The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London [Hardcover]

English scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) is known to history more for losing quarrels with better-known scientists than for his achievements. He dared challenge Newton for credit as discoverer of the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction and lost. In his dispute with Dutch scientist Christaan Huygens over who invented the isochronous pendulum clock, Hooke fared slightly better, since it was discovered that unfriendly members of the fledging Royal Society were slipping word of his discoveries to Huygens. Cambridge Renaissance scholar Jardine follows up her 2002 biography of Christopher Wren with this satisfying rehabilitation of Hooke, Wren's colleague in rebuilding London after the devastating fire of 1666. Jardine argues that Hooke played an equal role in many of the projects attributed to Wren, most notably the dome of Saint Paul's and the Monument to the Fire of London. Hooke never made the leap into greatness by adequately working out and proving his "hunches," in large part because of other scientists' demands on his time. As a young man, he was Robert Boyle's trusted assistant. At the Royal Society, which he helped found, he served as curator of experiments and secretary. After the fire he was forced to juggle society members' increasingly unreasonable demands with his work as surveyor and associate to Wren. Hooke grew ill-tempered in his later years and was finally removed from his Royal Society posts. Jardine convincingly attributes his physical deterioration to decades of self-medicating and overwork. Sure to become the standard life of Hooke, Jardine's sympathetic study will please readers interested in the early years of modern science and scientific biographies. Illus.
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Because victors write history, Newton looms large in the chronicles of Western science while the contentious hunchback who once challenged him for primacy survives as a mere footnote. In this lucid biography, Jardine acknowledges that Hooke erred in attacking Newton, but she refuses to let Hooke's contentiousness eclipse his considerable contributions to British culture. Highlighting the obstacles facing a fatherless boy from a family of ruined fortunes, Jardine chronicles Hooke's plucky rise as a maker of precision scientific instruments, a keen-eyed illustrator, and a geometrically acute architect and surveyor. Readers see a remarkable man parlay diverse gifts into a career that included serving as lead surveyor of London after the Great Fire of 1666, collaborating with Wren on landmark architectural projects, and creating Micrographia, a sensationally illustrated work of microscopic research. But Jardine also discerns pathos in the career of a man who pursued so many disciplines that he finally frustrated his own ambition to join Copernicus, Kepler, and, yes, Newton in the pantheon of theoretical scientists. A remarkably coherent portrait of a kaleidoscopic figure. Bryce Christensen
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“[Jardine’s] lucid and easy-reading prose paints a vivid portrait of a curiously overlooked historical figure.” (Washington Post Book World )

“Sure to become the standard life of Hooke.” (Publishers Weekly )

“First rate … both learned and delightfully readable.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch )

The brilliant, largely forgotten maverick Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor, architect and inventor who was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire of 1666. Throughout the 1670s he worked tirelessly with his intimate friend Christopher Wren to rebuild London, personally designing many notable public and private buildings, including the Monument to the Fire. He was the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, and the author and illustrator of Micrographia, a lavishly illustrated volume of fascinating engravings of natural phenomena as seen under the new microscope. He designed an early balance spring watch, was a virtuoso performer of public anatomical dissections of animals, and kept himself going with liberal doses of cannabis and "poppy water"(laudanum).

Hooke's personal diaries -- cryptically confessional as anything Pepys wrote -- record a life rich with melodrama. He came to London as a fatherless boy of thirteen to seek his fortune as a painter, rising by his wits to become an intellectual celebrity. He never married but formed a long-running illicit liaison with his niece. A dandy, boaster, workaholic, insomniac and inveterate socializer in London's most fashionable circles, Hooke had an irascible temper, and his passionate idealism proved fatal for his relationships with men of influence -- most notably Sir Isaac Newton, who, after one violent argument, wiped Hooke's name from the Royal Society records and destroyed his portrait.

In this lively and absorbing biography, Lisa Jardine at last does Hooke and his achievements justice. Illuminating London's critical role in the emergence of modern science, she rediscovers and decodes a great original thinker of indefatigable curiosity and imagination, a major figure in the seventeenth-century intellectual and scientific revolution.

Lisa Jardine is the author of The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London and On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life and Tumultuous Times of Sir Christopher Wren, as well as books on Erasmus and Sir Francis Bacon. She is Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, and Director of the AHRB Research Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She is also an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and has judged many literary awards, including the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.