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

by Lisa Jardine (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.28

  A biography of a brilliant, largely forgotten, maverick - a major figure in the 17th - century cultural and scientific revolutions. Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor and scientist who was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire. He worked tirelessly with his great friend Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild London throughout the 1670s, personally creating some notable public and private buildings. Like his friends, Wren and Boyle, he was also a prominent experimentalist; he became the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society in London; he was the propounder of Hooke's Law of elasticity, co-discoverer of Boyle's Law for gases, designer of an early balance-spring watch, and a virtuoso performer of gruesome public anatomical dissections of animals. As his intimate and confessional diary records, Hooke's life was rich with melodrama. He came to London, fatherless, aged 13 to seek his fortune. He never married but formed a long-running illicit relationship with his niece (his housekeeper). A dandy and a man of restless energy, a workaholic and an inveterate socialiser, he was a well-known man-about-town, an enthusiastic daily imbiber of the designer drugs of the time: coffee, tea, chocolate and tobacco; he took cannabis for his headaches, and worked late into the night fuelled by poppy water (opium). In later life he became unkempt and bedridden by illness, but maintained his social and intellectual activities. He argued with most of his peers, but his closest friendship, with Wren, remained unscathed. After violent rows with Sir Isaac Newton his name was wiped from the records of the Royal Society and his portrait destroyed after his death.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $4.31

  A biography of a brilliant, largely forgotten maverick - a major figure in the 17th-century cultural and scientific revolutions.

  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 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 - as 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 socialiser in London's most fashionable circles, Hooke's irascible temper and passionate idealism proved fatal for his relationships with men of influence, most notably with Sir Isaac Newton, who, after one violent row, 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 17th-century intellectual and scientific revolution.