Hooke quickly mastered Latin and Greek, mastered Euclid's Elements, learned to play the organ, and began his lifelong study of mechanics. He took this to London with the aim of beginning an apprenticeship, and studied briefly with Samuel Cowper and Peter Lely, but was persuaded instead to enter Westminster School by its headmaster Dr. On his father's death in 1648, Robert inherited 40 pounds. He made his own drawing materials from coal, chalk, and ruddle ( iron ore). He dismantled a brass clock and built a wooden replica that reportedly worked 'well enough'. The young Robert Hooke was fascinated by observation, mechanical works, and drawing.

Their father led a local school as well, yet at least partly homeschooled Robert, frail in health. Robert was the youngest, by seven years, of four siblings, two boys and two girls. Expected to join the church, Robert, too, would become a staunch monarchist. A royalist, John Hooke likely was among a group that went to pay respects to Charles I as he escaped to the Isle of Wight. Father John Hooke's two brothers, Robert's paternal uncles, were also ministers. Robert Hooke was born in 1635 in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight to Cecily Gyles and John Hooke, an Anglican priest, the curate of Freshwater's Church of All Saints. The work of Waller, along with John Ward's Lives of the Gresham Professors (with a list of his major works) and John Aubrey's Brief Lives, form the major near-contemporaneous biographical accounts of Hooke. Richard Waller mentions it in his introduction to The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M.D. Much of what is known of Hooke's early life comes from an autobiography that he commenced in 1696 but never completed. Life and works Hooke's microscope, from an engraving in Micrographia Early life In recent times, he has been called 'England's Leonardo'. Even so, Hooke was key in devising for London a set of planning controls that remain influential. Hooke's pioneering work in land surveying and in mapmaking aided development of the first modern plan-form map, although his grid-system plan for London was rejected in favour of rebuilding along existing routes. Thus observing microscopic fossils, Hooke presaged the theory of biological evolution. In geology and paleontology, Hooke originated the theory of a terraqueous globe, disputed the literally Biblical view of the Earth's age, hypothesised the extinction of species, and argued that fossils atop hills and mountains had become elevated by geological processes.

Priority over this insight contributed to the rivalry between Hooke and Newton, who thus antagonized Hooke's legacy. In physics, he approximated experimental confirmation that gravity heeds an inverse square law, and first hypothesised such a relation in planetary motion, too, a principle furthered and formalised by Isaac Newton in Newton's law of universal gravitation. And his is the first recorded hypothesis of heat expanding matter, air's composition by small particles at larger distances, and heat as energy. Investigating in optics, specifically light refraction, he inferred a wave theory of light. Hooke's 1665 book Micrographia, in which he coined the term ' cell', spurred microscopic investigations. In 1673, Hooke built the earliest Gregorian telescope, and then he observed the rotations of the planets Mars and Jupiter. Hooke was also Professor of Geometry at Gresham College.Īs an assistant to physical scientist Robert Boyle, Hooke built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's experiments on gas law, and himself conducted experiments. Hooke was also a member of the Royal Society and since 1662 was its curator of experiments. An impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood, he found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the architectural surveys after London's great fire of 1666. Robert Hooke FRS ( / h ʊ k/ 18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English polymath active as a scientist, natural philosopher and architect, who is credited to be one of the first two scientists to discover microorganisms in 1665 using a compound microscope that he built himself, the other scientist being Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1674.

Kids telescope and microscope