The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London (Hardcover)

Hooke was the sort of man who over-reached and had too many balls in the air at once. While he was a talented mechanic and experimenter, he took on such unrelated jobs as rebuilding London after the great fire. He did enough for half a dozen great men, but never achieved the first rank of a Newton or a Watt, with one or two great discoveries to his credit.

Jardine's book is extremely thoroughly researched, detailed, with plenty of references and source notes. There are lots of illustrations and portraits, and the book has a good index, and it is well organized. I enjoyed the detective story that Jardine tells in which she appears to have identified the only extant portrait of Hooke. Pretty convincing to me, and a real feather in her cap.

Sadly, however, she does not describe his scientific contributions very well or in as much detail as I would have liked. Descriptions of his astronomical instruments and innovations are quite glossed over, impossible to understand. In particular, for example, Hooke's attempt at the measurement of stellar parallax with a new zenith-pointing telescope, are entirely omitted from this work. This story is entertainingly told in Hirshfeld's recent book "Parallax" and belongs here too as it reveals so much of his method of working and his weakness in the follow-through.

One astounding revelation Jardine makes is that Hooke arrived at the inverse square law of gravitation "on the basis of experiments carried out with Henry Hunt..." but does not describe the experiments at all. How in the world could she omit any elaboration of this claim? If the experiments were done, and did support an inverse square law, then Hooke would be rightfully granted credit for the discovery of the universal law of gravitation, which almost everyone grants to Newton because he later worked out the mathematics of elliptical orbits!

The book rather concentrates on his social affairs, and is filled with minutiae that while sometimes interesting, is a bit exhausting. Just how much of the diary of the self-treatments of a hypochondriac can one stand to read?

History has, of course, sided with Newton, leaving Hooke the reputation as "a man who lacked the mathematical genius to turn a good idea into a great reality." He has since all but disappeared beneath the shadows of his scientific peers, Newton, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and others.

After three centuries, however, Hooke may finally be receiving his due. He first reappeared to the public as a major secondary character in author Neal Stephenson's recent mammoth and ongoing series of historical novels, The Baroque Cycle.

Now, on the heels of James Gleick's well-received biography of Newton, comes The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine's attempt to reveal the truth behind the legend.

Subtitled The Man who Measured London, Jardine successfully rescues Hooke from the scrap-heap of obscurity, unveiling a restless maverick passionate for his experiments, a foremost member in the influential Royal Society, and "a founding figure in the European scientific revolution."

Jardine wisely glosses over the perils of mathematical and scientific jargon, instead focusing her biography on reviving the career of a man so largely forgotten, no recognized portraits of him can be found.

Despite the reputation foisted upon him, Hooke was a well-respected inventor and engineer in seventeenth century London. His enthusiasm for experimentation made him a staple of Royal Society meetings, as fellow scientists would meet and debate the merits of what he and others had displayed that day.

Hooke's true moment of greatness came during London's Great Fire of 1666. Twelve thousand homes were destroyed, and sixty-five thousand people left homeless and destitute.

Hooke, with his talent for taking on many roles at once, became instrumental in the reconstruction of the city, accepting the post of Chief Surveyor, and personally designing many notable buildings, including Bedlam Hospital and the Royal College of Physicians. It was an astonishing effort that would keep him in the public eye for most of his days.

Sadly, despite his triumphs, Hooke was a scientist "without a defining great work to give his life shape." A hypochondriac and insomniac, he took to self-medicating daily, leaving him "in a permanent state of extreme tension, on the edge, wary and wakeful, constantly under the influence of stimulants."

Finally, what damaged Hooke the most was his inability, in today's parlance, to network. As Newton once put it, he was "a man of strange unsociable temper," stoop-shouldered, embittered, and guilty of taking on too many tasks at once, leaving friends and patrons disappointed.

Jardine longs to proclaim Hooke "a genius who has been unjustly overlooked." In the end, she cannot. Hooke was guilty of trying to do too much, and finishing too little. Still, Jardine's biography stands as a fitting testament to his work, an ode to a man who, by all accounts, should stand as the patron saint of the multi-tasker.