Described as the ‘English Leonardo Da Vinci’, Robert Hooke – astronomer, architect, palaeontologist and philosopher – was born in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Having spent his formative years here and returning to the Island throughout his life, the fascinating life of this scientific genius is kept alive by the Robert Hooke Society, based at the Planetarium at Fort Victoria, and the recent ‘Robert Hooke Trail’ created around the West Wight.
At the time that he was born (1635 – 1703), the West Wight was a separate Island, cut off from the rest of the Isle of Wight by the Western Yar. But there was a river crossing at the Causeway, as there is today, and Robert Hooke’s father was the curate of All Saints Church that stands on the high ground above. As a boy Robert Hooke would make mechanical devices by imitating local craftsmen and in the 1640s he learned how to draw from a visiting famous painter of miniatures, John Hoskyns.
The family lived in a modest cottage just down the road from the church, now known as Hooke Hill. It no longer exists but was behind Heatherstone House and a plaque now stands nearby. When Hooke was 13 his father died, leaving the boy £40 and he moved to London intending to take an apprenticeship as an artist. But he found this unsatisfactory and instead moved to Westminster School and under Dr Busby Hooke quickly mastered Latin and Greek and began his life-long study of mechanics – including trying to invent ways to fly.
In 1653 Hooke secured a chorister’s place at Christ Church in Oxford where he was employed as a ‘chemical assistant’ to Dr Thomas Willis and it was here that he met natural philosopher Robert Boyle and helped construct Boyle’s ‘machina Boyleana’ – an air pump that is basically the one we use today. Another friend he made here was Christopher Wren and in 1666, after the Great Fire of London, Hooke became the City of London Surveyor where he collaborated with Wren on the design and re-building of the area, including the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. To this day a plaque in his memory is beneath The Monument to the Great Fire of London.
From 1662 until his death in 1703 Hooke was the Curator of Experiments at the newly founded Royal Society. He invented the compound microscope and by the age of 30 (in 1665) he had published his ‘Micrographia’ full of observations from the mineral, animal and vegetable kingdoms, demonstrating what the microscope could do and originating the word ‘cell’ in biology.
The first pendulum clock was invented in 1657 by Christian Huyghens and Hooke wanted to improve their accuracy to help navigation at sea. By 1660 he had applied a spiral spring to the balance wheel, which helped considerably and saw the birth of ‘Hooke’s Law of Springs’. In 1677 Hooke invented the ‘Universal Joint’ to allow a pendulum to move noiselessly – today they are used in the drive-shaft of a car for linking the engine with the wheels.
Hooke was also a keen astronomer and invented the reflecting telescope and devised instruments to measure a second of arc in the movement of the sun or other stars. He made many observations of sunspots, the spots on Jupiter and made a map of the surface of the moon and was especially interested in comets and their orbits.
He was also interested in fossils, especially how they came to be found inland and on mountains. “Most of those Inland Places. . . are, or have been heretofore under the Water. . . the Waters have been forc’d away from the Parts formerly cover’d, and many of those surfaces are now raised above the level of the Water’s Surface many scores of Fathoms. It seems not improbable, that the tops of the highest and most considerable Mountains in the World have been under Water, and that they themselves most probably seem to have been the Effects of some very great Earthquake.” He continued to study fossils and to compare them with living organisms.
In 1665 he was appointed Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, with a salary and rooms at the College. Under this agreement he was unable to marry but could employ a housekeeper. But he was not a healthy man, suffering with a curvature of the spine that became worse as he aged and he was described in less than complimentary terms by contemporaries. He continued to visit the Island throughout his life and when he died he owned land just outside Newport – where the multi-screen cinema complex now stands.
He was made very wealthy by his work and on his death a great iron chest was found in his rooms that contained £8,000 in money and another £300 in gold and silver – about £1million at today’s values. However he was also much maligned by the scientific community after his death and it is thought that the subsequent president of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton, may have deliberately ‘lost’ a lot of his documents, instruments and even the only portrait of him known to exist.
Recent years have seen a renewal in interest in Robert Hooke and a manuscript containing over 20 years of the Royal Society’s meetings detailing records of his experiments and inventions mysteriously resurfaced in 2006. The founder of the Robert Hooke Society, Trevor Clarke of Freshwater, devoted many years of his life to collecting information and artifacts on Hooke and between 1995 and 2000 these were on show in the Bier House at All Saints Church. After Trevor’s death in 2004 the collection was moved on permanent loan to the Planetarium at Fort Victoria.
The Robert Hooke Trail was devised by the society and is a scenic eight mile circular walk beginning and ending at Fort Victoria and a booklet describing the trail and recounting his story is available through many outlets on the Island. In 2012 plaques will be placed around the trail to mark the route and give examples of his work.
