Robert Hooke: Early Respiratory Physiologist, Polymath, and Mechanical Genius

Physiology ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 222-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. West
Keyword(s):  
Atmospheric Pressure ◽  
Compound Eye ◽  
Artificial Ventilation ◽  
Respiratory Physiology ◽  
Universal Joint ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
New Buildings ◽  
Animal Preparation

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was a polymath who made important contributions to respiratory physiology and many other scientific areas. With Robert Boyle, he constructed the first air pump that allowed measurements on small animals at a reduced atmospheric pressure, and this started the discipline of high-altitude physiology. He also built the first human low-pressure chamber and described his experiences when the pressure was reduced to the equivalent of an altitude of ∼2,400 m. Using artificial ventilation in an animal preparation, he demonstrated that movement of the lung was not essential for life. His book Micrographia describing early studies with a microscope remains a classic. He produced an exquisite drawing of the head of a fly, showing the elaborate compound eye. There is also a detailed drawing of a flea, and Hooke noted how the long, many-jointed legs enable the insect to jump so high. For 40 years, he was the curator of experiments for the newly founded Royal Society in London and contributed greatly to its intellectual ferment. His mechanical inventions covered an enormous range, including the watch spring, the wheel barometer, and the universal joint. Following the Great Fire of London in 1666, he designed many of the new buildings in conjunction with Christopher Wren. Unfortunately, Hooke had an abrasive personality, which was partly responsible for a lack of recognition of his work for many years. However, during the last 25 years, there has been renewed interest, and he is now recognized as a brilliant scientist and innovator.

Frederick Slare, F. R. S. (1648-1727)

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Young Men ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
John Wallis ◽  
Christopher Wren

When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its initiators were far from being young men, as one would expect remembering that the long-lived John Wallis (1616-1703) gave its origins as lying in meetings begun as long before as 1645. Fifteen years after that date, most of its founders were, in 1660, well on in their 40s; even among the original Fellows of 1663 the youngest were Christopher Wren (38 in 1660), Robert Boyle (33) and William Croone (27), nor were the first recruits to the new, formal Society younger. Hence it is not surprising that the next 20 years saw the loss through death of the majority of them, nor that those who survived into the 1680s slowly withdrew from active participation in the meetings. Even Robert Hooke, only 27 when appointed Curator of Experiments in 1662, was by 1680 well on in years by 17th-century usage, and reasonably more interested in his various professional activities than anxious to labour at performing repetitions of experiments for the edification of fellow-members.

The efforts of the Aubrey correspondence group to revise John Wilkins’ Essay (1668) and their context

2001 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhodri Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
John Ray ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Society Committee ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
The Individual ◽  
John Wallis ◽  
Christopher Wren

Summary In the aftermath of the publication of John Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), the Royal Society established a committee to consider and develop Wilkins’s proposals, whose members included Seth Ward (1617–89), Robert Hooke (1635–1703), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), John Wallis (1616–1703), John Ray (1627–1705), Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and William Holder (1616–1698). Despite the fact that this committee never reported, work on the Essay did continue, with many of the individual members conducting a detailed correspondence, marshalled by John Aubrey (1626–1697). In addition to the members of the original Royal Society committee, this group’s participants included Francis Lodwick (1619–1694), the Somerset clergyman Andrew Paschall (c.1630–c.1696), and Thomas Pigott (1657–1686), fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. The correspondents could not, however, agree on the best means of advancing the Essay, with the principal bone of contention being the ideas of Seth Ward. Thus, their efforts were eventually fruitless. This article traces the activities of this group and the intellectual milieu in which the revision of Wilkins’s Essay took place.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

Locke, Boyle and Peter Stahl

1995 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-192 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Human Blood ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Practical Work ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
History Of

John Locke and Robert Boyle first met at some time before May 1660 but do not seem to have become closely acquainted until 1664 when they were both in Oxford. 1 Locke’s notebooks for 1664-67 contain many short entries ending ‘Mr.Boyle’, which appear to be details that Locke received from Boyle personally. 2 In his work, Boyle relied on various assistants, quite apart from craftsmen like glass-blowers and blacksmiths, who ranged from his amanuensis, needed because of his poor sight, and his servants who watched experiments through the night, to skilled collaborators like Robert Hooke. 3 In addition, Boyle was in touch with independent workers, notably Richard Lower whose name appears in Locke’s notebooks some time before Boyle’s; 4 and Dewhurst suggested that Locke was also a member of this group. 5 It is certainly true that Locke provided Boyle with barometric and meteorological readings about this time and that 21 of his headings for the ‘chymicall Analysis’ of blood are related to Boyle’s 46 headings in his Memoirs for the Natural History of Human Blood (1683/4). 6 But it is going too far to conclude from Locke’s practical notes on blood that he was then acting as Boyle’s assistant. Those notes come from Bodleian MS. Locke f.25. What they describe are not ‘experiments’ done by Locke, Boyle or anyone else. They are a record of the practical work Locke did when he attended a course of lectures in 1666 which were given by Peter Stahl, the German chemist brought by Boyle to Oxford in 1659.

Literary Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Fundamental Component ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Tool

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them.

scholarly journals The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth-Century English Natural History

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 562-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Color Changes ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Before Newton’s seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemiah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object’s hot and cold qualities, positing instead that saline principles governed color and color changes in flora, fauna and minerals. In our study, we also characterize to what extent chymistry was a basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century English natural historians.


The Libraries of Newton, Hooke and Boyle

1966 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The demand and search for the scientific literature of the past has grown enormously in the last twenty years. In an age as conscious as ours of the significance of science to mankind, some scientists naturally turned their thoughts to the origins of science as we know it, how scientific theories grew and how discoveries were made. Both institutions and individual scientists partake in these interests and form collections of books necessary for their study. How did their predecessors fare in this respect? They, of course, formed their libraries at a time when books were easy to find—and cheap. But what did they select for their particular reading? For example, what did the libraries of the three greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, look like? Fortunately in the case of Newton, the history of his books is now fairly clear, thanks to the devoted labours of Colonel R . de Villamil (i), but it is a sad reflection on our attitude to our great intellectual leaders that this library o f the greatest English scientist, whose work changed the world for hundreds of years, was not taken care of, was, in fact, forgotten and at times entirely neglected.

Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Walker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
John Evelyn

Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England charts the moment when well-educated, well-resourced, English intellectuals first became interested in classical architecture in substantial numbers. This occurred after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 and involved people such as John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and Roger North. The book explores how these figures treated architecture as a subject of intellectual enquiry, either as writers, as designers of buildings, or as both. In four substantial chapters it looks at how the architect was defined as a major intellectual figure; how architects acquired material that allowed them to define themselves as intellectually competent architects; how intellectual writers in the period handled knowledge of ancient architecture in their writing; and how the design process in architecture was conceived of in theoretical writing at the time. In all, the book shows that the key to understanding English architectural culture at the time is to understand how architecture was handled as knowledge, and how architects were conceived of as collectors and producers of such knowledge. It also makes the claim that architecture was treated as an extremely serious and important area of intellectual enquiry, the result of which was that, by the turn of the eighteenth century, architects and architectural writers could count themselves amongst England’s intellectual and cultural elite.

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