It was a commercial disaster for the City—and also a political one. During the recent civil war, the big merchants had been republican in their sympathies. Thanks partly to the invertebrate behaviour of Bloodworth, their pretensions to autonomy had been humbled. It was King Charles II who had finally given the decisive order to pull down the buildings and create the necessary firewalls. It was his younger brother the Duke of York—the future James II—who masterminded the fightback.
Now the preeminence—and the very existence—of the City was under threat. Unless the merchants acted fast, there was a risk that investment might never return to the ancient site in the Roman walls. Businesses would migrate to the west and north, and wealth and power would be concentrated near the royal court at Westminster. They needed a man with a plan, and they needed him fast.
To see what they eventually came up with I recommend that you go to a little cobbled square just by London Bridge, called Fish Street Hill. Thousands of Londoners stride past it every morning, in their great trans-river tramp, with hardly a glance at what was once intended to be among the most conspicuous objects in the City. It is the Monument, still the single biggest stone pillar ever constructed, a preposterous Portland periscope.
It is 202 feet high because it is 202 feet from Pudding Lane and the seat of the fire. At the back of the pedestal is a giant square relief in which a bare-breasted woman representing London (and with the full-lipped features, they say, of Nell Gwynn) looks with doting eyes at her saviour, Charles II, whose dopy expression and pencil moustache make him look a bit like troubled fashion designer John Galliano. It is altogether beautiful in design and concept, surmounted by a gleaming bronze bloom of flame, and well worth climbing.
At the top of its 311 black marble steps I puff to the railings and look out, like Pepys, at the panorama of London. There is Canary Wharf, sitting pale in the haze; St. Paul’s, the towers of the City. If I look down I can see the funny tram tracks of the window-cleaning devices on the office roofs.
I look straight down onto a desk in a bank a hundred feet below, where a man is slowly shuffling paper. The buses crawl up King William Street. There are only a few other tourists up here, including a man who hasn’t been in London for ten years.
“What’s that?” he asks, pointing at the Heron Tower. “And what’s that?” He indicates Norman Foster’s cross-hatched ellipsoid, a building now so famous that it is used as a shorthand for the City.
“That’s the Gherkin,” I say.
“Oh, that’s the Gherkin,” he exclaims—as if there were any other building on the horizon that looked remotely like a gherkin.
If Pepys were up here with us, I imagine he would be not so much amazed as shocked to see how the spires of lovely seventeenth-century churches have been engulfed in a tidal wave of concrete and glass. And yet there is still something about this view that he would have recognised.
In the weeks after the fire there was a competition to redesign the City. John Evelyn, the diarist, proposed a splendidly classical matrix of boulevards and piazzas. Sir Christopher Wren did the same. A man named Valentine Knight produced a scheme so revolutionary that he was arrested. It rapidly became clear that none of these plans would work. Their shops and houses may have burned to the ground, but Londoners still held title to the smouldering sites. They wouldn’t give them up.
In the end the harmonious neoclassical schemes were junked in favour of the ancient pattern. One man more than any other was to fix that pattern on the ground, and to measure out the plots of the new-built London. For the rest of the century he was to be a familiar figure, striding around the ruins with his “waywiser,” his own invention for measuring distances.
He designed or otherwise had a hand in fifty-one new or rebuilt churches. Indeed, he did the first sketch and proposal for the very monument on which I am standing. He was not Christopher Wren.
He was Robert Hooke, and in the phrase of London’s leading modern historian Stephen Inwood, he was the forgotten genius of the seventeenth century—and I hope all Hooke fans will turn next to Inwood’s remarkable biography. When Hooke died in 1703, he was alone and wretched and covered with lice, with a reputation as a sexually peculiar old miser. A view had gained ground among his contemporaries that he was querulous, boastful and an inveterate nicker of other people’s ideas. It was not a fair verdict.
He was in fact one of the most astonishingly inventive minds of his or any age. He was almost da Vinci–like in his range of interests, from painting and architecture to a Daedalic array of scientific innovations and theories. He looked up: through large telescopes that stuck from his roof that enabled him to be the first man to see the spot on Jupiter, and the first to calculate the revolutions of Mars.
He looked down: through microscopic lenses of all kinds. Hooke was the first to squint at semen and notice the funny tadpoles within. He was the first to cut open a section of cork with a sharp penknife, place it under a microscope and identify the little boxes that made up the tissue. He called them “cells,” the name they have borne ever since.
He not only designed the Monument and assorted churches but a range of beautiful country houses. He is credited with the invention of the sash window. The air pump and the air gun emerged from his teeming brain, as well as Hooke’s Law of Springs (strain is equal to stress), a principle of physics that is no less important for sounding a bit dull.
It was true that he came up with all manner of devices that he did not quite bring to perfection. There was the whalebone crossbow for killing whales, the self-replenishing lamp for seeing in the dark, the universal algebraic language, the semaphore using four-foot letters. He designed a bizarre bat suit for allowing a human being to fly, as well as thirty other flying contraptions, none of which got airborne. But his insights were often far ahead of his time.
Long before the invention of the stethoscope, he said that it was more sensible to listen to the chest of a patient than to follow the normal practice and taste his urine. He looked at fossil shells and worked out that the biblical account of Creation could not be the whole story. He was the first to give a scientific lecture on the effects of cannabis and to propose that degrees of brightness should be measured in candlepower.
He deduced that there was an element in the air that allowed fire to burn, and he even had a claim—a fateful one, as it turned out—to have hit on the principles of gravity before Isaac Newton. He has more entries than any other scientist in an authoritative encyclopaedia of the instruments of science—and yet until lately his career and achievements had been almost totally eclipsed by others. He is an illustration of the need to have good PR, and I hope to give him some now.
Robert Hooke was born in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight on 16 July 1635, the son of an impecunious vicar. His father hoped he would study for the cloth, but young Hooke claimed a headache. He preferred to imitate local craftsmen, making wooden watches and floating model boats on the River Yar. His father died when he was thirteen, and by today’s standards he then did something outlandish: he walked to London, carrying his entire inheritance of £100 in his pocket.
He arrived at a monster of a City, a place of four hundred thousand people—as big as the next fifty towns of England put together. As he proceeded through the sprawl of Southwark and over London Bridge, the boy would have seen at least some novelties unknown to Shakespeare. The fruits of trade were starting to appear—I mean literally fruits: bananas and pineapples from the tropics. Toothbrushes (invented in China in 1498) were at last making an impact on English dentition. The fork was becoming much more commonplace.
The London Bridge water pump had been augmented by a network of elm wood tubes—though nothing the Romans would have found especially impressive. People were carried around in sedan chairs or even hackney carriages, and fashionable women wore funny black patches on their faces, in the shapes of stars or crescent moons, though they did not, on
the whole, wear knickers. Men increasingly wore wigs. London was acquiring the social and cultural division that has lasted to this day, between an affluent and politically powerful West End and an East End full of relative poverty. The first great squares had been laid out at Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But there was one respect in which the London of Robert Hooke’s arrival was very much like the London of William Shakespeare and even Dick Whittington: it was still a city of awful plagues, and at its heart was a network of higgledy-piggledy streets and overhanging wooden houses. It was one great firetrap.
Showing considerable gumption, Hooke took himself to the house of the portrait painter Peter Lely—the man who painted Cromwell, “warts and all.” He might have been apprenticed to the artist, since he had flair for drawing, but paint, like religion, gave him a headache. He headed next for Westminster School, where he presented his cash to the great Dr. Busby and asked for an education.
Busby specialised in what we would now call flagellation. His results were remarkable. Contemporaries of Hooke included John Locke and John Dryden, and in a short space of time the adolescent had mastered the organ and the first six books of Euclid and become proficient in Latin and Greek while dabbling in Hebrew and other Eastern languages. He was also starting to look a bit odd. He was said to be “very mechanical” at Westminster, and he later claimed that he spent so much time on the Turn-Lath that he twisted his back.
His condition has been subsequently diagnosed as Scheuermann’s kyphosis, which involves the development of wedge-shaped spaces between the vertebrae. Whatever the cause of his malformation, he was generally agreed to be a sorry sight, with pointy features and bulging eyes in an overlarge head. Up to Christ Church, Oxford, went this strange hunched spermatozoon, and there he fell in with a group of scientists—or “philosophers,” as they called themselves—though even our modern term “science” is too narrow to capture their range of interests and enthusiasms.
It was an age of post-Copernican confidence in reason and man’s ability to disprove the judgment of the ancients. Galileo had pointed his optic tube at the heavens and the geocentric view of the universe was no more. Aristotle had been dethroned. A school of English science had been born—an empirical school in which you tested things in practice and then tried to deduce a theory.
Not for them the approach of René Descartes and the French, which was—and to some extent still is—to establish whether something could work in theory before establishing whether it was any good in practice. Hooke was recruited by his fellow student Robert Boyle, Old Etonian son of the Earl of Cork—the author of Boyle’s Law. Boyle noticed his mechanical gifts and set him to work on a vacuum pump. Also at Christ Church was Christopher Wren, with whom Hooke forged a working relationship that was to last decades and was to lead to at least a thousand meetings, walks and conversations between the two men, and untold riches for London. Boyle and Wren were among a widening circle of scientists and dilettanti that Hooke frequented on his return to the capital.
They debated everything from magnetism to human flight to the circulation of the blood. They bodged and fiddled and speculated, with beautiful devices of polished brass and wood. By the time of the Restoration in 1660 they needed more cash for their operations, and they were hopeful that King Charles II would live up to his reputation as a supporter of their inquiries. The Royal Society was formed. Since the King’s subsidy was in fact rather disappointing, and since it was necessary to fund the Society through the subscriptions of its members, it consisted largely of periwigged toffs who could afford to pay. That was why it was so necessary to leaven this membership with genuine scientific talent.
Hooke was the ideal man to serve as their professional scientist, and in 1662 he was made curator of experiments. He was commissioned to give a series of lectures for a fixed stipend and to lead the quest for knowledge. He would delight the Society by blowing up glass balls. He would do his best to oblige their barmy desire to grow moss on a dead man’s skull or make a coach that ran on legs instead of wheels. He demonstrated the world’s first pressure cooker, turning a cow—horns, hooves and all—into a kind of gelatinous paste that his fellow members claimed to find delicious.
It must be admitted that half the time Hooke and Co. did not know what they were doing, but then nobody had tried their experiments before. So much of the world was a mystery.
They were puzzled by the act of breathing, and wanted to establish what the point of it was. Years ago William Harvey had said it was to animate the blood, but it was not clear what that might mean. Hooke led a horrific experiment in which he cut open the thoracic cavity of a living dog and everyone craned round to try to work out the relation between the lungs and the heart. It was still not obvious. He vowed not to repeat the experiment, because of the torture of the poor hound. But only a few years later the Royal Society was at it again. Their curiosity was insatiable.
Did the air animate the frame, with the motion of the lungs somehow physically driving things along? Or was there perhaps something in the air that entered the bloodstream? Another dog was found (the first having expired), and Hooke punctured a hole in its pleural membrane, to which he fixed a tube and some bellows. By keeping the beast’s lungs continuously filled with air he was able to establish that the motion of the lungs was not indispensable to life.
The dog’s eyes remained bright. He even wagged his tail. Aha, said Hooke and the Royal Society as the loyal dog breathed his last. There must be something in the air. But what?
Hooke was not afraid to experiment on himself, and at one stage he sealed himself in a case and made that case airtight by surrounding it with a separate container, with water in the gap. He then commanded the air to be pumped from around him, and only gave up when his ears began to pop. He self-medicated with a bewildering range of substances and recorded his potations in his diary. He took sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) and woke “strangely refresht.” “This is a great discovery in Physick. I hope that this will dissolve the viscous slime that hath so much tormented me in my stomach and gutts.”
Having drunk a strong cup of Turkish coffee, he would try to counteract the caffeine with laudanum or syrup of poppies; or perhaps, to wake himself up again, he would shove some nutmeg or ginger or tobacco up his nostrils. One week he would have a daily dose of iron and mercury—these days regarded as more or less fatal—and the next week he would sustain himself entirely with boiled milk. On one occasion he decided to drink two quarts of “Dulwich water” from a source in south London, and found that it went down well. He later discovered that “many have died of Fluxes and some of Spotted Feaver upon drinking Dulwich water,” but one imagines that by this stage Hooke had an iron constitution.
I mean that literally: he would drink wine mixed with steel filings—to what medical end we are not told—and wake up with his head “benumm’d.” His body could cope with almost anything. He took infusions of “crocus metal”—probably oxysulfide of antimony—and vomited repeatedly the following day. He then moved on to stale Chester beer and went to bed after a libation of spirit of urine and laudanum mixed with milk.
Then he switched to something called “conserves” and “flowers of sulphur,” which he seemed to think worked all right on day one, though by the following day it had caused such bad and bloody dysentery that “he swooned and was badly griped.” He was continually putting honey or bitter almond oil in his ear or taking enemas or being bled of seven ounces of blood. He was a walking testament to human resilience. Others were less fortunate.
When his friend John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, fell ill with kidney stones, the prescription was four red-hot oyster shells in a quart of cider and blistering with cantharides, or Spanish fly. Wilkins died. Hooke was no less peculiar in what would now be called his private life. He does not seem to have been especially attractive to women, and though he had mistresses (several brassieres were found among his effects when he died), t
hey were generally servants or close relatives who were in some way dependent on him for shelter and income.
He would make a pass by “wrastling” with them, and he recorded his orgasms in his diary thus: )-(. So a typical entry might be the vigorous session he recorded with his servant Nell Young on 28 October 1672: “Played with Nell. )-(. Hurt small of back.”
Hooke was deeply conscious of his reputation and vulnerable to mockery. On 25 May 1676 he was having coffee with some chums when he heard of a new play, The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell. Restoration comedy was now in full swing. The barbarism of the Puritans was long forgotten. Hooke went to see what it was all about.
It was, I am afraid, all about him. It was a no-holds-barred parody of the Royal Society, their delectable disputations and crackpot experiments. In one scene the main character, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, is discovered lying on a table in his laboratory with a thread between his teeth, the other end of which is tied to the belly of a frog. He informs the audience that he is simultaneously learning to swim and to fly.
Everything seemed to be a reference to Hooke. Gimcrack is a man who spent thousands of pounds on microscopes to look at eels in vinegar, mites in cheese and the blue of plums. He uses absurd scientific terms, saying “It comes first to fluidity, then to orbiculation, then fixation, so to angulization, then crystallization, from thence to germination or ebullition, then vegetation, then plantanimation, perfect animation, sensation, local motion and the like.” Everyone knew that this was lifted more or less directly—like all the best parodies—from Hooke’s groundbreaking work, Micrographia, his beautifully drawn account of the fleas and lice and nettle stings he could see with his microscope.
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