Book: The Curious Life Of Robert Hooke
Author: Lisa Jardine
Price: HarperCollins, ?25
Even Cambridge academics now appreciate the publicity value of scientific anniversaries. In 1953 the discovery of DNA scarcely reached the national press, yet this year's celebrations overshadowed those for Edmund Hillary's conquest of Everest. It was only during the second half of the 19th century that publicists started to organise festivities for national figures such as Robert Burns. Scientific birthday parties arrived still later, and one of the largest was orchestrated by the nascent electrical industry's public relations men, who in 1931, for the 100th anniversary of the discovery of electromagnetic induction, converted Michael Faraday into a working-class hero and sold over 100,000 copies of The Errand Boy Who Changed the World.
The first major scientific anniversary was the 1909 centenary of Charles Darwin's birth. Isaac Newton, Britain's highest scientific priest, had to wait until 1927, the 200th anniversary of his death, when journalists moaned that "celebrations are now of almost monthly occurrence, and some people may think there are too many of them." Some people undoubtedly still think there are too many of them, but today science and the media are symbiotically linked. This year's scientific giant is Robert Hooke, the experimenter and inventor who died in 1703 and whose reputation, his devoted followers claim, has been unfairly eclipsed by his contemporaries. Revisionist accounts often cast his arch-enemy Newton as the villain of the piece, but Hooke's own behaviour also contributed to his marginalisation. He was an inveterate self-medicator, and the purges, emetics and other remedies he consumed exacerbated or even caused his debilitating symptoms and hastened his transformation into the eccentric, paranoid miser that his survivors connived to forget.
Tercentenary planning started several years ago, and the tributes that have appeared so far include four books, a television documentary and a large conference at the Royal Society. One of Hooke's leading champions is Jim Bennett, dynamic director of the newly revitalised Oxford Museum for the History of Science. Bennett has spearheaded broader moves to shift the attention of science's historians away from theory and abstraction towards experiments, instruments and practical applications. In modern accounts of the so-called scientific revolution (itself a French invention of the 1930s), Hooke emerges as the crucial experimenter who transformed ideas-based natural philosophy into something more like modern science by adapting traditional measuring instruments. More recently, another major Hooke protagonist has emerged - Michael Cooper, an engineering professor, whose intensive archival research has demonstrated Hooke's importance in rebuilding London after the great fire of 1666.
Lisa Jardine's lavishly illustrated biography owes much to the research of these and other scholars. Hers is no neutral appraisal, but a panegyric to Hooke's "unique, restless, remarkable genius." This emotional commitment makes it hard to understand two strange features. In the very opening paragraph of the preface, Jardine announces that since this is a companion volume to her earlier book on Christopher Wren, it will exclude discussions of her two heroes' architectural collaboration; interested readers are referred back to On a Grander Scale. Jardine is less explicit about her second surprising decision: she gives Hooke's most important book, his Micrographia of 1665, only perfunctory coverage. Yet emphasising the book's significance would have bolstered her claim that Hooke played a key role in the establishment of modern science.
Micrographia (literally "little letters") was an early scientific popularisation. The central message of it was that human vision had been clouded since the Fall in the Garden of Eden, so that microscopes and telescopes represented the most reliable way of seeing things as they really are. Hooke thrilled his readers by showing them a previously invisible world that he had explored with his optical instruments. The large fold-out engravings contained unsuspected delights, such as the multifaceted eyes of a fly, the hexagonal patterns of snowflakes and craters on the moon (surely inhabited, Hooke argued), and the tiny bristles and armour plates of insects.
Micrographia made a big impression. Samuel Pepys sat up until 2am in the morning, riveted by "the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life," and Newton wrote seven densely-packed sheets of comments. Jardine devotes only half a page to the topic, but there are strong arguments to support the claim that Hooke prefigured Newton's work in optics. Can it be coincidence that, having prevaricated for a decade, Newton published his Opticks the year after Hooke died?
Although we have verbal descriptions of Hooke, no portraits have survived, possibly because Newton contrived to misplace them when he became president of the Royal Society after Hooke's death. Confessing that she needs a picture in order to establish a relationship with her subject, Jardine has searched for and found a convenient candidate - a portrait with "J Ray" painted on the top right-hand corner. Although the man in this picture looks remarkably similar to the best authenticated version of the eminent naturalist John Ray, Jardine has decided that he is actually Hooke. Among other problems with this wishful identification, the hair shows no trace of what Hooke's close friend John Aubrey called its "excellent moist curle."
"Merely because one says something might be so, it does not follow that it has been proved that it is." Jardine sets this quotation at the top of page one. It is Newton's famous dismissal of Hooke's claim to have discovered the inverse square law of gravitation. How odd, then, to put an unconfirmed portrait on the front cover of her book. And how odd, too, to declaim the unprovable with such confidence. It seems most unlikely, as Jardine claims, that Hooke succeeded because he was the only fellow of the Royal Society with sufficient theatrical flair to captivate foreign visitors. On the contrary, since the whole point of carrying out experiments in public was to persuade the audience, many of his fellow experimenters were also skilled performers.
The Curious Life of Robert Hooke tries hard to rescue the reputation of an unjustly neglected innovator. Perhaps historians of science should be grateful that their discipline is receiving some welcome publicity from an eminent and fluent author. But surely when writing for a more general audience it is still important that professional historical standards be maintained. Biography, writes Jardine, "is the art of giving shape and coherence to the life of an individual." But that should not require transmuting cautious provisos about possibilities into near certainties.
In Jardine's book, her alleged portrait of Hooke is reproduced above a 20th-century painting of a youthful Newton meditating beneath a tree laden with rosy apples about to fall. This imaginary scene represents one of science's most powerful myths, that discovery takes place instantaneously, as when Archimedes leapt out of his bath or James Watt watched his kettle boil. Jardine wants to rewrite 17th-century history and bring Hooke out from the shadows of Wren and Newton, but in her eagerness to clinch the case, she has created new myths of her own.
