Robert Hooke

Who Named the Cell and Weighed the Spring · Natural Philosopher · 1635–1703

The Royal Society's Curator of Experiments, contracted to produce several new experiments every week — who named the cell, found the law every spring obeys, and rebuilt much of London after the Great Fire.

Who was Hooke?

Robert Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635, a sickly child of modest means who reached Oxford as a servitor and worked as Robert Boyle's assistant, building the air pump with which Boyle's law was found. In 1662 the new Royal Society appointed him Curator of Experiments, obliging him to demonstrate three or four new experiments at every weekly meeting — a post that explains both the extraordinary range of his work and its unfinished quality. Micrographia (1665) presented what the microscope revealed in engravings of startling power: a flea drawn at the size of a cat, the compound eye of a fly, the ragged point of a needle. Examining a sliver of cork he saw rows of small empty boxes and called them cells, after the rooms of a monastery — the word, though not the modern idea, is his. He established that the extension of a spring is proportional to the force stretching it, publishing it in 1676 as the anagram ceiiinosssttuv and two years later as ut tensio, sic vis. After the Great Fire of 1666 he was appointed a City Surveyor and worked with Christopher Wren on the rebuilding. He proposed that planetary motion arises from an attraction falling off as the square of the distance, and could not supply the mathematics; Newton could, and the resulting quarrel outlasted Hooke's life.

Major achievements

• Published Micrographia (1665), the first great work of microscopy
• Coined the word 'cell' for the boxes he saw in cork
• Discovered that extension is proportional to force — Hooke's law
• Served as the Royal Society's Curator of Experiments for forty years
• Surveyed and helped rebuild London with Wren after the Great Fire

Life in brief

• 1635 — Born on the Isle of Wight: A curate's son, sickly and largely self-taught at first.
• 1655 — Assistant to Robert Boyle: Builds the air pump used to establish Boyle's law.
• 1662 — Curator of Experiments: Contracted to demonstrate several new experiments weekly.
• 1665 — Micrographia: Publishes his microscope drawings, and names the cell.
• 1666 — The Great Fire: Appointed a City Surveyor; rebuilds London alongside Wren.
• 1676 — The anagram: Publishes his law of the spring in coded form.
• 1679 — Letters to Newton: Proposes an inverse-square attraction he cannot prove.
• 1703 — Dies in London: At Gresham College, where he had lived for forty years.

Explore the life of Hooke — five chapters

1. The Sickly Boy Who Reached Oxford as a Servant — The Isle of Wight to Boyle's air pump
2. Three New Experiments Every Week — The job that made and broke him
3. Micrographia — A flea the size of a cat, and a word that founded biology
4. As the Extension, So the Force — An anagram, and a city to rebuild
5. The Quarrel He Lost, and the Face Nobody Has — An inverse square without the mathematics

Read the five-chapter life of Robert Hooke →

Where Hooke appears in your course

Robert Hooke has a genuine claim on 2 lessons of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE science course built into Incandio:

• Levels of Organisation — Biology: The bottom rung of this ladder is the cell, and Hooke put it there. Cutting a thin slice of cork and holding it under his microscope in 1665, he found it divided into tiny boxes, counted more than a thousand million to the cubic inch, and called them cells because they looked like the bare rooms of a monastery. Every level above it on this page is built on that word.
• Hooke's Law and Elasticity — Physics: Statement 1.23 is his result, found while he was Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society and obliged to demonstrate several new experiments every week. He announced it in 1676 not in words but as the anagram ceiiinosssttuv, so that he could prove priority later without revealing the finding — and two years afterwards unscrambled it as ut tensio, sic vis. He had good reason to be careful: he spent his life watching ideas he had proposed get credited to other people, most famously the inverse-square law of gravitation.

Begin

• Start a conversation with Hooke — a dramatised, historically grounded AI portrayal
• Read the Historical Brief
• Explore the life of Hooke — five chapters
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