Out of the Shadow of a Giant

by John Gribbin

  Very little needs to be said here about Halley’s time in Chester. The clerks there were impudent and unsupportive, and quarrelled among themselves to the point of one challenging another to a duel; although the challenge was accepted, the duel never actually took place. There was also, almost inevitably, the kind of financial irregularities (for which, read theft) that was all too easy when large quantities of silver in small denomination coins were being handled. On 25 October 1697, Halley wrote to Hans Sloane, one of the Secretaries at the Royal, apologising for being unable to attend a meeting of the Society:

  as yet the business of our Mint is not in such condition, that I can be spared for good and all, although in a month I guess wee shall have finished our whole coinage… my heart be with you and I long to be delivered from the uneasiness I suffer here by ill company in my business, which at least is but drudgery, but as we are in perpetual feuds is intollerable.

  He only tolerated the situation a little longer, and resigned early in 1698, after an inquiry had looked into the abuses at Chester and found that they were no fault of his. It was almost time for Halley’s greatest adventure, but first a brief interruption showed just how highly regarded he was in Court circles, with, surely, no need of Newton’s patronage.

  Halley’s big adventure would involve voyaging to the South Seas on a ship, the Paramore, built especially for the job. As we describe in Chapter Ten, the project had been in hand for some time, but delayed by, among other things, the Nine Years’ War with France (during which the Lagos disaster occurred), which was ended by the Peace of Ryswick, signed in October 1697. Early in January 1698, however, Czar Peter of Russia (later to be known as ‘the Great’) came to England to study shipbuilding techniques, and at Peter’s specific request in March that year the Paramore was rigged and floated, not for Halley’s expedition, but to be made available to be used ‘as the Czar of Muscovy shall desire’.fn7 Peter wanted to carry out sailing ‘experiments’ with the ship, and later said that he would ‘far rather be an admiral in England than Tsar in Russia.’fn8 This was just one of several ships made available to Peter, who was also given a free run of the dockyards at Deptford. The Czar was just twenty-five when he arrived in London, and very much a practical ‘hands-on’ man who was not afraid of getting himself dirty learning the practicalities of shipbuilding. He was also a hands-on man in other ways, with a reputation for womanising, heavy drinking and crude manners and language, not the sort of person Flamsteed would have approved of. Peter stayed at a house in Deptford which was owned by John Evelyn, but rented out at the time to Admiral John Benbow. By the time he left, on 21 April, the house and gardens had suffered so much damage that the Exchequer paid Evelyn £300 in compensation. He may have been short-changed; Christopher Wren estimated the cost of repairing the damage as nearly £400.

  It is not known what relationship Halley had with the Czar, but he seems to have been made available as an adviser on nautical (and possibly scientific) matters. It is likely that he sailed with Peter on some occasions, and certain that he dined at Deptford. There is no evidence whether or not he joined in the drunken escapades that caused so much damage, although it is hard to see how he could have refused a suggestion by the Czar to join in some fun and games.fn9 In a biographical note by Halley’s younger contemporary Martin Folkes we are told:fn10

  This Great Prince was highly pleas’d with him, treated him with great distinction, admitting him to the Familiarity of his Table, to have the more opportunitys of being inform’d by his [entertaining] and instructing Conversation.

  And the Biographia Britannica, published in 1757, says that Peter:

  … found [Halley] equal to the great character he had heard of him. He asked him many questions concerning the fleet which he [Peter] intended to build, the sciences and arts which he wished to introduce into his dominions, and a thousand other subjects which his unbounded curiosity suggested; he was so well satisfied with Mr Halley’s answers, and so pleased with his conversation, that he admitted him familiarly to his table, and ranked him among the number of his friends.

  But however good his relationship with Czar Peter was, Halley must have been glad to see the back of him. After the tedium and troubles at Chester, he was about to experience a literal breath of fresh air, and to become, as Pepys described him, ‘the first Englishman (and possibly any other) that had so much, or (it might be said) any competent degree (meeting in them) of the science and practice (both) of navigation.’ His friend Robert Hooke, himself a frustrated would-be traveller who took a keen interest in voyagers who had visited far-distant lands, must have felt a twinge of envy.

  We can leave Halley getting ready to take the Paramore to sea while we recount what happened to Hooke after the publication of the Principia.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NOT FADE AWAY

  In spite of what Richard Waller tells us, it is clear that Hooke did not fade away immediately after the death of Grace. In January 1687, his salary at the Royal had been increased £100 a year, half of it coming from the Royal itself and the rest (if he could be made to pay up) from Cutler. In return, Hooke was once again more active in the Society, carrying out experiments and providing written ‘discourses’ on the work.fn1 Grace died in February that year, aged twenty-six, of ‘a fever’. She was buried on the 28th, at the church of St Helen Bishopsgate. But Hooke’s grief did not prevent him from completing a series of lectures on fossils that he had begun the previous December and ended in March. We shall save discussion of Hooke’s ideas concerning fossils, the age of the Earth, and life for later in this chapter, after describing his other activities.

  Socially, Hooke was as active as ever, enjoying the company of his friends in coffee shops (he still favoured Jonathan’s), visiting bookshops, and indulging his slightly extravagant taste in clothing (at the end of 1688 his new winter coat cost seventeen shillings and sixpence). He had, after all, less incentive, when he was not working, to stay in his rooms, where he was looked after by a maidservant, Martha. But when he took up diary keeping again the Pisces symbol did not appear anywhere alongside her name, or that of her successor. His frequent companion at home was Harry Hunt, now the Operator at the Royal, who often dined with Hooke, took tea with him and ran errands. The relationship has been described as like father and son.fn2

  The diary begins again in November 1688, just after William of Orange had landed in England with his army, and gives us some insight into how the kind of people Hooke mingled with viewed the ‘Glorious Revolution’. The invasion began at Torbay, in the West Country, but William moved slowly towards London, gathering support without bloodshed, while support for James declined to the point where the army abandoned him to his fate.

  Hooke records some civil unrest in London during November, when it was not clear whether James would try to make a stand against the invader, and he writes on 5 December of ‘Great confusion of reports’. The confusion was largely caused by James dithering. He eventually decided to make a run for it on 11 December, which triggered some rioting and looting. ‘[R]able rifled Salisbury house’, Hooke wrote, and ‘the tower surrendered to Lord Mayor and Lord Lucas Governor disarmed all Papists in the tower.’ James was soon captured and brought back to London, but allowed to leave by ship from Greenwich on 18 December, the day William arrived in London. Hooke writes that a few weeks later in Jonathan’s he ‘pleaded against Division and Revenge’. He was not alone. The consensus seems to have been that even a Dutch king was preferable to another civil war. Halley, as we noted earlier, wrote at the time:

  For my part, I am for the King in possession. If I am protected, I am content. I am sure we pay dear enough for our Protection, & why should we not have the Benefit of it?

  And, indeed, life went on pretty much as normal in London while the position of William and Mary was being formalised.

  It is striking that at the end of the 1680s, with Hooke in his mid-fifties, there is less mention in the diary of the vomiting and purges that feature in the earlier vol
ume, and Hooke seems to have been in good health (by his standards), and fit enough for long walks, although Richard Waller tells us that earlier in 1688, before the diary resumed, Hooke had been ill with ‘Head-achs, Giddiness and Fainting, and with a general decay all over, which hinder’d his Philosophical Studies’. Although this seems to have passed, he now had increasing trouble with his eyesight, which had probably been damaged by the strain of his microscopic work, and this may explain brief references in the diary to feeling melancholy. He served on the Council of the Royal every year from 1689 to 1695, in 1697, 1698 and 1700, and took what opportunities he could to establish his priority over ideas that were now being rediscovered by others.

  In a lecture to the Royal on 26 June 1689, he deviated from his subject (the mixing of liquids) to complain:

  Though many of the things I have first Discovered could not find acceptance [at the time] yet I find there are not wanting some who pride themselves on arrogating of them for their own – But I let that passe for the present.

  He had a point. Early in 1690, for example, Halley came up with the idea of using telescopic sights in quadrants, and Hooke grumbled to his friends at Jonathan’s that ‘Hally pretended to the glasse sights of Sea quadrant, though it was printed in Hist. of the Royal Society before he went to school’. That, of course is why Halley knew nothing of it – he had not been reading such publications when a schoolboy, and didn’t know of Hooke’s work. But he soon acknowledged it, and the incident did not harm their friendship.

  In another presentation in February 1690, Hooke highlighted another piece of Newtonian plagiarism, sarcastically saying that ‘of late Mr. Newton has done me the favour to print and publish as his own Inventions’ several of Hooke’s ideas, including the equatorial bulging of the Earth:

  And I conceive there are some present that may very well Remember and Doe know that Mr Newton did not send up that addition to his book till some weeks after I had read & shewn the experiments and demonstrations thereof in this place.

  But although Hooke had a point, protestations like these helped to create an image of a cantankerous old man critical of the work of others. That image has unjustly coloured much of the writing about Hooke since his death, including discussions of his earlier life and work.

  A year before Hooke’s mutterings about Halley, Halley himself brought Newton, in London for the Convention Parliament, and Hooke together at his house; they met again at the Royal on 12 June 1689, when Huygens and Fatio were also present. Their paths crossed several times that year, but since these meetings went largely unremarked it seems that there was neither a reconciliation nor a major confrontation. What is more telling is that Newton had very little to do with the Royal, even after he moved permanently to London, while Hooke was still alive. Hooke’s presence was clearly the reason for this, since following Hooke’s death Newton became the major figure in the Society. As for Hooke, although peeved that Newton had stolen his ideas, he had plenty of other things to do, and doesn’t seem to have let the dispute affect him drastically. Unlike Newton, he was not obsessive, and continued with a wide variety of activities, including visiting the ship of his friend Captain Robert Knox back from his latest travels, watching an eclipse of the Moon, architectural work (his friendship with Wren continued), microscope design, and much more.

  One of the most intriguing stories brought back by Knox from India concerned ‘a strange intoxicating herb’, like hemp, known as gange. The self-dosing Hooke was thoroughly intrigued by Knox’s first-hand account of experimenting with the drug, but never managed to grow it and try it himself. He described the effects, as reported by Knox, to the Royal:

  [the patient] is very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks Words without any Coherence, not knowing what he saith or doth; yet he is not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances and sheweth many odd Tricks; after a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry.

  Although he never did get to go on a long voyage, Hooke always took advantage of any opportunity for a short sea trip, usually to test his navigational instruments, and often joined in excursions along the river, like the outing of May Day 1665, which is described in Pepys’ diary. On 22 March 1689, Hooke’s diary notes ‘Hally a sailing’; on 3 April he notes ‘Hally Returned’. Reading between the lines, we can guess that Hooke would have welcomed an invitation to join Halley on this mission to survey the Thames approaches.

  There is a gap in the diary – a missing volume – covering March 1690 to December 1692, an interval which saw the death of two old frends, Theodore Haak in May 1690 and Robert Boyle in December 1691, plus the award to Hooke of the degree of Doctor of Physick (Medicine) by the University of Oxford, on the advice (meaning order) of the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, ‘as he is a Person of a prodigious inventive Head, so of great Virtue & goodness; and as exceedingly well vers’d in all mathematical & mechanical, so particularly in astronomical knowledge’. Microscopy also remained linked with Hooke; in his will, Boyle left Hooke ‘my best microscope and my best loadstone.’ Hooke’s ongoing work as surveyor and architect included supervising various repairs and improvements to Westminster Abbey, and the design of several buildings at Plymouth Docks, including housing for officers. Pevsner describes this as ‘the first example in any of the English dockyards of a unified approach for officers’ housing.’fn3 He was also still involved in designing better instruments for navigation. It was in this connection that he made a perceptive remark in one of his lectures at the end of 1690:

  There are many things, that before theory are discover’d, are look’d upon as impossible, which yet, when they are found, are said to be known by every one, the inventor only excepted, who must pass for an Ignoramus.

  This has a pre-echo of the famous statement by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:

  All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

  When the diary entries resume in December 1692, Hooke, now fifty-seven, is on the Council of the Royal, engaged in several building works, and still fit enough to travel everywhere around London on foot. But for him, original science was now essentially a thing of the past. His interest in travellers’ tales of the world beyond Europe remained strong, and right up until the final entry on 8 August 1693 we have an image of the same old Hooke, far from being ‘Melancholly and Cynical’, still frequenting coffee houses, and still able, in spite of trouble with his eyes, to read the books he continued to purchase in great quantities. But he was not as physically strong as he had been, unable to clamber over scaffolding, and with deteriorating eyesight. He formally ceased his activities as Wren’s partner in 1693. But his mind was as sharp as ever. Knox, back in London in the spring of 1694, told Hooke, among other things, about the giant leaves of the taliput tree, which provided welcome shade in tropical climes. In the 1690s, it was widely accepted that all things on Earth had been put there by God for the benefit of mankind, so these trees must have been created for the purpose of providing people with shade. But Hooke told the Royal that the leaves were there for the good of the tree, and the fact that they happened to provide shade for humans was a coincidence. Obvious to us, but not to the Fellows of the time.

  It was his interest in tales from far lands that led Hooke to design and build a ‘Picture-Box’, a kind of portable camera obscura that would project an image of the outside world on to paper so that it could be sketched quickly and (more importantly) accurately.

  The tedious wrangle over payment for the Cutlerian lectures also came to a denouement in the mid-1690s. With Cutler dead, Hooke (supported by the Royal) had to battle through the courts with Cutler’s executors, finally winning his case on his own sixty-first birthday, 18 July 1696, with his arrears back to 1684 paid and an order that the estate should continue to pay £50 a year as long as he continued to give the lectures. The money was
less important to him than the principle, but he continued to give the lectures until May 1697, by which time his health was failing. In the summer of that year, he began to suffer with sore and swollen legs, reducing his mobility, and had a fall that seems to have cracked some of his ribs. Waller tells us that by that time he had ceased to eat meat, ‘no flesh in the least agreeing with his weak constitution’, and subsisted on a diet of milk and vegetables. The Royal Society still met at Gresham College, so he was able to attend meetings, give lectures (most notably on earthquakes) and serve on Council. His last contribution was on 24 June 1702, when he made a short comment about earthquakes and glass-grinding.

  It was in these declining years that Hooke began to neglect himself, and become over-concerned that he might not have enough money to see out his life. As Knox put it, he ‘lived Miserably as if he had not sufficient to afford him food & Rayment’. In Jardine’s words, ‘by the age of 65 Hooke was a physical wreck, emaciated and haggard’, a situation she blames in no small measure on ‘his self-dosing with pharmaceuticals’:fn4