Robert Hooke (1635-1703)
Category: Jointed Couplings
Item Number: P01
Description: Universal joint
Image source
Robert Hooke was born on July 18, 1635. As a child he survived smallpox, but was scarred physically and emotionally for life. When Hooke was thirteen years old, he became an orphan and was sent off to London. He was lucky in London to meet the painter Sir Peter Lely, and with him Hooke developed his artistic skills. As a boy, Robert Hooke had shown also considerable interest and skill in mechanical things. This, along with Hooke's intelligence, did not escape the notice of Richard Busby, who saw great genius in Hooke, and got involved to the extent of taking the boy into his own home.
In 1653 after graduating from Westminster School, Hooke moved to Oxford University, working his way through as a servant as had Newton in Cambridge. At Oxford, Hooke met physicist Robert Boyle, becoming his paid assistant. During his time with Boyle, their greatest accomplishment was the construction of the air pump. Hooke stayed with Boyle until 1662 when Boyle helped Hooke secure the job as Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society. No job could have suited Robert Hooke more and most other scientists less, than the job of Curator of Experiments. His task there was three to four major experiments each week to be reported on and/or demonstrated to the Royal Society. The experiments varied in topic greatly, some of chemical nature, some of astronomy, some of biology; all were considered Natural Philosophy. Hooke performed it excellently for forty one years until his death.
In 1663, Hooke was elected a Fellow of the Society. In 1665, he was appointed Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. The same year he published his Micrographia, a book with elaborate drawings of various things under the microscope. Hooke had taken close observations of the comets of 1664 and 1665, as well as collecting data from other astronomers. In 1666, after the Great Fire of London, Hooke was appointed surveyor of London, designing many buildings including Montague House, the Royal College of Physicians, Bedlam and Bethlehem Hospital.
In 1677, after Henry Oldenburg's death, Hooke succeeded him to the post of Secretary of the Royal Society while still maintaining his responsibilities as Curator. Hooke continued in this capacity until 1683 when the post of secretary was filled by Richard Waller who would eventually write Hooke's biography.
Hooke was interested in architecture. He often conversed about it with Christopher Wren. While Wren was constructing St. Paul's Cathedral, his greatest work, Hooke assisted in modifying the great arches of the structure.
Hooke anticipated some of the most important discoveries and inventions of his time. Among Hooke's contributions are the correct formulation of the theory of elasticity, the kinetic hypothesis of gases and the nature of combustion. He was the first to use the balance spring for the regulation of watches and devised improvements in pendulum clocks and invented a machine for cutting the teeth of watch wheels. An expert micro-scopist, his microstudies of the composition of cork led him to suggest the use of the word cell (meaning a tiny bare room, like a monk's cell), and the word survived as the name for living cells. The publication of his Micrographia in 1665, published in English, with its engraved magnifications of minute bodies, was a major milestone of English science.
Hooke was the first to report the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and the first to establish the rotation of the giant planet. He formulated the theory of planetary motion as a problem in mechanics, and pioneered the scientific trail that led Newton to his goal in the formulation of the law of gravitation. As a scientist, Hooke made useful contributions to the wave theory of light. His interests ranged from these matters to pre-Daltonian atomic studies, astronomy, earthquakes and the physics of spring mechanisms. He set the thermo-metrical zero at the freezing point of water and studied the relationship of barometrical readings to changes in the weather; he invented a land carriage, a diving bell, a method of telegraphy and he and ascertained the number of vibrations corresponding to musical notes.
The first confrontation between Hooke and Newton came in 1672. Newton had written a paper on his demonstration of white light being a composite of other colours. It was presented to the Royal Society just prior to Newton's reception as a Fellow of the Society. Newton thought a great deal of his demonstration, referring to it as "the oddest if not the most considerable detection wch hath hitherto beene made in the operations of Nature." But Newton was met with a strong rebuff by Hooke. Hooke had his own wave theory of light, he had gone into some detail about it in the Micrographia, and he still believed in it strongly. He claimed Newton had not proven his idea clearly, and needed more detail.
In many ways, the problems between Hooke and Newton could be attributed to the traits they had in common, rather than to their differences of opinion on scientific matters. Both were short tempered. Both were quick to make someone an enemy. Both Newton and Hooke were suspicious of other people's motives, (especially each other's), to the point of paranoia. Newton seems to have always been that way. But Hooke seems have developed this trait later in life.
In other ways Hooke and Newton were opposite, almost as if they had all the wrong things in common. While Newton was a recluse, seldom dining out, Hooke was gregarious and loved nothing better than the coffee house. He often dined there and stayed until one or two in the morning, drinking some, and smoking and talking to friends. When it came to experiments and work, they were opposite also. Newton would work on one project relentlessly until he had defeated it. Hooke, and it must be said this attribute would be required of him if he was to do a proper job as curator of Experiments, flitted from one topic to another. He was, similar to Halley, curious to a fault about everything. It was quite probably the demands of his job as Curator of Experiments that kept Hooke from concentrating adequate time on any one subject. The very job at which he had worked so diligently and so faithfully would be the cause of later accusations of Hooke's work being "broken" and "disjointed."
The next major confrontation between Hooke and Newton surfaced openly in 1684. It concerned Newton's Principia, and the involvement Hooke had in it. Newton claimed Hooke had none, and quite a few historians have agreed; but a closer look at the events prior to the Principia's publication, leave little doubt that Hooke was indeed involved.
The year 1687 was indeed a dark year for Robert Hooke. The Principia was published, without recognition to Hooke. As if that was not enough, Hooke's niece also died that year. She was the niece who had captured the heart of the aging scientist. After the Principia publication and the death of Hooke's niece, his health declined at a greater rate. It is possible, judging by some descriptions, that Hooke was inflicted with Scoliosis, a crippling degenerative disease that causes an unnatural curvature of the spine and would account for his "incurvature" and stooping posture. But he stayed active until the last year of his life when he possibly had a stroke and was confined to bed. But Waller reported that his mind stayed clear until his death, though he became increasingly melancholy and disagreeable.
Hooke died on March 3, 1703, having been blind and bedridden the last year of his life. His grave location is not even known. Richard Waller published some of Hooke's works in 1705, dedicated to none other than Isaac Newton. This posthumous insult did little for Hooke and it is quite doubtful Newton appreciated it anyway. What remained of Hooke's works then passed to the Reverend William Derham, who was an old friend of Newton's and took until 1725 to publish any more of Hooke's works.
How to obtain accurate angular measurements ran through almost everything Hooke did, for astronomy was the most intensely instrumental of the sciences, and astronomers across Europe realized that it was on refined angles that arguments and theories must stand or fall. Hooke's lack of a micrometer was solved in 1667, when he saw Richard Towneley's instrument, which was based on a prototype of 1640 invented by the Yorkshireman William Gascoigne. This instrument used a pair of fine-pitched screws to move two pointers in the focal plane of a Keplerian telescope. By enclosing the object to be measured between the pointers, its angular diameter could now be computed to within a few arc seconds, if one knew the exact focal length of the telescope, and the pitch of the screw which moved the pointers. Hooke published an engraving of the instrument to accompany Towneley's description in 1667. Its principle was to lie at the heart of astronomical measurement down to the twentieth century. [38]
Hooke quickly developed the concept of using screw turns to measure angles in the remarkable quadrant that he described to the Royal Society in 1674. In this instrument, he attempted to avoid the problems of unequally drawn degrees on the scale of an astronomical instrument by cutting fine teeth into the brass edge of the quadrant. By rotating a precision tangent screw along these teeth, he hoped to be able to express degrees, minutes, and seconds in full and part turns of the screw. It was a brilliant and portentous idea and one of the earliest attempts to apply precision mechanics to astronomy. Unfortunately, like so many of Hooke's inventions, it went beyond the current skills of manufacture and failed to work properly. But one Hooke invention that was originally intended to form part of an astronomical instrument was his celebrated 'Universal Joint', which was devised to operate an adjusting arm of his Helioscope apparatus in 1676.
Sources for Further Information on Hooke:
1. Biography in Charles Gillispie (ed.). Dictionary of Scientific Biography. V. VI. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica.
3. Arnol'd, V. I., Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke. Pioneers in mathematical analysis and catastrophe theory from evolvents to quasicrystals (Basel, 1990).
4. Bogolyubov, A. N., Robert Hooke 1635-1703, Scientific-Biographic Literature 'Nauka' (Moscow, 1984).
5. Centore, F. F., Robert Hooke's contributions to mechanics: a study in seventeenth century natural philosophy (The Hague, 1970).
6. Chapman, A. "England's Leonardo: Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and the art of experiment in Restoration England", in Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 67, 239 - 275 (1996).
7. Crowther, J. G., Founders of British science: John Wilkins, Robert Boyle, John Ray, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton (London, 1960).
8. Derham W. (ed.), The Philosophical Works of Dr Robert Hooke (London, 1726).
9. Espinasse, M., Robert Hooke (London, 1956).
10. Hunter M. and Schaffer S.(eds.), Robert Hooke : new studies (Eoodbridge, 1989).
11. Nichols, R., The Diaries of Robert Hooke, The Leonardo of London, 1635-1703 (Lewes, 1994).
12. Waller R. (ed.), The Posthumous Works of Dr Robert Hooke (London, 1705).
13. http://www.roberthooke.org.uk/
14. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hooke.html
15. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/hooke.htm
16. http://starryskies.com/~kmiles/spec/hooks.html
