The Forgotten Genius: The Biography of Robert Hooke 1635–1703 , Stephen Inwood MacAdam/Cage, San Francisco, 2003. $28.50 (482 pp.). ISBN 1-931561-56-7
Robert Hooke has never really been forgotten. But he is usually remembered only as a peripheral figure of the scientific revolution, famous for his controversies with the great Isaac Newton or, especially in Great Britain, for being a minor colleague of Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London who also rebuilt the city after the great fire of 1666. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London by Lisa Jardine and The Forgotten Genius: The Biography of Robert Hooke 1635–1703 by Stephen Inwood are both biographies by British authors, and Jardine’s book in particular reminds us of Hooke’s major, albeit overshadowed, role in that astonishing rebuilding effort. He would have been much better remembered had he received the kind of hagiographical treatment after his death that so benefited Wren.
Hooke was a founding member of the Royal Society when it received its final royal authorization in 1663. He was its lifeblood for many years, the one who made it much more than just a talking shop. He was appointed the society’s first “curator of experiments,” charged with producing experimental demonstrations for the group’s discussions at each weekly meeting. Hooke received the post after being Robert Boyle’s experimental technician in Oxford for several years; he built Boyle’s air pumps and probably was responsible for the initial formulation of Boyle’s law. (Hooke’s law, of course, is itself well known to engineers and physicists.)
Hooke published on many topics and left a large collection of manuscripts on many others, including geology, astronomy, watchmaking, gravity, chemistry, mechanics, and microscopy. His interest in microscopy in particular produced his greatest lasting legacy: Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses of 1665. That book is perhaps best known for its huge fold-out engraving of a magnified flea, an image that is frequently reproduced without attribution. The magnificent illustrations, some perhaps due to Hooke’s friend and colleague Wren, ensured the book’s success. It was the book’s textual contents, however, that laid the foundation for Hooke’s contemporary reputation. His discussion of the nature of light and color caught the attention of the young Newton—Hooke first described “Newton’s rings” in Micrographia—and set the stage for the controversy between him and Newton in the 1670s after Newton published his own ideas on the same subject.
Readers interested in learning more about Hooke and this controversy with Newton, and about Micrographia, may be disappointed by Jardine’s book. Jardine evidently intended that her book join the ranks of the countless “The Man Who …” books whose many subjects “changed the world,” following the example of the 1995 biography Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (Walker, 1995) by Dava Sobel. Although Jardine begins with a theme-setting account of Hooke’s battle for credit when Newton’s Principia was published, her narrative provides no discussion of the optical controversy between the two men and, more surprisingly, no real discussion of Micrographia and its contents. Inwood’s The Forgotten Genius, on the other hand, dedicates several pages to each of the famous controversies and an entire chapter (although of modest length) to the Micrographia. His book discusses many of Hooke’s scientific and technical innovations, including all of the major ones, whereas Jardine often mentions them only in passing.
The focus of Jardine’s book is on Hooke as a social being who moves around London consorting with people of many different sorts and social classes, from lords to laborers. Even before his intensive work on the surveying and rebuilding of London after the fire, Hooke appears in a variety of settings, from bookshops to the court of Charles II. He is most typically seen in coffeehouses, a new feature of London life in the 1660s that Hooke took to like a duck to water, where he could meet with Royal Society colleagues, mathematical instrument makers, and sailors. His technical and intellectual capacities, combined with his social skills, recommended him to the City of London as a practical surveyor. The appointment, together with his work for Wren’s architectural firm, made him the single most significant figure in the grand project for rebuilding London, an enterprise whose swiftness amazed foreign visitors. It is in Jardine’s accounts of this period of Hooke’s life, rather than in her accounts of his scientific labors, that Hooke really comes alive.
A feature that recommends Hooke to biographers is the existence of his famous diaries, which both Jardine and Inwood use well. The diaries sketch out the business of Hooke’s everyday life, the breadth of his social acquaintance, and the details of his domestic existence. Jardine and Inwood both discuss his constant concerns with his health and with medical remedies, few of which seemed to have done much good. The diaries are also the source for what historians know about his sex life, without which no biography is nowadays complete.
Jardine’s book is lavishly illustrated and is more appealing to the eye. Inwood’s, by contrast, is comfortable and old-fashioned and takes its biographical task seriously, proceeding largely chronologically and trying not to leave out important events in the course of Hooke’s life. Jardine attempts more vigorously to develop themes, such as the long-lasting importance of Hooke’s childhood in the Isle of Wight. His early years on the island seem to have shaped his later geological ideas and provided social connections (including sources of servants) that continued to be important to him until the end.
Anyone seriously interested in Hooke has, in addition to Jardine’s and Inwood’s books, plenty of specialized scholarly work available. The layperson who wants to learn something about Hooke’s tremendously inventive scientific career would do well to start with Inwood, whereas the reader who is interested in the social and cultural life of later 17th-century London will profit much from Jardine’s colorful and insightful book.
