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CHAPTER ONE
FROM FRESHWATER TO OXFORD

According to his own account, Robert Hooke was born at exactly noon on 18 July 1635, at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. What we know of his early life comes from two sources. John Aubrey’s Brief Lives is always entertaining, although not always accurate, but Aubrey was a friend of Hooke and had many conversations with him. Another friend, the naturalist Richard Waller, knew Hooke in later life, and was responsible for publishing the Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke in 1705, putting into print some of Hooke’s previously unpublished lectures. Waller’s introduction to that book drew, he tells us, on an autobiographical memoir that Hooke started to write but never finished, and which is now lost. The story pieced together from these two sources can be fleshed out, however, with other information about events on the Isle of Wight in particular, and across Britain in general, at the time Hooke was growing up. It was certainly an interesting time to be alive, taking in civil war and the execution of a king before the boy was fourteen.

Hooke’s father, John, was the curate of All Saints Church, where the rector was Cardell Goodman, a staunch Royalist and former member of Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford – connections that would in due course become important to Robert. His mother, Cecellie, was the second wife of John Hooke, presumably a good deal younger than him, and Robert was by some way the youngest of four children. He had two sisters, the younger of whom was seven years older than him, and a brother, John junior, born in 1630.

Robert was a sickly baby who was christened the day after his birth, probably because he was not expected to live, but he survived to become a sickly child. He was too delicate to be sent away to school in Newport like his brother but was educated at home by his father. Although plagued by recurrent headaches and other ailments, this left him plenty of time to wander the south-west corner of the island, gradually becoming stronger, and to follow his own interests, which leaned towards practical activities such as making working models. These demonstrated a rare skill at an early age. He built a model ship, described by Waller as ‘about Yard long, fitly shaping it, adding its Rigging of Ropes, Pullies, Masts, &c. with a contrivance to make it fire off some small Guns, as it was sailing cross a Haven of pretty breadth’ (probably Yarmouth). When he saw a brass clock that had been taken to pieces for repairs, he copied the components in wood and put them together to make a clock, which worked tolerably well. The downside of all the hours he spent over a workbench was that by the time he was sixteen Robert had, he told Waller, developed a pronounced stoop, sometimes referred to by his biographers as a hunchback. As these examples show, Robert Hooke was a precocious ‘mechanic’ of rare skill. But his skills extended beyond the practical. When the artist John Hoskins, a painter at the court of Charles I, visited the island, Robert watched him at work, then made his own paints from materials to hand, such as coal, chalk and an iron ore known as ruddle, and used them to copy paintings hanging in the house, to such good effect that Hoskins suggested he could have a career as an artist.

The other formative influence on the young Hooke was the world around him. That part of the Isle of Wight offers spectacular scenery, chalk cliffs, and the dramatic sight of the Needles, a series of chalk spires rising from the sea at the end of a chalky spine running across the island. Many of the island strata are rich in fossils. Even as a child, Robert was intrigued by the discovery of the shells of sea creatures at the top of these cliffs, a long way above the waves. Most people in those days, if they thought about such things at all, assumed that this must be something to do with the biblical flood. But even though he was the son of a curate, Hooke had doubts, which developed over the years into ideas that culminated in a series of lectures at Gresham College, published posthumously as A Discourse on Earthquakes. Way ahead of his time, as we shall see, Hooke realised that the landscape we see around us today is a result of geological processes operating over immense spans of time, far longer than the then popular biblical timescale of Bishop James Ussher. Much later, he recalled how as a child he had observed a cliff made of layers of material, one of which, far above he sea, was a band of sand ‘filled with a great variety of Shells, such as Oysters, Limpits, and several sorts of Periwinkles.’^fn1

These activities took place against the background of the Civil War (actually a series of wars), which lasted from 1642 to 1651. Although the Isle of Wight was staunchly Royalist, its geographical isolation just off the south coast of England, and a judicious surrender to Parliament at the beginning of the conflict, spared it from the turmoil suffered by much of the country, but it was a natural place for Charles I to set up a Royalist base when he escaped from Parliamentary captivity in November 1647 (it is widely thought that he was allowed to escape by the Parliamentarians, at a loss to know what to do with him, in the hope that he would flee to permanent exile in France). This adventure came to nothing, but must have made an impression on Robert, who remained a Royalist throughout his life.

All the model-making and wandering abroad in the countryside came to an end, however, in October 1648, when Hooke’s father died. Robert was just thirteen. John had been ill for some time, and knowing that his time was short had made careful provisions for the family. He left the boy as his share ‘forty pounds of lawful English money, the great and best-joined chest, and all my books’; there was an additional legacy of £10, which had been held by John in trust for Robert, from the will of Robert’s maternal grandmother. The total sum of £50 sounds modest today, and some accounts describe the boy as an impoverished orphan. But in terms of spending power, it was equivalent to about £20,000 today, certainly enough to give him a start in life, even if he would soon have to find a way to earn a living. It may be significant that Robert’s inheritance was entirely portable – as Lisa Jardine put it: ‘cash, books and a chest to carry them in’. Clearly Robert’s future away from the island was already planned. The first step down the road to that future took him as an apprentice to the studio of the portrait painter Peter Lely at Covent Garden in London,^fn2 just about at the time the King’s adventure on the island came to an end and he was carried off once again, this time permanently, by the forces of Parliament. Charles was beheaded on 30 January 1649.

Hooke was almost certainly introduced to Lely by John Hoskins, who may have been the person who took him from the Isle of Wight to London. It is easy to imagine the likely fate today of a thirteen-year-old boy with £20,000 in his pocket, installed as an apprentice to an artist in Covent Garden, part of the expanding metropolis of London, then home to some four hundred thousand people. But children were expected to grow up more quickly in the seventeenth century, and Hooke, as he soon demonstrated, was no ordinary child, even by the standards of his day.

But Robert did not stay with Lely for long. Almost as soon as he was installed in Lely’s studio, Robert had second thoughts. According to John Aubrey, who later became a close friend of Hooke, he decided that Lely had nothing to teach him: he ‘quickly perceived what was to be donne, so, thought he, why cannot I doe this by my selfe and keep my hundred pounds?’^fn3 According to Waller, Hooke was put off a career as an artist by the smell of the painting materials, which brought on a recurrence of the headaches that had plagued his childhood. Both accounts may, of course, contain part of the truth. And in the light of what happened next, there may be a third thread to the story.

After a brief time with Lely, Hooke enrolled at the prestigious Westminster School, where the headmaster, Richard Busby, held on to his post in spite of his Royalist sympathies and the proximity of Parliament. It is easy to identify the connection that took him there. Cardell Goodman, the rector at Freshwater, had been a pupil at the school, and was a witness to and executor of the will of John Hooke. Our own speculation is that Robert was supposed to be going to Westminster School all along, with his money and chest full of books, but was briefly tempted by the thought of becoming an artist. It is fortunate for the development of science in Britain that he quickly came to his senses and followed what was probably his father’s plan.

Busby was an enlightened headmaster (in some ways; he was also a strict disciplinarian) who charged pupils according to their intellectual ability as well as their ability to pay. Some paid as much as £30 a year, which would soon have eaten up Robert’s inheritance. But some paid nothing at all, and were lodged in Busby’s house. There is no record of what, if anything, Robert paid for his education, but he was one of Busby’s special cases, bright but relatively poor boys who did not necessarily follow the regular curriculum (which still concentrated on the Classics, Greek and Latin literature) but had freedom to develop other skills that might be useful in later life. The ‘regular’ pupils, sons of gentlemen all, and including John Locke, Christopher Wren (three years Hooke’s senior, who became his close friend in Oxford) and John Dryden, had no need to get their hands dirty in this way. But it suited Hooke perfectly.

Although he was not often seen at lessons (at least, according to Aubrey), during his time at Westminster Hooke mastered Latin and could converse in the language, and studied Greek and Hebrew, like the classical scholars. He also, though, learned to play the organ, a skill that would soon come in handy, and mastered the mathematical works of Euclid. According to Waller:

he fell seriously upon the study of the Mathematicks, the Dr. [Busby] encouraging him therein. and allowing him particular time for that purpose. In this he took the most regular Method, and first made himself Master of Euclid’s Elements, and thence proceeded orderly from that sure Basis to the other parts of the Mathematicks, and thereafter to the application thereof to Mechanicks, his first and last Mistress.

Instead of his lessons, he could be found in one of the workshops associated with the school, where he spent the long hours bent over a lathe that he thought produced his stoop. It seems more likely, however, that he suffered from a condition known as Scheuermann’s kyphosis, a curvature of the spine that develops in adolescence and may have a genetic basis but has been linked to poor diet when young.

Hooke’s interest in ‘Mechanicks’ while at Westminster led him, among other things, to devise ‘thirty severall wayes of Flying’, he later told Aubrey. John Wilkins, the Warden of Wadham College in Oxford, was another person interested in mechanical devices, and had written a book about them, published in 1648, with the splendid title Mathematicall Magick, or the wonders that can be performed by mechanical geometry. The book dealt with the use of levers, pulleys and other mechanical aids for practical uses, then went on to more speculative discussion of mechanical automata, including flying machines (ten years earlier, Wilkins had speculated in print about the possibility of flying to the Moon). It seems that Hooke’s interest in mechanical devices, and in particular flying machines, was reported to Wilkins by Busby, helping to smooth Hooke’s path when in due course he too moved on from Westminster to Christ Church. Indeed, Wilkins gave a copy of his book to the boy while he was still at Westminster and Hooke still had the book at the time of his death. When he made the move to Oxford, he left behind someone who had become a firm friend, not just his schoolmaster. Busby and Hooke remained friends for the rest of Busby’s life (he died in 1695), and Hooke was the architect for a church and vicarage built for Busby at Willen, in Buckinghamshire, in the 1680s. When Busby was Archdeacon of Westminster, Hooke carried out several commissions at the Abbey, including repaving the choir, where the black and white marble flooring he had installed can still be seen. But an architectural career lay far in the future when Hooke went up to Oxford in 1653, at the age of eighteen.

The path from Westminster to Christ Church was a well-trodden one. Each year, four Westminster students were awarded scholarships to the college; but Hooke was not one of the four selected in 1653. Instead, he was awarded a choral scholarship, thanks to his musical ability. This seems to have been literally money for nothing, because during the Parliamentary Interregnum such frivolities as church music were banned. In addition, we are told that Hooke acted as a servitor (or ‘subsizar’) to a ‘Mr Goodman’. The position of servitor, acting as a servant to a more wealthy student, was a way for less well off but academically gifted students to make their way at Oxford or Cambridge in those days. The duties might be very light or more onerous, depending on who was being ‘served’. But there is no record of a student called Goodman in Christ Church at the time Hooke was up in Oxford. The logical conclusion is that he was being supported by Cardell Goodman, himself a former Westminster scholar and Christ Church graduate, perhaps with the notional title of servitor for administrative reasons. Although Goodman died in 1653, he could well have left money for the purpose. If so, once again it was money for nothing, and a clear indication of the high academic reputation Hooke had already achieved at the age of eighteen.

Hooke’s time as a student in Oxford was distinctly out of the usual path of other students. Although he went up to Christ Church in 1653, he did not matriculate (in effect, register to study for a degree) until 1658, and he never took the BA examination, although he was awarded an MA in any case in 1663, after he had left Oxford (this is not, as we shall see, totally unlike what later happened to Edmond Halley). Instead of following a conventional course of study, alongside what (if anything) he was studying in college he worked as an assistant to two of the pioneering scientists of the time, first Thomas Willis and then Robert Boyle.^fn4 The connection with Willis, and through him a group of scientists, had begun by 1655, when Hooke was twenty.