Biography of Robert Hooke
Born in England's Isle of Wight in 1635, scientist Robert Hooke was educated at oxford. His research and experiments ranged from astronomy to biology to physics; he is particularly recognized for the observations he made while using a microscope and for "Hooke's Law" of elasticity. Hooke died in London in 1703.The 1678 publication of Hooke's Lectures of Spring he stated that the force required to extend or compress a spring is proportional to the distance of that extension or compression. In an ongoing, related project, Hooke worked for many years on the invention of a spring-regulated watch.Hooke never married. His niece, Grace Hooke, his longtime live-in companion and housekeeper, as well as his eventual lover, died in 1687; Hooke was inconsolable at the loss.
Hooke had discovered plant cells -- more precisely, what Hooke saw were the cell walls in cork tissue. In fact, it was Hooke who coined the term "cells": the boxlike cells of cork reminded him of the cells of a monastery. Hooke also reported seeing similar structures in wood and in other plants. In 1678, after Leeuwenhoek had written to the Royal Society with a report of discovering "little animals" -- bacteria and protozoa -- Hooke was asked by the Society to confirm Leeuwenhoek's findings. He successfully did so, thus paving the way for the wide acceptance of Leeuwenhoek's discoveries. Hooke noted that Leeuwenhoek's simple microscopes gave clearer images than his compound microscope, but found simple microscopes difficult to use: he called them "offensive to my eye" and complained that they "much strained and weakened the sight."
Hooke was also a keen observer of fossils and geology. While some fossils closely resemble living animals or plants, others do not -- because of their mode of preservation, because they are extinct, or because they represent living taxa which are undiscovered or poorly known. In the seventeenth century, a number of hypotheses had been proposed for the origin of fossils. One widely accepted theory, going back to Aristotle, stated that fossils were formed and grew within the Earth. A shaping force, or "extraordinary Plastick virtue," could thus create to stones that looked like living beings but were not. Hooke's contemporary, the naturalist and shell collector Martin Lister wrote in 1678 that "our English Quarry-shells were not cast in any Animal mold, whose species or race is yet to be found in being at this day." We would now interpret these fossils as belonging to extinct taxa, but extinction was not widely accepted at the time, and Lister concluded: "I am apt to think, there is no such matter, as Petrifying of Shells in the business. . . but that these Cockle-like shells ever were, as they are at present, lapides sui generis [stones of their own kind], and never any part of an Animal."
Hooke examined fossils with a microscope -- the first person to do so -- and noted close similarities between the structures of petrified wood and fossil shells on the one hand, and living wood and living mollusc shells on the other. In Micrographia he compared a piece of petrified wood with a piece of rotten oak wood, and concluded that
this petrify'd Wood having lain in some place where it was well soak'd with petrifying water (that is, such water as is well impregnated with stony and earthy particles) did by degrees separate abundance of stony particles from the permeating water, which stony particles, being by means of the fluid vehicle convey'd, not onely into the Microscopical pores. . . but also into the pores or Interstitia. . . of that part of the Wood, which through the Microscope, appears most solid. . .Hooke's language may be archaic, but his meaning is quite modern: Dead wood could be turned to stone by the action of water rich in dissolved minerals, which would deposit minerals throughout the wood. Hooke also concluded in Micrographiathat the shell-like fossils that he examined really were "the Shells of certain Shel-fishes, which, either by some Deluge, Inundation, earthquake, or some such other means, came to be thrown to that place, and there to be fill'd with some kind of Mud or Clay, or petrifying Water, or some other substance. . . "