College. But he was always, he always had millions of different, projects on the go. I think partly because he was that sort of man, he had a very fertile,

energetic mind, but also because he needed money. Was he typical of the group of men at that time in being a generalist, or was he exceptional in being such a generalist? Most of the people at the time were a generalist. If you just think about someone even more famous, Isaac Newton, he was doing stuff on optics, he was doing stuff on gravity, he experimented with his eyes, he was doing stuff with alchemy, he was reading the Bible. The whole concept of a specialist, just didn't exist in those times. That's something that really emerged in the 19th century. There wasn't even the split that we would make

between the arts and sciences. So specialisation just didn't happen. One of his earlier and continuing in interest, Rob Arleff, was Springs. What attracted him to Springs and what did he discover? There was a law. He got a law named after him. The only law named after him was to do with Springs. Yeah, Springs really go through Hook's life.

I think from the earliest accounts we have of him, He's thinking of developing flying machines that must involve springs. 1648, the year that his father died, John Wilkins published this great book, Mathematical Magic, and it has a detailed account of how one might reach the moon. You know, they're executable, they're realizable, I think, in principle, according to the views of the time. And when Hook goes to study with Wilkins and others, in the late 1650s at Wadham,

we know that he devoted a very large amount of his time to progressing the development of chariots, of flying machines, I mean, hook developed wings, an ornithopter. What's an ornithopter? An ornithopter is a sort of helicopter that's like a bird. It's got a bird-like aspect to it, hence this kind of an ornithos.

No. But it's... I mean, most of Hooke's projects don't come to pass, but it's the fertility of his brain. No, no, I think it's the fertility of his inventions, of his inventiveness. And there are reasons why they don't come to pass, partly because he hasn't got the time to fulfill them, and partly because they can't really, in practice, be realized.

But the stuff on Springs really takes off in the... In fact, when he works with Boyle, because Boyle's entire program, I think, is premised on the idea that the air has spills, And that goes to the heart of hooks, not just his obsession with mechanical springs. And we're thinking about the wings of a fly, you know, and the kind of vibrations that come off from a fly's wings, which hook likens to the vibrations that come off when you play a musical instrument. But the whole idea of springs goes, as I said, to the heart of his mechanical devices. He works on springed coaches with Wilkins in the time of the plague.

It leads to the law, Hook's Law, which is essentially that in modern terms, the strain on an elastic object is proportional to the stress placed on it. But it also goes to his theory, his theory of nature. And his theory of nature is, I think, quite extraordinary because it involves the idea that objects, tiny objects, atoms, are intrinsically dynamic. They're full of energy, they vibrate. and I think things of them

as sort of thinks of tiny atoms as micro springs. You know, you can deform them, but then they will come back to the way they are and they send out vibrations through this invisible fluid, send out these waves that Patricia talked about through the ether, as he called it. David and Patricia alluded to this, but can we just nail it?

He was a tremendous instrument maker at a time of good instrument makers. He became a supreme instrument maker. Can you just say something about that? and how rare it was. He was bright. I think that there are a number of natural philosophers in England from the late 1640s

who are capable of making devices themselves and they see it as an important part of who they are. What are you talking about devices? You're talking about seriously. They grind their own lenses. So it becomes important for gentlemen like Jonathan Goddard, who's a physician, and Robert Boyle indeed,

to some extent make their own stuff. But they don't, after a point, they don't really do their stuff. they have joiners to do stuff. But Hook really did this stuff. Hook is interesting because we have, in the evidence from his diary, 1672 to 80, we have unprecedented information of how he worked in proximity to the closest instrument makers of the day. So we know that he gave them information, he gave them skills,

and he got stuff back in return from them. So I don't think necessarily we should say he's any better than they are, but he's no worse than they are. They learn from him and he learns from them. And quite soon in a few decades, London became the centre of instrument, the world centre of making these fine scientific instruments. I think London is becoming the centre in the 1650s. People are coming to London in the 1660s and they flock to London in the 1670s and 80s

to get the best instruments. And of course, what you have is a market that's based on, partly on the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. But more generally it's because England is becoming a trance. trading commercial nation to rival the Netherlands. And that starts in the 1650s. David Rorton, his first big splash, and some people still think his greatest,

was micrographia in 1665. It was a sensation. Can you tell us about it? Yeah. What makes micrographia a sensation is it's the first book which shows what you can do with the microscope. And it shows what can be done with the microscope because it's full of the most extraordinary illustrations

which Hook produces himself. He had almost become an artist. He can do wonderful illustrations. And so it shows an invisible world, primarily of things that you already know about. What's a flea look like through a microscope? And he does this enormous open-page spread of 18-inch flea, which goes on to become the sort of thing you get in Swift.

It's a nightmare flea that's there on the page. And in that sense, what Hook is doing is showing you the world that you're normally in touch with and how transformed it is through the microscope. this drawing was phenomenal wasn't it I mean he took a few lessons but he seems to have walked out after six or seven weeks when it was an apprentice thinking

well I've got the hang of this I can go on with the next thing yes he I mean again it's his skill with his hands partly and he is extraordinarily quick at picking up things and discovering how to do things but also in seeing ways in which

you can mass produce things we were talking earlier a moment ago about his contact with people like watchmakers Hook designs finds out how to make gears on watches so that you can effectively mass produce them so they're always the same. That makes it possible

to build a new sort of watch industry. And even when he's looking at a microscope, he invents a way of making the light 50 times greater than normal in order to see more. Yes, the problem we're looking through a microscope is what you see, 17th century of microscope is you see this very sort of unilluminated dark space.

And what Hook does is he finds ways of focusing the light on it. So he puts it through a globe of water. He has a mirror. He has an oil lamp. All of this to focus light onto the object that he's looking at so you can see it clearly. astonishing, isn't it? Patricia, what impact did it have? Micrographia? I think the pictures that David has just described had an enormous impact. Samuel Peep's, for example, reported that he bought one of the very early copies and he stayed up all night reading it. And the pictures and also the descriptions of the pictures are stunning. I mean,

he writes in a beautiful style describing these tiny little insects. And he makes jokes sort of, like a flea affects nothing so much as a crown, by which he means it affects the king and everybody else's heads as well. So he writes beautifully. He draws absolutely beautifully. Just seeing what he chooses to show gives you an indication of what 17th century life was like. There are things like crystals of frozen urine. There's fleas, there's fleas, there's lice. There's all sorts of things which we don't really know about now. A lot of the book was about his philosophical approach,

how he thought you should approach nature. It's in micrography. He's got that very famous phrase that what you should do is draw with a sincere hand and a faithful eye. But apart from that, I imagine that most ordinary people just knew about the pictures. But later on, when he was having... knowing Rouse with Newton and with other philosophers, he kept pointing back to micrographia and saying,

yeah, look, I did everything about optics in there. Yes, it's all in micrographia, and he refers people back to the written parts. I think the scientific world was interested in what he wrote. For ordinary people, his reputation was in the pictures. And it made the invisible visible, didn't he? Absolutely. It's worth saying that there was a theory behind this,

as there was behind, the overlapping systems of thought can't be ruled out, can they? These men are of the Enlightenment. as it were to now, but many of them were deeply religious and they brought their religion to bear on their work and in a way it steered some of their work I mean, when Newton used to say gravity which said once that gravity was God and so on

but in Hook's case he thought that after the fall we had sent all our faculties that been impaired we couldn't see really but this microscope would help us to see the real world as God had made it and it was a perfect world when you looked at all these fleas and lights and such In a way, the whole book is an example of natural theology, this way of arguing from the natural world to prove the existence of God, the great designer.

So, for example, he draws analogies, similarities between different things he looked at, because they're part of God's plan. But right at the beginning, he says, he follows Francis Bacon. He says, yes, our senses were damaged in the fall, and therefore, micrographia for him is the first installment in a grand project to enhance the senses. So, for example, thermometers are a way of picking up on the vibrations that Rob was talking about. So in a way, thermometers enhance the sense of touch. But he does things with hearing.

But now he's starting with microscopes that enhance the sense of sight. He also says, like Francis Bacon, that you should be very careful to eliminate from your mind any prejudices, any prior opinions. And that's why he says you should draw with a sincere hand and a faithful eye. So this is a religious enterprise all the way through you. Learn about the natural world to learn more about God. And he showed things from, then we'll come back that in a minute. I'll have to enough there. Robert Ali,

Patricia referred to his observations on light, which in micrographia. And of course, Newton's first great work is on optics. And as Patricia said, who went after him said, well, I did that a few years ago, if you don't have read my book properly. What was going on there? in the

in micrographia with his views on light because this is a compendium of a lot of his views this book as well as being what it is David described Yeah I think Hook's views are as they would say at the time

quite consonant so that they all hang together they're very coherent so Hook thinks that bodies whether they're comets or other kinds of bodies in the universe they shine they give off energies or vibrations

and shiny bodies give off waves that go out through this ether an optical ether. So there's this kind of invisible fluid that allows optical waves to go through it. How did you arrive at waves? It's such an idea.

How did he arrive at that? You can't even see them. You can see that when you chuck a stone in a pond, the waves ripple outwards. And there are many, you know, optical phenomena that mimic wave-like behavior. And Newton doesn't like that. Hook does.

But essentially what Hook says in a very obscure way is that there are two main colors, red and blue. And when the light goes through one refracting medium and hits another refracting medium in a certain way, you see it as red or blue depending on how the wave has hit that, the pulse, as he calls it, has hit this other medium. But combinations of these things can give rise. For example, when white light hits a prism, they give rise to the colours of the rainbow. So in the case of the dispute with Newton, as hooksies,

it, the prism is a refracting medium that modifies the white light into a series of constituent colours. And of course, for Newton, that's not right because in a sense the colours were in the white light or they constituted the white light before it hit the prism. And that's one of the main differences between them. It's a very big difference. And it became a serious row. I mean, we're talking about men who are at each other's throats for a while. I don't think that the wave corpuscle thing between them is the big

as big as later rows you made now well it's not as big as later rouse but I don't think in terms of the theory of light that that's the key issue it's certainly an issue of intellectual property that goes throughout their relationship it's waves versus particles and later on a few centuries down the line people are saying well lights both yes yeah that wasn't really available to them at the time David well the round with Newton is partly about the fact that Newton says

I've got the right answer. Hook says, that's a good answer, but I've got a good answer. Hook wants to say there are alternative hypotheses that might make sense of this. Newton wants to say, I've done an experiment which tells you what the right answer is. And running through Hook's early work, there's this fundamental tension between different views of science. On the one hand, he thinks following Bacon, that science will be based upon acquiring new information. You look through the microscope, you draw exactly what you see, you build up a body of information. On the other hand, he thinks science is about coming up with clever explanations for things.

Why are there craters on the moon? Is it being bombarded from outer space? He considers that possibility. He says it's impossible. So he builds a little tub of plaster, boils it up, and shows that popping could cause craters. And he says that's what's causing the craters on the moon. So he comes up with very bold explanations that are hypotheses. And he's one of the first to use the word hypothesis comes from Descartes in this sort of way.

The Royal Society is supposed to be opposed to inventing explanations. and Hook can't stop himself from doing it. Newton says, I'm not inventing expressions, I'm giving you the right answer. So you've got a sort of conflict about what the methodology of science is. There's also a practical thing that in micrographia, Hook developed something which now, rather annoyingly, from Hook's point of view, is called Newton's rings.

But it was Hook that discovered it, as if you have two plates of glass with a little gap of air between them, you get rings. So what Newton did was to get a flat plate of glass and put a very, very shallow lens on top, and he worked out mathematically how the rings are formed. There's a dark spot at the centre where the lens touches the glass, and then there's coloured rings all round it.

And what Hook did, Hook had shown it in micrographia, but then Newton took it over and provided a mathematical explanation. And that's quite a pattern in their relationship. As he did with gravity, David Wood, didn't he? And that's so we can maybe, you sort of rescued me, partly from the word row, which Rob challenged. but there was a distinct difference. In gravity, there was a great difference.

Yes. No, Newton and Hook have fallen out over the question of light. Then they don't communicate with each other for many years. In 1677, Hook is the, you've become the Secretary of the Royal Society, who writes to Newton, and he says, have you got any suggestions about this peculiar force that's holding the universe together? I've been thinking about this, and I've come up with the inverse, what we now call the inverse square law, which explains how gravity gets weaker as you go farther away from the source of the gravitational.

Does he come up with the word? He comes up with a formula. But not the word, not the word gravity. Oh, yes. I think, yes. Yes, he comes up with you. Yeah, yeah, he comes up with the word. And he says this to Newton.

And this is when Newton writes back the same set of correspondence about standing on the shoulders of chance. Now, because Hook has never seen anyone explain what gravity, is in terms of the inverse great law before. And because Newton comes along later and makes this the foundation of his theory of gravity, Hook throughout the rest of his life believed he'd given this idea to Newton. And Newton had stolen it insofar as Newton publishes it without acknowledging his debt to Hook. In fact, we know that Newton had already come up with this idea already. Hook wasn't telling Newton anything he didn't know.

But you can understand that from Hook's point of view, it looks as if his idea has been stolen and he's furious. Well, he's dealing with the most secretive man in the news. universe at that time, Newton, isn't he? Indeed, and this is a world in which everybody is engaged in parity disputes. You know, Newton later on falls out with Leibnets over who's invented calculus.

Everybody is saying, you've stolen my idea. Hook isn't alone in being acutely sensitive to this. But it's similar, as with the lens, that Hook and Newton both suggest that the path of the planets might be ellipses if there were an inverse square law. But what

Newton did was bluff, say yes, the pattern would be in ellipse. And then he spent the next two years dedicating himself to doing the mathematics to prove that it was an ellipse. So again, it's a similar sort of priority debate about ideas and working out the maths. I mean, I think the key thing here is Newton's mother died in 1679. He tended to her for six months. He came back in November 1679 and he found Hook's letters on his desk. And what Hook says in that initial letter, which is a remarkable letter, referring back to a book that Hook had published five years earlier, a book called An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth.

What Hook said is all bodies attract, all celestial bodies attract centrally. So they attract things to themselves. The second thing is that you can compound motion, so you can analyze the orbits of planets by thinking of them as rectilinear motion in a tangent. So you can think of planets as moving in a way that, they would move in a straight line, except they're constantly pulled back by this attractive force. So just two very simple ideas.

And the third thing is the inverse square law, the one over R squared law. Now, Newton knows this, as David has just said, he's known it for a long period of time. But what he doesn't know is that you can analyze orbital motion through rectilinear motion plus central attractive force. That's what Hook teaches him. And that is what Hook wants.

He also wants the inverse square law. He wants Newton in Procipia to reference the inverse square law. And he also wants Newton to reference the fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid because it's flattened at the pulse, which for Hook is extremely important because Hook has a theory of how the Earth has changed over time. And it's a brilliant theory. It's a remarkable theory. So Hook wants that.

He doesn't get any of them. He gets nothing. He gets nothing from Newton. And Newton acts in incredible bad faith in 1686, 87, just as the Prince of the Prince of him. Kippe is published. But for Newton's point of view, what Newton certainly didn't understand until he reads this letter from Hook is how you describe

and how you explain orbital motion. But in fact, all that Hook has done there is take Galileo's principles of what's happening if you're firing a cannonball that are trying to go in a straight line and then it's also falling. It's doing two things at once, traveling in a straight light and falling simultaneously. Apply that to

orbital motion of planets. So, in a sense, Hook has only told Newton something that Newton already knew and that everybody has already known he's shown him how to apply Galileo to the heavens. And consequently I think there's a sense in which Newton must have thought oh, that's obvious. I don't have to

attribute it to Hook because we've already known that. But bringing those ideas together, Hook is actually the first person to do when Newton should have said I wouldn't have seen it or it hadn't seen it until Hook pointed it out. Is there a sense, Persia, can you give the listeners some idea of we've got the raw society we all think of it as goodness me

and then there was light? Is there a sense that this row is going on between a dozen men and people in London are writing stage plays making fun of these scientists anyway and so on. Oh well the most famous example of that is Thomas Shadwell's play The Virtuoso which

the central character Nicholas Gimcrack is based on Hook and they have farcical scenes on that where one of the most famous is where Gimcrack's lying on a table and he's being taught how to swim but he never will actually be able to swim in water he never will become

a frog and Hook was absolutely furious when he was in the audience and that was how well known he was. He knew that everybody in that theatre was laughing at him. The Royal Society was a source of mockery because a lot of people were just sitting around

discussing what's the nature of the air. Well, that's not much help. I can breathe. I don't need to know what's in the air. So there were a lot of jokes of that sort. There was a lot of mockery at Hook himself. Was there something, David, that was a compound of mockery, wasn't he? We told you

was a small man and perhaps and he seemed to be constantly ill. He was not a wealthy man. Because of his post as Grussian professor, he was not allowed to marry. He lived in Romans with a couple of servants and so. Was there a sense that some were some Boyle and people were independent and wealthy?

What was going on? Why was he disregarded so often? Why was he disregarded? He's crooked. He's small. He starts off being poor. He starts off, he's an employee. He boils the employee, which is why I think Boyle initially doesn't feel he has to recognize him because it hooks his fancy lab assistant.

A sort of servant? Yes, he's a servant. And he becomes the servant of the Royal Society, and they treat him a bit like a servant. But then remarkably, I said he didn't matriculated Oxford and he didn't study for his degree. But in 1662, I think it is, the University of Oxford gives him an M.A. And after he's been given an M.A. for nothing, he's elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Well, for quite a lot. He'd done quite a lot of work. He didn't take an exam. He's not taken any exams. He's then elected a fellow. of the Royal Society. Once you've got a university degree, you are by definition a gentleman. He's moved up in social status and he

begins to regard himself and it begins to some degree to be treated as an equal with other people. So one of the things Hook is doing is he's moving up in social status and there's an awkwardness about whether people will recognise this which isn't helped by the fact that he's a profoundly awkward character himself.

Can I just say Hook dies in 1703 with 9,500 pounds, which is an unbelievable amount of money. He's already quite wealthy by the early 1670s. He doesn't have to work for hire by the early 60s. Because he insists on getting paid for everything, and particularly after the Great Fire makes a lot of money reorganising London.

But he's throwing himself into the world. He leads this active life, this Feta Activa, that Bacon enjoins, and he can't stop himself. And one of the problems is because he's pulled in so many directions, he can't finish anything. The other problem, which is related to one of the projects, he's got to undo the damage of the fall is to create an infrastructure so that you can memorialise or make a memory, a recording of all the things that have been done.

But his main problem is that all the great things he's done, and he's done great things, were given as lectures and demonstrations to the Royal Society. So when Henry Oldenberg, the secretary, died in 1677, you know, the first thing Hook does after he's elected as a secretary is he goes back over the records and he finds out what he already wants to find, which is that Oldenberg is a rascal or a dog who has deliberately refused to record Hook's great discoveries. And the hook folio that's online, I think, is available to the listeners, shows Hook's efforts over a period of, what, 15, 20 years to do right by himself. And, you know, towards the end of his life. Why did Oldenberg cut him out?

That's a very good question. And it... Oldenberg, actually, in a sense, gave the Royal Society's international status by having these transactions, having a print. Then they could go to Germany and Holland and Italy and so on. And America, of course, but... I think until the hookfolio was discovered seven, eight years ago, actually ten years ago, now time flies.

We had no evidence that Oldenberg deliberately excluded Hook from the records, but that shows conclusively that he did. And I think it derives, particularly in the last two years of Oldenberg's life, when there is this dispute with Christian Hewiggins, over the invention of a balanced spring watch, because that's the great invention for Hook. He wants that badly, and Oldenberg effectively stops him from getting the credit for that. It's curious, isn't, and why are they all against him?

He was doing nothing but help them, and he must... Anyway, never mind. I think after the Great Fire of London, when he became the city surveyor, and he was working very closely with Wren and rebuilding the city, I think he paid less and, we had less and less time to spend at the Royal Society, so he was quite often sort of recycling old experiments and old ideas. And yes, I mean, he was one of the extraordinary things

that he was incredibly wealthy. He had this huge amount of money. But he just didn't show it. He didn't spend it. He had the reputation of being a miser and he was always very shabbily dressed. And another thing that we haven't talked about it, he was constantly taking drugs.

He was constantly, constantly medicating himself. He's left his dowry. He was absolutely obsessed with every sniffle. He was particularly obsessed with his bowels like a lot of 17th and 18th century gentlemen were. And he had this idea that the more times he was sick, the more purgatives he took, the clearer his mind became. So he was constantly dosed up.

Right, well, we'll go today. Sorry about that. Is there any sense of a constant philosophy behind his work? Or is it just constant invention and total work? The philosophy, I think, hook designs machines, but he also thinks that the universe is a machine. And what he thinks he's seen through his microscope is how creatures like flees are little machines.

So in that sense, his philosophy is a mechanical philosophy. You use machines to explore a world that's been created by God as a great machine. And that's a fundamental understanding that enables him to see a coherence between his own practical task and what God himself has done when he's made the universe. But can I just go back to the fire of London?

Because I think Hook's life falls into two halves. up until the fire of London in 1666 he's struggling to make money he's poor he's a servant he's doing what people tell him to do after 1666 he's coining it he becomes the key surveyor who lays out the plan of the new London he's in charge of compensating people when their land is taken away from them to build new wider roads

he's in charge of settling disputes between neighbours over party walls and so on he designs 40 new churches 13,000 houses have been burnt. 65,000 people have been made homeless. Hook is the man in charge of rebuilding London. And that's, I think, as far as we can tell, where the £9,000 that he's got.

9,000 pounds is over a million in modern money. It makes him he dies as rich as Boyle, who's always regarded through his life as being enormously rich. He dies as rich as John Locke, who's a great successful investor and has a fantastically successful career. Now, there's all in a chest underneath his bed. It's all in a chest underneath his bed.

He inherits his chest from his father, I suspect. It's probably the same chest. Hook carries on behaving as if he's still poor. He doesn't adapt to having changed his own life. And it's true that he never finishes things. The one thing he never fails to finish is building works. He becomes an architect. He does all that stuff efficiently and on time.

Meanwhile, the Royal Society is saying, come and do some experiments for us. And he's too busy making money. We haven't time ready to fit in the geology and everything. It was very interesting about these old bones that were discovered about geology and managed to try to fit that end to the short 4,000-year

BC span of creation of the earth. Rob, you're looking impatient. I think he's remarkably innovative in the field of thinking about bones, mammoths from Siberia, the famous Kentish hippopotamus. So he's very unlike some of his contemporaries, he's prepared to think that things like

Ammonites, Bellamites, Trialabar. are the remains and shells. They're the remains of living things. But that makes the 4,000 year, 6,000 year history of the world very, very difficult to sustain. And he is prepared to think the unthinkable. He's prepared to think, you know, almost uniquely in his time that the 4,000, 6,000 year history of the earth can't be right.

The other thing that's interesting is he looks at the coastlines of Ireland, Africa, and he looks at the coastlines of what's known of North America and South America. And he says they look as though they fit into each other. you know, and you can make some inferences from that about how the history of the world has come about. You know, that kind of theory of continental drift is put about in the 20th century. And we could go on about the things he just kept inventing,

but his reputation declined steeply in the last 15 or so year was Newton, and partly risk. Newton seemed to get it in from him. There's not a portrait of him. Newton filled his place with portraits of other people, but there's not a single portrait of Hook remaining. Well, Newton became... If there ever was one.

Well, we don't know if there ever was one, but certainly one of the first things that Newton did when he became president of the Royal Society, first of all, he shipped in his own large portrait and had his name put on it in gold letters, and then he got all the other fellow's portraits in there. And Hook's portrait, if there was one, somehow miraculous he didn't find its way to the Royal Society.

Hook died in 1703, 2003 and 1704, Newton publishes his book about optics, and then he was president for over 20 years. And if you're president of the Royal Society, it's pretty easy to suppress somebody's reputation. A very similar thing happened at the end of the 18th, early 19th century with Joseph Banks. His Victorian successors didn't like the way he'd governed the Royal Society for 42, 43 years. And his reputation was suppressed. And he also was resurrected around about the time of hook at the end of the 20th century. So I think there's quite a few historical characters like that who now, recently, historians are casting far more attention to.

Rob, how does his reputation stand now? He's been rediscovered. Well, how's his reputation sound now? I think in the last 30 years he's been rehabilitated. I think he's a remarkable man. He's just very unfortunate, first of all, to have been giving, doing his best work verbally, as it were, without it being recorded, you know, as soon as he gets the chance,

he publishes all his own stuff as lectures. But he's also obviously unfortunate to be born in the same era as Isaac Newton. And with Newton's triumphs, everyone else, with one or two exceptions, Christian Huygens, they're all obliterated. And I don't think Newton has, I mean, Newton is certainly one for holding graduates. Definitely. He's great at that. But he doesn't have to do anything. I mean, the triumph of his work, the work of his own disciples and acolytes

serves to obliterate the memory of Robert Hook. David? But his central problem is he's not really a great mathematician. What's the difference between Hook and Newton is that Hook is a great experimenter. He's a wonderful genius at devising experiments, explaining things through experiments, but he's not a great mathematician. And the new science is being made by the mathematicians, by Galileo, by Kepler, by Newton, and he can't keep up with them.

Absolutely. Maths is so central to modern science that we inevitably heroise Newton rather than an experimentalist, but they're both absolutely crucial for the development of science. Thank you very much, Patricia. Patricia Farah, David Wooden, Rob Eiliffe.

Next week we'll be talking about Mary Magdalene, sometimes called the Apostles Apostle. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Now, what did we miss out?

Your Honour. Comparing Newton and Hook, it's quite interesting to think of them geographically, that Hook basically lived in the Isle of White, Oxford, and London, and Newton only ever lived in Grantham and Walthorpe and Cairns in London. So both of them had these very sedentary lives based in three places. And when the Great Plague was on, and they both escaped and went to the countryside,

Newton went back to Walshaw, and that was when supposedly the apple fell, and he did all his great experiments with the prisons. At the same time, he was doing all that. Hook was staying with a friend up on the Downs near Bantstead, and he found seashells, and that was what he was thinking about how the earth was created and how the temporary flood doesn't make sense in terms of developing the earth. So you've got these

two men whose lives are intertwined in three different places or doing similar things. It's a thinking isn't it? You pick up a seashell if you're me and you think, isn't that lovely? You pick up a sea shell if you hook, you think, where did that come from? And if you're

Isaac Newton, you stand on the shore and you say, I'm like a little boy who's watched the sea coming in. No, no, but I'm as a boy standing on the shore picking up a pebble rather better than all the others

but what I see before me is the great ocean of truth. He could never have said that. He could never have said that. He's not articulate enough. It's got a poetic emotional touch to it. Exactly. And he said he despised poetry large.

He was writing his own, yeah. But where a hook comes from in the Isle of Wight, there are lots of fossils. What's extraordinary about it, in a way is that he carries the memory of those fossils through his life. He looks at petrified wood through his microscope and says, this is wood, but it's turned to stone. Standard view at the time is that fossils are somehow made by nature,

and they just look like they've been living creatures, and they aren't really living creatures. Hook, following Leonardo before him, says, these are real, the remains are real live creatures. And then he makes this extraordinary step and saying, well, some of these things no longer exist, so some creatures must have disappeared. And this is, I think, the brilliant move.

He says, maybe there are creatures alive now that used not to exist. And in that sense, he has a notion that the population of living beings has changed over time. He's the first person, I think, to be clear about that. That doesn't mean it's evolution, though, does it? It could be, you know, separate creations by God.

You wanted to have a bit long flood and things like that. Did Newton say, you probably tell me, Didn't Newton say gravity as God or God was gravity? So he didn't say that either. He didn't say a lot, do you? He does think that the real cause of all the things that happen in the world is God. Because it's neither a material nor a spiritual cause. And I think in private he does think that the cause of gravitation is God, but gravity is not God. That's a terrible idea.

Where did I get this quote from? Did I misread it or? Because I couldn't have made it up. Newton said that God sort of somehow permeates the universe. It's a sort of quick sandbite to say. God is gravity, but it's not actually, or gravity is God, but... I mean, it's rather like the seashore. I mean, he doesn't do... He doesn't do elegant sun, like someone else must have done that for him.

No, someone else. It's a late 18th century. One thing we did leave out was a colossal row he had with Havilius about telescopes and whether or not you should use lenses in the eyepiece or whether you should use the naked eye. And the last pickplate and micrographia has got this marvellous show-off picture of a crater on the moon, There's a great big bit, which is how Hook sees it through his telescope. And there's these tiny little dots that Havilius and someone else see through their telescope.

And then he goes into a long soliloquy about how, well, the crater looks like a pear, and the earth and the moon must be similar. And the next thing, he's got this short vegetable coat, by which he means grass, this short vegetable coat growing on the moon like it does on Salisbury Plains. He doesn't quite get the sheep out there, but you can see them coming. And then he says he hypothesizes that there is a force like gravity up on the moon like there is down on the earth below. And the force like gravity

on the moon is already there in Copernicus. Copernicus is quite clear that there would need to be a pattern of attraction. But let's defend Havilius for a moment. Havilius has some of the most wonderful telescopes. Havilius simply believes that for measuring the location of bodies in the

heavens, natural eyesight instruments of the site sort that have been used by Tico Braid are better than anything because if you try and put a lens in what you'll get his vibration and you won't be able to calibrate it properly. I think the BBC is going to interrupt this broadcast. Enter our producer, bearing news.

Yes, great news. Tea or coffee. Coffee, please. I've got a question. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Yes. Was he being generous or not? Oh, sarcastic. No. No. It's been sarcastic.

No, he's not being sarcastic. He was addressing that to hook, though, was he? If I have been, you know, if I've seen further than others, it's because I've been standing on the shoulders of giant. But he's seen further than others. saying, I've seen further than you. But also, he's just said, Descartes did a little step, and you did a bit more.

And then he's saying, I stood on the shoulders of giants, I'm not you and Descartes. Yeah, but in the previous letter, he's just said, you stole everything from Descartes. And I destroy what you didn't take from Descartes. That's the previous letter. You can says that to hook, yeah, yeah. Hold on.

But is it, in this phrase that I've stood on the shoulder of giant, does he mean hook? Yes, he does. The letter is to hook. So he isn't being sarcastic. No, it's not something. Right. He's saying,

because Hook's a little guy, he is being sarcastic. No, no, he's flattering hook. He's trying to. I don't know if he got it from Shart. If he knew about the way that this was used in the Shardt. Yes.

It was quite... It was quite a colloquial turn of phrase. Wonderful to see, aren't you? I don't, I don't agree. I don't think he... I mean, unless he woke up... Do you want to your coffee? We've got limited time.

You can't make a remark like that to someone who's totally bent over and getting... has been since he was 16 and is getting worse and worse and worse because Hook apparently had some awful inherited disease. There are many more science and discussion programs from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4.