Portrait of Hooke (from the Internet)
Hooke entered Westminster College in London in 1645 and then oxford, where he was favored by Boyle as his assistant.
In 1662, Hooke was appointed director of the laboratory of the Royal Society, and his main task was to prepare several experiments at the meetings of the Royal Society for members to observe, discuss, analyze, and conjecture. The position began as a volunteer laborer, but with Hooke's excellent work, the Royal Society began to pay him a salary, so Hook became the first "professional" scientist in Western history to earn money from scientific research.
Hooke held this position for 40 years until his death in 1703.
Hooke's Microscope and the Microscopy
In Hooke's time, grinding lenses and making instruments was a fashionable thing. Hooke himself was a highly gifted instrument maker. He designed and built a composite optical microscope with eyepieces, objectives and stages.
Hooke designed a dual-lens microscope
Hooke used the microscope he had built to look east and west, observing everything around him in detail, drawing tiny details of objects invisible to the naked eye, and in 1665 published the first most widely influential work in the history of the Royal Society, Micrographia.
Hooke's 1965 book, Micrography
The cover of Micrographia bears the coat of arms of the Royal Society and the motto "Do not trust anyone's words".
Hooke was not the first to draw microscopic images, but the publication of books that year was a very extravagant affair, and most of the results and drawings made by people with microscopes in the early days were only preserved in manuscript form.
Hooke microscope in The Microscopic Atlas
"Micrography" has a very wide range of themes, a total of 66 topics, including crystals, fossils, fungi and various insects, it can be said that Van Hooke can encounter in life, he has painted over and over again. There are 6 illustrations in the book as folding drawings, the largest of which depicts a flea. As soon as the illustration of the flea was published, it caused a sensation in Britain, and everyone from ordinary people to princes and nobles was stunned, and it turned out that the insects that bite them every day actually looked like this.
The illustration of fleas in Hooke's book is also the first portrait of a fleas in human history
The word "Cell" is used for the first time in the book Micrography. Hooke once scraped a thin slice from a piece of cork and placed it under a microscope to observe. He saw many small "confined rooms", much like honeycombs, so he called them Cell, which the Japanese and Chinese later translated as "cells." Hooke's view is basically accurate, but these small rooms are not really biological cells, but the cell walls left behind after the death of the cells.
Hooke sees the small room (cells) on a cork cut with a microscope
Fungi are also objects of close observation by Hooke under lenses. Hooke found hair on a leather book and wondered what it was, so he placed it under a microscope and looked closely and found small hyphae growing on the leather. In addition, Hooke also found that fungi are the "culprits" that infect and destroy the leaves of rose plants, causing them to appear rusty. Hooke proposed a theory from this observation: when a plant or animal decays, it produces "some inferior, uncomplicated" organism.
This figure is an illustration of the first chapter of human history, Fungi
Many of the topics in Micrograph are related to familiar insects, such as flies, bees, fleas, ants, and lice.
Illustration of aphid flies in the Microscopic Atlas
Hooke's description of human lice in the book is rather humorous:
"This thing is so disgusting and impossible to hide; so wanton and overbearing; so arrogant and contemptuous; it sits at the top of the Forbidden Purple, acts simply and rudely, will not let go of the ears of a passerby, and will not give up without sucking blood."
The first nude photo of a lice in history
All the illustrations in Hooke's book were drawn by his own hands, no way, the camera was not invented in those days, and painting was also one of the indispensable skills of scientists in the absence of cameras.
Robert Hooke and Leeuwenhoek
Dutch businessman Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, a loyal reader of micrography, was inspired by the work to immerse himself in the microscopic world using his own single-lens microscope, which is nearly 300 times magnification, observing, describing and mapping single-celled organisms such as protozoa and bacteria. Because Hook and Leeuwenhoek are pronounced similarly, some domestic works treat them as the same person, causing quite a few misunderstandings.
Hook was a difficult man to get along with, and he had a dispute with the Dutch scientist Huygens over the right to invent a gossamer watch, and he also had an open dispute with Isaac Newton.
Robert Hooke's entanglement with Isaac Newton
Hooke supported the wave theory of light, while Newton published a paper arguing that light is a particle, and the debate between the two was fierce. Hooke believed that some of Newton's views were suspected of plagiarizing his Micrograph, and wrote to question Newton, and Newton sneered at Hooke in his reply, saying the well-known quote:
“What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways...... If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants. – (About Optics) Descartes took a good step forward. You've made it the icing on the cake in many ways... If I can see further, it is also because I stand on the shoulders of giants like you. ”
In fact, Hooke was a short man and slightly hunchbacked.
There is evidence that much of the foundational work on gravity was done by Hooke, which Newton does not acknowledge, and after Hooke's death in 1703, Newton dismissed Hooke's laboratory and destroyed everything about Hooke, supposedly leaving not a single portrait. So the portrait of Hooke that we see today, who is the person who painted it? There is no way to know.
Naturalism and naturalist
Hooke contributed a great deal in his lifetime, and the scientific research he engaged in at that time could be considered to belong to the category of naturalistic research. Naturalism corresponds to natural history in English, also translated as natural history.
From the time of the discovery of the New World in the Age of Discovery, until the birth of modern science, Europeans discovered countless new plants, animals, minerals, etc. in the past few hundred years, but there was no camera at that time, how to tell others about the newly discovered species? The only way to do it was to find an artist to paint it, or to make a specimen and bring it back to the Fun Cottage (and later the museum) for others to see.
The collective name of knowledge in that era was naturalism, and with the accumulation of knowledge and the expansion of people's understanding of the world, this knowledge eventually diverged into zoology, botany, mineralogy and so on.
Over the past few hundred years, there have been many great naturalists whose stories are extraordinary, and whose naturalistic works are extremely valuable to read and collect.