Product Description

A biography of a brilliant, largely forgotten, maverick - a major figure in the 17th - century cultural and scientific revolutions. Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor and scientist who was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire. He worked tirelessly with his great friend Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild London throughout the 1670s, personally creating some notable public and private buildings. Like his friends, Wren and Boyle, he was also a prominent experimentalist; he became the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society in London; he was the propounder of Hooke's Law of elasticity, co-discoverer of Boyle's Law for gases, designer of an early balance-spring watch, and a virtuoso performer of gruesome public anatomical dissections of animals. As his intimate and confessional diary records, Hooke's life was rich with melodrama. He came to London, fatherless, aged 13 to seek his fortune. He never married but formed a long-running illicit relationship with his niece (his housekeeper). A dandy and a man of restless energy, a workaholic and an inveterate socialiser, he was a well-known man-about-town, an enthusiastic daily imbiber of the designer drugs of the time: coffee, tea, chocolate and tobacco; he took cannabis for his headaches, and worked late into the night fuelled by "poppy water" (opium). In later life he became unkempt and bedridden by illness, but maintained his social and intellectual activities. He argued with most of his peers, but his closest friendship, with Wren, remained unscathed. After violent rows with Sir Isaac Newton his name was wiped from the records of the Royal Society and his portrait destroyed after his death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #559014 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Review
Of On A Grander Scale (2002): 'A wonderful book which looks set to be the definitive life of Wren for a long time to come' --Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday 'Jardine writes with ease, style, enthusiasm and humanity' --Kerry Downes, TLS 'A full and fascinating biography...Jardine is particularly good on the extraordinary width of Wren's interests and achievements' --Antonia Fraser, New Statesman 'A great fist of an intellectual biography' --Andrew Saint, Guardian 'Imaginative, fluent and scholarly' --Linda Colley, The Times An 'extraordinary story...told with relish by Lisa Jardine, whose qualifications for the task are exactly right, for it needs a rare combination of scientific knowledge, historical skill, and narrative power...It was a life of quiet courage and great achievement, and Jardine's celebration of it does it ample justice' --AC Grayling, Independent on Sunday 'As we would expect from her, Jardine is excellent at placing Wren in the historical and intellectual context of his time...While going over familiar ground, she comes up with some startling discoveries' --Gavin Stamp, Daily Telegraph 'Immensely detailed...Jardine, following the scientific trail, has constructed a book that is as much an account of a movement as a biography of a man...Like its subtitle, this book is on a grander scale than other recent Wren biographies and is probably as definitive as current studies allow...Amazing value for the sheer amount of historical research; it sheds much light on Wren's extraordinary times' --Hugh Pearman, Sunday Times Of Ingenious Pursuits (1999): 'LJ has the knack of making science easy to understand. Her book brilliantly recaptures the excitement of the seventeenth-century scientists and the new word of objects they were finding and theorizing' Roy Porter Of Wordly Goods: 'A pleasure to read, as well as a pleasure to hold' Observer

The Guardian
'This fascinating, impeccably researched account should help to bring him (Hooke) into the light again'

The Times
'... the main pleasures of this book are that one learns so much about life in London...excellent and beautifully illustrated'

Customer Reviews

A lively and beautifully written account
Robert Hooke was very much a Renaissance man: artist, scientist, instrument-maker, and architect, he is remembered today only for Hooke's law which still forms the foundation of structural mechanics. However, he was at the time the major driving force behind the Royal Society. As its curator of experiments it was Hooke that both put forward the ideas to be tested and devised and built the equipment. He pioneered work in microscopy, made contributions in anatomy, changed the way we make clocks and watches and first put forward the idea that gravity obeyed the inverse square law. All this he did in his spare time between surveying London after the Great Fire and acting as an architect both in his own right and as Christopher Wren's chief assistant and friend.

This book vividly paints a picture of the life of this fascinating character. So lucidly is it written that one barely notices that it is brimming with fresh insights. An outstanding piece of scholarship and a brilliant piece of prose, this book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in the story of one of history's most colourful characters.

Disappointed reader
Having admired for a long time some of the theorems of Robert Hooke, and also being amazed of his diversity, I looked forward to reading this book. But I was astonished how an exciting thinker could actually be put back in the cupboard he should have leaft a long time ago! The sometimes tedious descriptions of all correspondences and repetitions of some facts, and the lack of synthetizing the ideas and discoveries of this man, that maybe stand as the sole witnesses of his accomplishments, is somewhat strange. Also, the negligence of defining the time and the environment he lived in, and foremost the probably disadvantage of not being born noble, has not been elucidated far enough. Was he the sole man in the scientific life of the 17th century England not to be recognized for his scientific work? The definition of "the winner takes it all" is also hastily put together, and that is maybe one of the feelings you get from this book, that the writer has not unveiled the incredible stringency and skills, and maybe visions, of all these men deducing facts about the laws of nature from observations and with instruments that actually were far from perfect. That's sad..as we've been left with immense treasures from which it should be more easy to derive insights about these men and their time.

A disappointing and poorly structured biography
This biography falls short of Lisa Jardine's usual high standard. It needs a good edit and reorganization to provide form, remove repetition and add depth to a very haphazard account. Hooke's fascinating and varied life fails to come alive in these pages. For a man who never quite made the scientific impact he deserved, this biography shows a fitting symmetry and should also be overshadowed.