Robert Hooke

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2016

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Robert Hooke (1635-1703) who worked for Robert Boyle and was curator of experiments at the Royal Society. The engraving of a flea, above, is taken from his Micrographia which caused a sensation when published in 1665. Sometimes remembered for his disputes with Newton, he studied the planets with telescopes and snowflakes with microscopes. He was an early proposer of a theory of evolution, discovered light diffraction with a wave theory to explain it and felt he was rarely given due credit for his discoveries. With David Wootton Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York Patricia Fara President Elect of the British Society for the History of Science And Rob Iliffe Professor of History of Science at Oxford University Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our
0:04.5	terms of use please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:07.9	radio for.
0:08.9	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:10.8	Hello, for two decades in the 17th century Robert Hook was arguably the greatest
0:15.0	natural philosopher in Britain at the head of the new interest in science
0:18.6	inspired by Copernicus and Descartes. He excelled everywhere. He studied the planets with his
0:24.1	telescopes, the snowflakes with his microscopes. At the height of the great
0:27.8	plague of 1665 his book Micrografia captured the public imagination
0:32.1	with its detailed engravings of fleas and the eyes of flies never before seen.
0:37.0	The finest maker of scientific instruments in Europe, he built the air pump for Robert Boyle, he devised a wave theory of light and on it went.
0:45.2	Isaac Newton apparently acknowledges debt to hook with the phrase, if I've seen further,
0:49.7	it's by standing on the shoulders of giants. That though was written during a long bitter dispute,
0:55.3	at the end of which Hook was largely written out of scientific history for about 300 years.
1:00.5	With me to discuss Robert Hook, our David Wooten, Professor of History at the University of York,
1:05.0	Patricia Farrar, President-elect of the British Society of the History of Science,
1:09.0	and Robert Ilyft, Professor of the History of Science at Oxford University.
1:13.4	David Wooten, in the early 17th century natural philosophers were starting to throw
1:18.7	off the old Aristotelian ideas.
1:21.2	What was emerging?
1:22.2	What was emerging? What was emerging?
1:23.0	What were they throwing off, first of all?
	...

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