Robert Hooke's Experimental Philosophy by Felicity Henderson

Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy

by Felicity Henderson

Reaktion Books, 2024

The year 2003, marking three centuries since Robert Hooke’s death, was greeted with two generous biographies, those by Stephen Inwood and Lisa Jardine. These comprised the popular front of a gradual effort to restore the long maligned scientist’s reputation, that of a quarrelsome wannabe Isaac Newton whose contributions are confined to an elementary law of springs. Inwood’s biography was published as Jardine was writing hers, prompting the latter to slyly remark in her preface that Inwood’s “meticulously detailed book” enabled her to find her own narrative voice and to give her own book “coherence and shape.” Felicity Henderson’s book, Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy, is neither a generous biography nor meticulously detailed, but a coherent, shapely and insightful introduction to the fascinating scientific pioneer.

Henderson, a Senior Lecturer in Archives and Material Culture at the University of Exeter, is the editor of a forthcoming edition of Robert Hooke’s diaries for Oxford University Press. The diaries, along with Hooke’s other writings, provide the bulk of the source material  for this book, which summarily skips to the 1660s and the founding of the Royal Society in London, now the world’s oldest scientific institution, with Hooke becoming its first employee and effectively “the first professional English scientist.” It was a period when the now considered basic principles of scientific methodology were being formed, and no one was more active in that process than Robert Hooke.

The members of the Royal Society would meet to discuss and argue, leading to the publication of Philosophical Transactions, now the longest running scientific journal. In addition to being one of the more energetic interlocutors, Hooke was responsible for the experiments conducted during the meetings. He also had a lucrative job as a surveyor for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, which meant he was always out walking the bustling streets of the city. Intriguingly, Henderson shows that it is this last element which is the key to Robert Hooke’s scientific method.

Hooke mistrusted his own senses and was incomparably enthusiastic about new experimental instruments. He believed that scientists should read widely, and that scientific value was to be found in the objects of everyday life. This belief is enshrined in his Micrographia, whose illustrations of fleas and human hair seen through the microscope thrilled the reading public (“The most ingenious book that ever I read in my life,” recorded Samuel Pepys.) Henderson might be reaching when she claims him as a pioneer in science communication, but Hooke did practice what we would now call community science. Contrary to the prevailing philosophical snobbishness, he argued that knowledge could be derived from labourers and craftsmen, going so far as to call their workshops a kind of laboratory. London, mercantile and industrial, was the perfect place for him.

Hooke wanted telescopes to be placed on the city’s tallest buildings, he described the size of a comet in relation to the tower behind which it passed, and he once “dashed into a house that had just been hit by lightning in order to find out what damage had been done”. He invented devices for seafarers who, in turn, would share their findings with him. He socialized with travellers from the Far East and received a piece of linen made by Native Americans “about 500 miles to the Northwest of Carolina”, which he tried to reproduce. Hooke’s experimental method, says Henderson, “is striking for the emphasis that he put on looking outward. For him, external experiences – conversations, time spent watching tradesmen at work, the act of touching, smelling and tasting different substances – underpinned natural philosophy.”

For much of Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy, Henderson’s authorial voice and plan largely go unnoticed, allowing for the impression that this is a haphazard collection of Hooke quotes and facts around a theme. But as Henderson reaches the close, around Hooke’s remarkable observation of fossils, she treats her audience to a most understated and logical finale, pulling all threads together in the tying of the bow. It is believed that no portrait of Robert Hooke survives, but this short, symphonic book is a fine substitute.

Nikolas Mavreas is a reader living in Athens, Greece.