| Great Men: Robert Hooke | ||
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by David Finlay (19 Feb 03) Also in this series: The comic writer J B Morton, whose "Beachcomber" column ran in the Daily Express for over fifty years, invented a micro-universe of eccentric characters. One of the most celebrated of these was a certain Dr Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht, who filled his days inventing items of questionable benefit to humanity, including a suet container, a leather grape, a stanchion to prop up other stanchions, a dummy jellyfish, waterproof onions, a glass stilt, a screw for screwing screws into other screws, a cheese anchor and a chivet for screaming radishes. I don't know if Morton had a real-life inventor in mind when he created the good Doctor, but one possible prototype might have been Robert Hooke, one of the most brilliant scientists of all time yet also one of the most neglected. Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635 but spent his working life in London, where he was employed in various capacities (including Curator of Experiments) by the Royal Society. His workload was absolutely astonishing. He was a top-class anatomist, astronomer, biologist, draughtsman, geologist, inventor, instrument maker, meteorologist, theorist and watchmaker. In addition, he was a leading figure in the massive rebuilding programme which followed the Great Fire of London in September 1666. This led him into the fields of surveying and town planning, and eventually into architecture, which became one of his principal sources of income even though he continued to work for the Royal Society. Early illness turned Hooke into an ugly, deformed man, but this does not seem to have affected either his professional or his social life. He did, however, become very unpopular with a great many of his fellow scientists. The root of the problem was that he started an immense number of projects but lacked the time - and in some cases the expertise - to finish many of them. When others developed the same concepts further, Hooke was quick to point out that he had had the same idea first and should be given full credit. A Disputatious Fellow One of his most serious and longest-running disputes was with Isaac Newton, who described Hooke (by implication, at least) as "a man of strange unsociable temper". Newton and Hooke were both interested in planetary motion, and it was to Hooke's great chagrin that Newton was eventually hailed as being the first to understand how planets moved through the sky. In fairness, the credit went to the right man, but it is widely believed that Newton would not have been able to develop his theory if he had not been spurred on by the arguments with Hooke. Hooke also battled with the great scientist Christiaan Huygens to produce a clock that was accurate enough to help establish longitude at sea. Neither of them succeeded (they more or less fought each other to a standstill), but Hooke's collaboration with Clerkenwell watchmaker Thomas Tompion created an enviable tradition of horological expertise in London. Hooke did not argue with everyone he met. He was a lifelong friend of Sir Christopher Wren, another scientist whose career was dramatically altered by the Fire, and indeed was responsible for a great deal of London architecture for which Wren (not by his own doing) was later given full credit. Transportation was, of course, very limited in the 17th century, but Hooke worked for a time on developing a horse-drawn cart with superior ride quality to those in common use. And there are suggestions that he was thinking about what would have been the first bicycle, if he had had time to finish the project. The Motoring Connection Among Hooke's many projects, though, two in particular have close relevance to motoring today. With a few exceptions, nearly every car ever built has been suspended on springs. Hooke did not invent the spring, but elasticity was one of his favourite fields of enquiry, and he was the first to establish that if you double the load on a single-rate spring, you will also double the compression or expansion of the spring itself. So, if a spring is rated at 100lbs per inch, for example, a load of 200lbs will compress it two inches. It seems a simple idea now, but it is fundamental to suspension design, as well as to many other scientific principles, and Hooke realised it before anyone else. A specific Hooke invention has been fitted to millions of cars, though it is less common now. The universal joint allows one shaft to turn another even when the angle between the shafts changes. Hooke needed to invent this to complete the design of a quadrant to be used for making astronomical observations. The problem was that, because of the rotation of the earth, the sky appeared to be turning. Other quadrants had to be constantly adjusted by assistants, but Hooke added a pendulum clock to his device. A series of joints enabled the quadrant to move in time with the clock, and therefore in time with the sky too. This machine was never built, but the universal joint (also known as the Hooke joint) was used in many other applications, including automotive ones. It doesn't work very well at sharp angles, which is why the constant velocity joint was later invented, but it copes well enough in front-engined, rear-wheel (or four-wheel) drive cars, where the back of the gearbox does not always point directly towards the rear axle because of suspension movement. Hooke died in 1703. Three hundred years later, his universal joint is still in common use, one of the many legacies of this brilliant but largely forgotten man who, in the words of the great diarist Samuel Pepys "is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that ever I saw." Further reading Also in this series: |
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