scholarly journals A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 16: Robert Hooke and the Royal Society of London

2005 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank N. Egerton
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
History Of ◽  
Royal Society Of London

Hooke recommemorated

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-140
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
History Of

Richard Nichols, The Diaries of Robert Hooke, The Leonardo of London, 1635-1703 . Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 1994, Pp. 185, £15.00. ISBN 0- 86332-930-6. Richard Nichols is a science master turned historian of science who celebrates in this book Robert Hooke’s contributions to the arts and sciences. The appreciation brings together comments from Hooke’s Diaries , and other works, on each of his main enterprises, and on his personal interaction with each of his principal friends and foes. Further references to Hooke and his activities are drawn from Birch’s History of the Royal Society, Aubrey’s Brief Lives , and the Diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys. The first section of the book, ‘Hooke the Man’, covers his early years of education at home in Freshwater, at Westminster school and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he soon joined the group of experimental philosophers who set him up as Curator of the Royal Society and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, Bishopsgate. Hooke’s domestic life at Gresham College is described - his intimate relationships with a series of housekeepers, including his niece, Grace Hooke, and his social life at the College and in the London coffee houses.

scholarly journals Robert Hooke, F. R. S. (1635-1703)

1960 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-145 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Hooke’S Law ◽  
Hooke's Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Instruments

The period which saw the foundation of the Royal Society is rich in names remarkable for original achievement in the field of science, but, if we except Newton—and his first paper appeared eleven years after the foundation of the Society which is now being celebrated—none is more noteworthy than Robert Hooke. Without any advantages of birth or influence, poor in health and poor, as a young man, in worldly goods, he carried out work of the first importance in most branches of science then known, and of one branch, meteorology, he may claim to be the founder. Not only was he outstanding as an experimenter and as the inventor of new instruments, but he had an informed imagination which led him to astonishingly correct anticipations of many advances subsequently to be made. Although to many his name is known only through Hooke’s Law, outstanding figures in the history of science have been loud in his praises. Thomas Young wrote of the ‘inexhaustible but neglected mines of nascent inventions, the works of the great Robert Hooke’, a most apt phrase, since Hooke’s work contains so much that is suggestive and original, which his restless spirit lacked time to develop.

Opening Address

1878 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 472-486
Author(s):  
Alexander Grant
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
First Year ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opening Address ◽  
Royal Society Of London

Gentlemen,—I find it recorded that in the year 1662, which was the first year of the incorporation of the Royal Society of London, the celebrated mathematician, Robert Hooke, drew up “Proposals for the good of the Royal Society,” the third article of which was as follows :— “That every member of the Society shall be equally obliged to promote the ends thereof by paying 52s. yearly, and by doing some one duty that shall be charged on him by the Council once a year, or, if his occasions will not permit, to pay 52s. more per annum.’ This proposed salutary rule does not seem ever to have been enacted by the Royal Society of London, nor do I believe that any analogous article forms part of the statutes of this Society, and yet it is in accordance with the spirit of such a rule that I appear before you this evening.

The Reverend Thomas Hincks FRS (1818–1899): taxonomist of Bryozoa and Hydrozoa

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale R. Calder
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
History Museum ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Royal Society Of London

Thomas Hincks was born 15 July 1818 in Exeter, England. He attended Manchester New College, York, from 1833 to 1839, and received a B.A. from the University of London in 1840. In 1839 he commenced a 30-year career as a cleric, and served with distinction at Unitarian chapels in Ireland and England. Meanwhile, he enthusiastically pursued interests in natural history. A breakdown in his health and permanent voice impairment during 1867–68 while at Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, forced him reluctantly to resign from active ministry in 1869. He moved to Taunton and later to Clifton, and devoted much of the rest of his life to natural history. Hincks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1872 for noteworthy contributions to natural history. Foremost among his publications in science were A history of the British hydroid zoophytes (1868) and A history of the British marine Polyzoa (1880). Hincks named 24 families, 52 genera and 360 species and subspecies of invertebrates, mostly Bryozoa and Hydrozoa. Hincks died 25 January 1899 in Clifton, and was buried in Leeds. His important bryozoan and hydroid collections are in the Natural History Museum, London. At least six genera and 13 species of invertebrates are named in his honour.

‘The Ballad of Robert Crosse and Joseph Glanvill’ and the Background to Plus Ultra

1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas H. Steneck
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
New Science ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Growth Of Science ◽  
Royal Society Of London

Joseph Glanvill is well known for his enthusiastic support of the early Royal Society. Even before Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society of London (1667) appeared in full, Glanvill had set a philosophic background for the new science in his Vanity of dogmatizing (1661), had attacked the outdatedness of contemporary Aristotelians in a revised edition of Vanity called Scepsis scientifica (1665), had praised the Society at length in a flowery address in Scepsis, and had defended the programme of the Society in his private correspondence. If propaganda and enthusiastic support were needed for the growth of science in Restoration England, no one seems to have done more to supply these ingredients during the early years of the Royal Society's existence than the colourful rector of Bath and Frome.

scholarly journals Instruments and relics

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-485
Author(s):  
Rebekah Higgitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early History ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Royal Society Of London

Abstract Despite the age and prestige of the Royal Society of London, the history of its collections of scientific instruments and apparatus has largely been one of accidental accumulation and neglect. This article tracks their movements and the processes by which objects came to be recognized as possessing value beyond reuse or sale. From at least the mid-nineteenth century, the few surviving objects with links to the society’s early history and its most illustrious Fellows came to be termed ‘relics’, were treated with suitable reverence, put on display and made part of the society’s public self-presentation. If the more quotidian objects survived into the later 1800s, when their potential as objects for collection, research, display, reproduction and loan began to be appreciated, they are likely to have survived to the present day.

A Brief History of the Method of Fixing by Horizontal Angles

1972 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-534
Author(s):  
Charles H. Cotter
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Vice President ◽  
East India Company ◽  
New Instrument ◽  
History Of ◽  
Celestial Bodies ◽  
First Time ◽  
Royal Society Of London

John Hadley (1670–1744), Vice-President of the Royal Society of London, communicated his ‘Description of a new Instrument for taking Angles’ to the Society on 13 May 1731. Hadley's invention for the first time provided the navigator with an instrument by which he could measure altitudes of celestial bodies with ease and accuracy on board a lively ship at sea. It was not however until about 1750, when the instrument was to be found on board vessels of the East India Company, that Hadley's quadrant (or octant as it is sometimes called) rapidly came into general use.

A footnote to the history of the barometer

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-151 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
History Of

Among the ‘Classified Papers’ at the Royal Society, there are two small sheets of paper unsigned and undated, bearing an unfinished article by Robert Hooke entitled, ‘Of Aerostatick Instruments’. 1 Although it is undated, the watermark is the same as that in the paper of another autograph by Hooke, dated 18 July 1683. 2 The two specimens of Hooke’s rather variable handwriting— he was in one of his less legible phases at this time—are also almost exactly alike, so that we may date the manuscript, provisionally, 1683. As tills fragment touches on several points in the history of the barometer, I make no apology for publishing it in full.

The Testimony of Nature: Boyle, Hooke and Experimental Philosophy

1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Kargon
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Organization ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Full Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

“The Office of the sense shall be the only judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”Francis Bacon, The Great InstaurationThe first history of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667, and the most recent full study of that scientific organization published three centuries later, agree on one important point: that Sir Francis Bacon was the intellectual progenitor of the body, that in the denigrating words of a contemporary critic the Society was “Bacon-faced.” The author of the former, Thomas Sprat, termed Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise,” and in “whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the defence of Experimental Philosophy.” The author of the latter, Margery Purver, agrees that “Bacon was the great formative influence on the Society's concept of science.”Yet it must be conceded at once that Bacon's legacy was ambiguous. While the early Royal Society indeed was Bacon-faced, “it saw many faces of Bacon.” The period after the founding of the Society, the 1660's and 1670's, was one of contending philosophies and of a continuing effort to fashion clearer notions of what an experimental philosophy was to be like and what role experience was to play in scientific argument. Two of the more important and influential members of the Society who were actively engaged in this pursuit were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; these men were, and saw themselves, as disciples of the Lord Chancellor. It is my intention here to illustrate the differing approaches to the Baconian legacy of Boyle and of Hooke by focusing attention upon an interesting analogy, used by both, which may aid us in interpreting the conception of experiment in the works of these two founders of the experimental philosophy.

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