Robert Hooke story
ROBERT HOOKE
Robert Hooke
Description
Education: Wadham College, Christ Church, Westminster School
Robert Hooke was one of the special breed scientists whose intellect and ingenuity spanned various disciplines. Like his contemporaries Issac Newton (1642-1727) and Christian Huygens, Hooke worked in many fields often with remarkable results.
Hooke was born in Britain, on the Isle of Wight in 1635. A sickly child who was stricken with smallpox at an early age, he was not expected to survive more than a few years. His persistent ill heath forced him to remain indoors, where he found amusement in taking apart and reassembling mechanical device. By his tenth birthday, he had become adept at constructing intricate mechanical toys, including working boats and clocks.
After his father's death in 1648, Hooke was sent to attend boarding school, where the headmaster recognized his potential and placed him in a curriculum that included Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Hooke attended Oxford in 1653. Though he never completed his bachelor's degree, it was oxford that Hooke met some of Britain's greatest scientists, around whom the British Royal Society would later from. Among these was the physicist Robert Boyle, for whom Hooke served as a laboratory assistant. Under Boyle's tutelage Hooke constructed the precursor to the modern air pump, the first in a long line of ingenious scientific tools he would invent.
Using this new air pump, Boyle's performed the Research that would ultimately lead him to the find him to the finding known today as Boyle's Law. (Boyle's Law state that there is an inverse relationship between the volume and pressure of an ideal gas, at constant temperature.) In fact, some scientist have suggested that Hooke may have been pressured to relinquish credit for his discovery to his instructor.
Around this time many European inventors were vying to develop the first accurate device to determine longitude on a sailing ship. Already in use, the chronometer, essentially a modified clock, was unreliable since the pendulum used to regulate its motion was thrown off by the ship's rocking. Sometime near 1660 Hooke introduced a chronometer design based upon a spring rather than a pendulum. (Today Hooke's name is associated with the law that, in many situation, the force on an object is proportional to its displacement from its resting, or equilibrium, position.) Although his design was sound, he was unable to find investors to back him, and it was not until 1674 that Christian Huygens patented his own spring-driven chronometer. Hooke immediately claimed that Huygens ' invention was a derivative of his own, beginning a dispute that remains unresolved to this day.
That was not the only confrontation Hooke had with one of his peers. Perhaps the most famous was his feud with Issac Newton, which began in the early 1670s. Newton, then a young student, he had submitted a paper on light and colours to the British Royal Society. Hooke reviewed the paper and quickly dismissed it. Newton published a second paper on light in 1675, introducing a theory describing light as an undulatory wave. Hooke's reply was that Newton had stolen this wave theory outright from his own earlier publication, Micrographia.
Hooke later made a similar claim to Newton's theory of gravitation. The verbals battles between these two scientist were very bitter, several times driving Newton to a nervous breakdown. While his true contribution to the cannon of theoretical science is unclear, Hooke was unqestionably one of society's most productive inventors of scientific equipment. Among his list of accomplishment are the universal joint, the reflecting telescope, the compound microscopy, the wheel barometer, the anemometer, the spring-driven wristwatch, the "cross-hairs" sight for telescope, and new standards for microscopy. The bulk of his invention were constructed during his term as Curator of Experiments for the British Royal Society, where he was commissioned to explore new avenues and creates new devices.
Though mechanics was certainly his first love, Hooke turned to architecture after a great fire burned most of London in 1666. To help with the reconstruction of the city and to aid his colleague, English architect Christopher Wren (1632-1723), Hooke designed several prominent building, most of which still stand.
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