Shadwell then went on to make fun of Hooke’s wacko transfusions, as Gimcrack and his sidekick, Sir Formal Trifle, describe how they have transferred blood between dogs and even put sheep’s blood into a madman. This last was taken directly from life.
Hooke and his colleagues had tried in vain to get the physicians at the Bethlem hospital to let them experiment on their patients, and they had at last persuaded a mentally unsound divinity graduate named Arthur Coga to be given a transfusion of lamb’s blood for a fee of one pound for his pains. He seems to have survived this lunacy, and the Hooke character Gimcrack boasts of the success of the operation. He ceased to be mad and became wholly ovine, he tells the audience. He sprouted wool all over. “I shall shortly have a flock of ’em. I’ll make all my own clothes of ’em.”
The idiotic Gimcrack is then seen reading the Geneva Bible by the light of a rotting leg of pork, making a tarantula dance to music and watching military campaigns take place on the surface of the moon. All these activities were references to Hooke’s notions or experiments, and yet the point and message of the play was the most stinging thing of all. As the comedy moves to its climax, Gimcrack’s house is besieged by a mob of ribbon weavers complaining that he had invented a machine that would put them out of work. Hooke/Gimcrack comes out to appease them.
“Hear me, gentlemen,” he says. “I never invented an engine in my life. As God shall save me, you do me wrong. I never invented so much as an engine to pare cream cheese with. We virtuosos never find out anything of use. ’Tis not our way.”
Sitting in the audience, Hooke burned with indignation. His life and work were being regarded with the most withering satire. People were holding their sides with laughter. “Damned dogs,” he wrote in his diary. “Vindica me Deus [may God avenge me]. People almost pointed.”
As a criticism of Hooke, the notion of uselessness was especially unfair. So much of what he did was practical; so many of his experiments were sheer economic logic.
England for most of his life had been engaged in a struggle with Holland for maritime supremacy, and London was the centre of an expanding commercial empire. The tonnage of shipping in England’s foreign trade rose 60 percent between 1630 and 1660, and a further 80 percent between 1660 and 1688. In other words, the number of ships in England’s merchant fleet more than doubled in Hooke’s lifetime.
It was crucial for all those captains to have an idea of where they were, to avoid being shipwrecked and to avoid being beaten by the Dutch. That is why Hooke worked so hard on all manner of aids to navigation. There were his quadrants and sextants, minutely engineered with their little brass screws and their markings so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye; these were to be used for gauging one’s position against the stars. There was a shipboard windmill that he hoped (vainly) might be handy for turning a capstan and shifting a boat off the shallows. He invented a depth sounder and a wheel barometer.
He even tried his hand at diving equipment and personally pioneered the idea that it might be possible to breathe underwater with a sponge soaked in salad oil pressed to your mouth. It was not a success. His next solution was a series of inverted buckets full of trapped air, which was little better. He threw himself like a ravenous squirrel at the toughest nut of all—the secret of longitude.
It wasn’t because he particularly wanted to tell the time that he worked so hard on the spring-regulated watch—a new concept to replace the primitive escapements that had existed since the Middle Ages. It was because he believed a mariner would have a much better chance of working out his longitude if he had an accurate record of the time at dawn and sunset.
As for his terrestrial projects, it wasn’t for the sheer intellectual pleasure of it that he formulated Hooke’s catenary law of arches—that an arch should exhibit the same curve as an inverted hanging chain. He came up with the theory because he built a hell of a lot of arches and he needed them to last. He produced his work on road engineering because people genuinely couldn’t make up their minds.
Was it more efficient to have a smooth journey on a soft road or a bumpy journey on a hard road? Hard and bumpy were best, said Hooke, and the thinner the wheels of your carriage the better. Across a vast front Robert Hooke advanced human understanding, sometimes by small steps, sometimes by leaps, and his satisfaction was the esteem of his peers.
To understand the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, you have to peer into the coffee shops that had sprung up in his lifetime, and which had become a characteristic institution of the city. They had begun in 1652 with Pasqua Rosee’s Head, opened in St. Michael’s Alley off Cornhill by a Turkish immigrant named Pasqua Rosee. The coffee shops sold the exotic provender that English merchantmen were locating with ever-increasing navigational accuracy in the waters of the Indies and the Americas.
There was Arabian coffee, West Indian sugar, Virginia tobacco, China tea and South American cocoa. By the time Hooke died in 1703 there were five hundred of the places. Hooke’s favourites were Garraway’s or Jonathan’s or Man’s, but he spread his favours widely. He loved coffeehouses because they were places you could show off. They were marts of ideas. His diary records that he would go to Man’s and chew the fat with Christopher Wren or John Aubrey, and in one coffee-slurping session they would cover the scotoscope for seeing in the dark, the refraction of light, the anatomy of the helical muscle of the gut and the way cliff pigeons love salt. He and Wren then had a more detailed discussion of Hooke’s plans for a flying chariot with horses.
The coffee shop was a place you might go to tell your friends about a new technique of glass-making or how to make phosphorus. If you were lucky, a chap in a coffee shop might let fall some priceless piece of information, such as “quicklime, white of eggs, blood or slime of snails makes a cement for water pipes as hard as stone”; and sometimes Hooke would share some tip of his own, such as his discovery that if you cut off the top of your thumb, you could cure it in four days with Balsamum Peruvianum.
Very often the assembly of philosophers and virtuosi would be so carried away that they would conduct experiments on the spot. Hooke twice climbed to the ceiling of Garraway’s to prove that the Earth was rotating in a certain direction. A dropped ball would fall slightly to the southeast of the place where you would expect it to land if it fell in a straight line, he claimed, not because the ball had swerved but because the Earth had moved while it was in flight.
On at least one occasion the experiment seemed to work. The ball landed to the southeast of true. Great was his rejoicing. It was a heady atmosphere, fed by the new drugs of nicotine and caffeine and cocoa, and the competition for acclaim was intense. In due time the London coffee shops were to become places where people traded stocks and shares or bought insurance. Lloyd’s of London was born in a coffee shop. From the very beginning they were places where reputations rose and fell as if on a bourse.
You could figuratively buy Hookes or sell Boyles or Newtons, depending on how the philosophers were doing with their experiments. The coffee shops became such hotbeds of gossip and rumour that at one stage in 1675 the King attempted to have them shut down. “In such houses divers false malitious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad, to the defamation of His Majesty’s government and the disturbance of the peace and quiet of the realm,” it was proclaimed—though later the King was talked out of so unpopular a measure.
Hooke often recorded how he was received by his fellow coffee drinkers, on one occasion noting dolefully that they drank everyone’s health but his own. This was the environment in which his ego was either pumped or deflated, and as he encountered other scientists and their achievements, he engaged in the feuding that was to cost him so dear.
His problem was that he experimented in so many fields that he was always jealous of any advance that he had missed. He rowed terribly with the great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens over who had been the first to invent the spri
ng-regulated watch. To make matters worse he accused the poor Secretary of the Royal Society, an excellent man named Henry Oldenburg, of passing his breakthroughs over to the foreigner.
Hooke’s conceit was often to announce, on hearing of some development, that he had come up with the idea years ago, and he would offer to prove it at the next meeting. So he would go off and rootle around in his papers, and sometimes he did indeed find some kind of apparent confirmation. When he formulated his famous law of springs, he was so excited that he wrote it down in code so that no one who swiped his diary should be able to work it out. He wrote “ceiinosssttuu,” which is an anagram of “ut tensio sic vis.”
He was once in a coffee shop imparting the secret of flight to his friend Edmund Wild when three strangers walked in. Hooke clammed up, and Wild—along with the rest of the world—was to remain in the dark.
He fell out badly with John Flamsteed, the future Astronomer Royal, who as a young man wrote to Hooke, asking for advice on an optical problem. Sensing an attempt to steal his ideas, Hooke refused, and Flamsteed wrote plaintively: “He affirms to know several secrets of the meliorating and improving of optics, of which we have yet had no treatise. . . . Why burns this lamp in secret?” Hooke called him a “conceited coxcomb.”
The feud with Flamsteed blew up at Garraway’s in 1681 when they were having a discussion about lenses. Tell you what, Flamsteed, said Hooke “somewhat captiously”—laying a trap for his opponent—if you have a lens with a flat side and a convex side, which side should you point at the heavens? Poor Flamsteed was caught off guard. He panicked. Er, it doesn’t much matter, he said, but on the whole the flat side should point at the sky.
Ha! Hooke pounced and launched a verbal battery designed to show that it had to be curvy side up. “He bore down on me with words enough and persuaded the company that I was ignorant in these things which he only understood not I,” protested the astronomer.
Hooke caused great international offence by writing an essay attacking the Polish astronomer Johann Hevelius, and accusing him of using primitive and out-of-date technology. I, Hooke, he proclaimed, am in the process of constructing a sensational new quadrant for the study of the heavens, a machine far better than anything made by Hevelius.
It was indeed a marvel, full of novelties such as a water level for exact perpendicular and a clockwork mechanism for diurnal rotation. But it didn’t really work, and some of its refinements took centuries to be perfected in the hands of others. Hevelius wrote bitterly against those who sought to destroy his good name and reputation, and who seemed to despise everything he did. Where was the evidence, he demanded, that Hooke could produce the goods himself? And a lot of people thought there was something in what Hevelius said.
When Hooke was not claiming that he had pre-invented just about everything, he was stealthily trying to borrow the ideas of others. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz arrived in London with his calculating machine. Hooke prowled behind it, removed the back plate and—much to the consternation of Leibniz—produced his own mechanical calculator.
This machine worked well and was favourably reviewed until someone pointed out that it was no quicker than pen and paper. Never mind! said Hooke, in typical style. “I have an instrument now making, which will perform the same effects with the German, which will not have a tenth part of the number of parts . . .” and so on. The machine did not materialise, but Leibniz was appalled at his conduct and wrote in strong terms to the Royal Society.
Hooke was a scrapper and a controversialist, a man who despite his undoubted achievements was acquiring a reputation as a braggart. And yet all of these rows and feuds might have been forgotten had he not picked a fight with the intellectual Goliath of his age.
It was Hooke’s curse to fall out catastrophically with the man whose insight and genius were to dominate our understanding of the physical world for the next 250 years. By the winter of 1683–84 Hooke’s mind was roaming over all sorts of things. The Polish Jan Sobieski had just saved Christendom by fending off the Turks at the gates of Vienna, so he was reminding the Royal Society of the possibilities of warning against invasions with hilltop semaphores and telescopes.
It was also the coldest winter in memory, and Londoners had the first Frost Fair on the Thames in 120 years. The river froze solid for seven weeks, and there were shops and booths set out in formal streets on the ice. Londoners entertained themselves with horse and coach races. There was bull- and bearbaiting and there were plays and brothels, and in the words of John Evelyn, it was altogether a Bacchanalian triumph.
Hooke made himself useful, meanwhile, by working out the durability of the ice on which they frolicked. He took a bar 3½ inches thick and 4 inches wide and 15 inches long and determined that it would not break until it was asked to take a weight of 350 pounds. He also verified, by means of an especially complicated experiment, that a block of ice weighed seven-eighths as much as water of equivalent volume, and that one-eighth of the bulk of an iceberg would therefore appear above the surface of the sea: another helpful thing for sailors to know.
It was in this busy January 1684 that he was having a conversation with Sir Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley, and Hooke boasted that he had cracked the inverse square law. OK, said Wren, who was by now President of the Royal Society. I’ll give you two months to bring me a proof and you can have a prize of 40 shillings. Peasy, said Hooke, with typical self-assurance. I’ve had it taped for ages. I am just waiting for others to try and fail for a good long time, so they will really appreciate my efforts when I make them public.
Wren raised an eyebrow. Oh yeah? he said, or words to that effect. You betcha, said Hooke, and went off, alas, to do something completely different.
The inverse square law is one of the building blocks of the universe. It states that the gravitational attraction between two bodies is the inverse square of the distance between them. So if the distance between body x and body y is ten, then the gravitational attraction between them is 1/100. Hooke had in fact speculated about gravity in some of his lectures, and he had written to Isaac Newton in 1679 suggesting that the inverse square law might apply. The idea was not original to him—a Frenchman named Bullialdus seems to have been first, in 1645—and he certainly had not offered a mathematical proof. But that letter and his sense of unacknowledged priority were to become a source of poisonous rancour.
After Wren had issued his challenge to Hooke, Edmond Halley went off and repeated the conversation to Newton, who had been made Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge at the age of twenty-nine, and it was the pale, mystic and flowing-haired Newton who now decided to apply himself seriously to the problem.
Hooke continued with his kaleidoscopic curriculum. One day he was developing strange boingy-boingy shoes that he claimed could propel him 12 feet upwards and 20 feet forwards—though we have no eyewitness accounts of an eggheaded man bouncing down the street, and we may assume that this was one of his inventions that was still being perfected.
He continued to give his Gresham lectures, sometimes very sparsely attended—a solitary fat man or a group of schoolboys picking their noses. Sometimes he would go and sit in the lectures given by his enemy Flamsteed, gazing so balefully that Flamsteed accused him of driving the rest of the audience away.
He had learned Dutch so that he could read the works of the great microscopist Leeuwenhoek, and now he tried to learn Chinese. But the proof of the inverse square law he did not attempt.
It was Newton who buried himself for two years in his room, and who thought deeply about the way the heavens and the Earth were put together. In April 1686 he published his findings. Amid the happy fossickings of the Royal Society into their favourite topics—pressure-cooked chocolate, monstrous infants, giant intestinal worms—Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica arrived like a bombshell.
On 28 April 1686 Sir John Hoskins chaired a meeting at which he declare
d that Newton’s work was “so much more to be prized, for that it was both Invented and perfected at the same time.” Hooke was enraged. He was convinced that Newton had filched the idea from him, and made the point volubly at the coffeehouse after the meeting.
“Hooke made a great stir, pretending Newton had it all from him, and desiring they would see he had justice done him,” said an eyewitness. News of Hooke’s behaviour reached Newton, and Newton was frankly even more outraged than Hooke. It was one thing to posit the inverse square law of gravity—an intuitive conclusion from the obvious fact that gravity was a notably weak force. It was a quite different thing to be able to sit down and do the original mathematics.
As he heard more and more of Hooke’s obstreperousness, Newton’s fury grew. Hooke pretended that he could not be bothered with the drudgery of dry calculations and observations, whereas the reality was that he simply wasn’t capable of it, raged Newton. “For tis plain by his words that he knew not how to go about it.” It was a cruel remark but probably true, and Hooke was deeply stung.
To the end of his days he continued to fume. In 1690 we find him referring to the inverse square law as “the theory I had the happiness to invent,” or to “the proprietys of gravity which I myself first discovered and showed to this society many years since. . . . Of late Mr Newton has done me the favour to print and publish as his own invention.”
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