BiographyIt is the perennial fate of collaborators with the famous to be forgotten, and indeed the famous often work hard to diminish the role of their co-workers.
For every hundred people who have heard of Pericles maybe one has heard of Ephialtes, and the same applies to Alexandre Dumas and Maquet, Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth,Napoleon and Desaix and hundreds of others. So it is with Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who worked in tandem with Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild London in the 1660s but is now almost wholly forgotten.Lisa Jardine labours hard in this committed biography to make the case for Hooke and dispel the "who he?" factor, but she has given hostages to fortune by having already included the story of the Wren-Hooke collaboration in her Wren biography, On a Grander Scale : The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren, published last year. With the best of the wine already drunk, so to speak, even the most talented biographer would face an uphill task to breathe life into the story of Robert Hooke. Alas, Lisa Jardine finds no way to "magic" her very dry material and indeed makes no real effort to do so. This is emphatically a book for scholars rather than the general reader.
Born in the Isle of Wight, educated at Oxford, Hooke was a highly talented physicist who in his 20s had designed the air-pump with which Robert Boyle tested his famous law. Appointed professor of physics at 30 in a London college, he produced his brilliant and versatile Micrographia in the same year (1665), which summarised his microscopic investigations in botany, chemistry and physics and proposed a theory of colour that anticipated Newton's. He worked on primitive and inchoate versions of flying machines and steam engines, formulated the best theory of the arch hitherto and took out patents for balance-spring pocket watches. He published Hooke's Law of elasticity - tension is proportional to extension - built the first reflecting telescope, discovered the fifth star in Orion, inferred the rotation of Jupiter and invented or improved the compound microscope, the quadrant, the marine barometer and the universal joint.After the Great Fire of London in 1666, he was appointed City Surveyor and presided over the rebuilding of London. In this capacity he designed the new Bethelehem Hospital (Moorfields) and Montagu House and was also responsible for the Monument and the Royal College of Physicians.
Argumentative, opinionated and combative, Hooke clashed acrimoniously and vociferously with many of his eminent fellow scientists, especially Newton and the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius.Newton accused him of plagiarism (but then Newton suspected all his rivals, including Leibniz, of having stolen his ideas) and Hevelius charged him with incompetence and sensationalism. Jardine's careful scholarship establishes that Hooke really did discover the "inverse-square" law of gravitation before Newton but that Newton in his Principia adamantly refused to acknowledge his rival's work. Hooke was his own worst enemy, for he alienated many initially sympathetic to him, to the point where Newton was able to "airbrush" him out of the annals of the Royal Society. A bon vivant and dandy, as a young man Hooke wasted a lot of his energy boasting at fashionable London supper-tables about his undeniable talent.Sexually he was an oddity, unmarried and,like Hitler, besotted with a niece, Grace, who died young and whose entire life seems shrouded in mystery and scandal. As he got older and more embittered, Hooke sought more and more comfort in drugs, which simply exacerbated an increasing tendency to irascibility, anxiety, mood-swings and paranoia. The cliché "cocktail of drugs" scarcely does justice to Hooke's bizarre pick 'n' mix attitude to narcotics, and these sections would make good reading for pharmacologists and amateur poisoners. In old age he failed to mellow and raged, not just against the dying of the light, but against everyone and everything. This part of Jardine's investigation is particularly well done.
Liberally (and perhaps too liberally) salted with extensive quotes from the Hooke diaries, Jardine's book is clearly a labour of love. But there is one glaring oddity about it. There is no extant likeness of Hooke and this seems to wind Jardine up in every sense. As with Jan Morris and Admiral Fisher, she seems obsessed with Hooke's face and claims to have found an image that is his likeness. It will probably be regarded as "sexist" if I suggest that in this instance Lisa Jardine has allowed her feminine intuition to overrule logic and probability, but first consider her tenuous arguments. She claims that the image she champions as being "certainly" that of Hooke cannot be of John Ray (the usual attribution) because it does not match the other known likenesses of John Ray. The rest of her case is as follows. The painter of the portrait Jardine reproduces was Mary Beale, for whom (allegedly) Hooke sat. If Hooke had his portrait painted (and we don't know that he did), he might have chosen Mary Beale. Er,that's it. Faced with this "evidence" one can only say that Jardine reminds one of Lucetta and her preference for Sir Proteus in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona :
"I have no other than a woman's reason.
I think him so because I think him so."
Frank McLynn 's latest book, Wagons West, is published by Pimlico
The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London By Lisa Jardine HaperCollins, 422pp. £25