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The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London

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Hooke was indeed a curious character. Newton's phrase was that he was a "man of strange, unsociable temper." Hooke was, like many other early workers in the nascent sciences, jealous of others and argumentative about his contributions--modesty was not one of the virtues of such men in those days.

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?

I think I would have liked this book much better if I had read it before Stephen Inwood's The Forgotten Genius which, like this book, deals with the life of Robert Hooke. The differences between the two books, however, are striking. This is not to say that one is necessarily better than the other but, rather, that each has its strengths and weaknesses.

The first thing of note in Ms. Jardine's book is that she has a case to make--that a portrait previously identified as botanist John Ray is, in fact, a portrait of Hooke. This may not seem important to the casual reader but it has been one of the commonalities of Hooke research that no image of him remains. (Whether through accident or the machinations of bitter scientists like Newton, no one knows.) In fact, it is her argument over the authenticity of this portrait (which has some merit) that seems her real incentive for writing this book. In some sense, the rest of the book is an afterthought.

This is not to say that the rest of the book is not worthwhile. It most certainly is. Ms. Jardine tells her story well. Ms. Jardine's book has one major advantage over Mr. Inwood's: it is much more readable. Her style is much lighter and engaging. She is telling the story for a general audience whereas Mr. Inwood's main audience seems to be scientists and historians. She vividly recreates his youth on the Isle of Wight and his flight to London. She is excellent with outlining Hooke's tendencies towards hypochondria and the many tonics he took to keep himself going at a hectic pace. I am also very impressed with her telling of Hooke's conflict with the Huygens family which often gets short shrift in Hooke's story due to the much better known conflict with Newton.

Still, overall, Inwood's book gives a much better sense of the man. There is a real depth missing in this book. Ms. Jardine talks of Hooke's conflict with Newton near the very start of the book and then hardly mentions it again, though this is probably the defining time of Hooke's life. Her ability to discuss Hooke's scientific discoveries seems rather limited and even her discussion of his architectural work seems rather superficial. She is also rather gentle with Hooke, the man, glossing over evidence of his many affairs with housekeepers and what almost certainly became an incestuous relationship with his niece as well as taking it easy on his notoriously bad temper, though she does acknowledge it.

At least Ms. Jardine recognizes Hooke's weaknesses as a scientist and doesn't try to convince us he is a disrespected genius. She sees that he often overcommitted himself--though often with good reason--and that he didn't have the innate abilities of Newton, Huygens and Wren. He was a workman--the best of workmen and he deserved respect for that--but no genius.

A five-star book would be a collaboration between Ms. Jardine and Mr. Inwood. Combining her writing skills with his research and scientific knowledge would do Hooke the best justice. As it is, I would suggest reading this book first for a good introduction and then Mr. Inwood's book for a deeper look at this great experimentalist, Robert Hooke.

Robert Hooke's life was curious, a neglected topic that makes good reading, although a full, living sense of this man is missing from the book.

He was an ingenious, creative man, abounding with energy and interests in his younger years, whose acquaintances and friends included Boyle, Pepys, and Wren. He was widely recognized as a physics and general science experimenter of exceptional ability - a designer of both accurate instruments and experiments in which to employ them - almost certainly the greatest of his day. He might be viewed from today's perspective as something of the Ernest Lawrence of his day versus the great theorists.

Hooke's interests included astronomical measurements, microscopy, fossils, watches, the behavior of gases, and more. He was also interested in theoretical concepts although his mathematical abilities fell far short of people like Newton or Leibniz. Still, he came up with the hypothesis of the inverse-square law for gravity which he sent to Newton, asking him to prove mathematically whether it was valid. Newton never gave Hooke appropriate credit for Hooke's early insight, and it is not clear whether this was owing to Hooke's annoying carping or Newton's own very unpleasant temperament.

Hooke's early musings on the layers of fossils found on his native Isle of Wight demonstrate a remarkable analytical and creative mind at work. He got the process of their formation pretty close to right lifetimes before the meaning of fossils was widely recognized in science.

Ms. Jardine made the happy discovery of what is likely Hooke's portrait (no known one survives), a picture that had long been identified as being of John Ray. The circumstances of her discovery make a wonderful little tale early in the book.

What comes through so strongly from some of Jardine's anecdotes is how the basic philosophy of science had advanced by the second half of the 17th century, Hooke's time. This was, after all, only a few decades after Francis Bacon, yet the main points of modern science seem to be assumed by Europe's leading tinkerers and scientists.

Hooke's story is not a happy one, but I will leave that for readers to discover. Ms. Jardine is at times a slightly awkward writer, but she has an interesting story to tell and, on the whole, she tells it well. Ms. Jardine also wrote On a Grander Scale, a biography of the wonderful Christopher Wren. The book on Hooke she regards as a companion volume to the one on Wren. Do read both.

Definitely not for the casual reader or the faint-hearted but an excellent read all the same. You will need to be pretty curious about Mr. Hooke and his cantankerous personality to navigate this book. The extensive use of quotes from original texts and letters provides the story with authenticity that is admirable but sometimes, makes it a little laborious read. I suspect it is important to understand how Hooke was hooked on patent medicines and opiates, not to say the odd heavy metal, but constantly reading about his vomiting habits is not for the squeamish, particularly at the breakfast table. However this is a great read and I came out of it feeling more sympathetic about Hooke who accomplished more in each month of his life than most of us do in a lifetime. Certainly Lisa Jardine made a comprehensive effort to capture the whole man and succeeded perhaps a little too much.

This book is an interesting read, though it is sort of dry. My interest did not really get aroused by the book until the Great Fire and the rebuilding. Maybe I know too much about Robert Hook and the first part of the book was only a rehash of what I was already familiar with. I have always known about the Great Fire and the damage to the city, but had no idea of what went on in the effort to rebuild. Of course Sir Christopher Wren has always been "the man who built London after the fire" and this book does give a little more realistic description of how the interests of the various groups (the Royals, the Corporation of London, the Royal Society and the average citizen) were accomodated in the rebuilding.

I was looking for a good introduction to Hooke and his contributions, and got part of that. Lisa Jardine shows us a man of great energy, great diversity, great precision and artistry. Yet as she tells the story she writes out of a background of knowledge of Hooke which she doesn't detail for us. For example: apparently Hooke had a long-standing interest in a universal language - but we only notice this at the end of the book; apparently he had a pattern of contesting prior discoveries, but she doesn't exhibit this pattern for us; the zenith telescope seems to be very important for Hooke - it's not shown why here.
Coupled with the fact that her plan is not chronologically structured, the timeline is not all that clear to me as a reader, but rather I have a cloudy impression of Hooke's life read out of the largely inimical view of Newton and the self-obsessed Royal Society with their treatment of Hooke as a rather difficult servant, toally at their beck and call.
I'm glad to have read the book - but I'm keen to read a better one.

It's amazing how many documents referring to Hooke have survived from the 17th century. Jardine seems to have studied them with care and insight. This is an excellent biography. Read this with Claire Tomalin's life of Samuel Pepys (The Unequalled Self) and you'll learn more about English history of the 17th century (especially the 1660s) than you'll get from many history books.

Maybe I'm making a mistake but i'm also reading this authors book about Christopher Wren at the same time, written in the same style.. I'm finding the text a little broken up in both of these books with many quotes from letters, and some in the old style english,

Personally i would like to have seen a more chatty, as opposed to a historical document, type of book in both cases.

For me they just seem like they could be more human and interesting in both cases.