Robert Hooke FRS (/hʊk/; 18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703)[4][a] was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect.

[8] After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke (as a surveyor and architect) attained wealth and esteem by performing more than half of the property line surveys and assisting with the city's rapid reconstruction.

[35] Hooke also had "some instruction in drawing" from the limner Samuel Cowper[34] but "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution, increasing his Head-ache to which he was ever too much subject", and he became a pupil at Westminster School, living with its master Richard Busby.

[37] Hooke quickly mastered Latin, Greek and Euclid's Elements;[11] he also learnt to play the organ[38] and began his lifelong study of mechanics.

[39] In 1653, Hooke secured a place at Christ Church, Oxford, receiving free tuition and accommodation as an organist and a chorister, and a basic income as a servitor,[40][d] despite the fact he did not officially matriculate until 1658.

[42][e] The Philosophical Club had been founded by John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, who led this important group of scientists who went on to form the nucleus of the Royal Society.

[54] On 5 November 1661, Robert Moray proposed the appointment of a curator to furnish the society with experiments, and this was unanimously passed and Hooke was named on Boyle's recommendation.

[63] Waller's comments influenced other writers for more than 200 years such that many books and articles – especially biographies of Isaac Newton – portray Hooke as a disgruntled, selfish, anti-social curmudgeon.

[68] In October 1675, the Council of the Royal Society considered a motion to expel Hooke because of an attack he made on Christiaan Huygens over scientific priority in watch design but it did not pass.

[69] According to Hooke's biographer Ellen Drake: if one studies the intellectual milieu of the time, the controversies and rivalries of the type in which he was involved seem almost to be the rule rather than the exception.

[78][j] Since childhood, Hooke suffered from migraine, tinnitus, dizziness and bouts of insomnia;[80] he also had a spinal deformity that was consistent with a diagnosis of Scheuermann's kyphosis, giving him in middle and later years a "thin and crooked body, over-large head and protruding eyes".

[89][90] There were also experiments on gravity, the falling of objects, the weighing of bodies, the measurement of barometric pressure at different heights, and the movement of pendulums up to 200 ft long (61 m).

In March 1665, he published his findings and from them, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini calculated the rotation period of Jupiter to be nine hours and fifty-five minutes.

He conducted experiments to investigate the formation of these craters and concluded their existence meant the Moon must have its own gravity, a radical departure from the contemporaneous Aristotelian celestial model.

[107] Hooke used mechanical analogues to understand fundamental processes such as the motion of a spherical pendulum and of a ball in a hollow cone, to demonstrate central force due to gravity,[108] and a hanging chain net with point loads to provide the optimum shape for a dome with heavy cross on top.

[109] Despite continuing reports to the contrary,[110] Hooke did not influence Thomas Newcomen's invention of the steam engine; this myth, which originated in an article in the third edition of "Encyclopædia Britannica", has been found to be mistaken.

...Hooke's 1674 Gresham lecture, An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth by Observations (published 1679), said gravitation applies to "all celestial bodies"[115] and restated these three propositions.

[125] Newton, who in May 1686 was presented with Hooke's claim to priority on the inverse square law, denied he was to be credited as author of the idea, giving reasons including the citation of prior work by others.

Newton wrote: Yet am I not beholden to him for any light into that business ... but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipsis, which inclined me to try it.

[137]The hand-crafted, leather-and-gold-tooled microscope he designed and used to make the observations for Micrographia, which Christopher Cock made for him in London, is on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Maryland.

Hooke's experiments led him to conclude combustion involves a component of air, a statement with which modern scientists would agree but that was not understood widely, if at all, in the seventeenth century.

[144] In a series of lectures in 1668, Hooke proposed the then-heretical idea the Earth's surface had been formed by volcanoes and earthquakes, and that the latter were responsible for shell fossils being found far above sea level.

[149][150] In acoustics, in 1681, Hooke showed the Royal Society that musical tones can be generated using spinning brass cogs cut with teeth in particular proportions.

[157] Other buildings Hooke designed include the Royal College of Physicians (1679);[158] Aske's Hospital (1679),[159] Ragley Hall, Warwickshire (1680);[160] the Church of St Mary Magdalene at Willen, Buckinghamshire (1680)[161] and Ramsbury Manor, Wiltshire (1681).

The Monument to the Great Fire of London was designed to serve a scientific function as a zenith telescope for astronomical observation, though traffic vibration made it unusable for this purpose.

The King decided both the prospective cost of building and compensation, and the need to quickly restore trade and population meant the city would be rebuilt on the original property lines.

He was closely involved with the drafting of an Act of Common Council (April 1667), which set out the process by which the original foundations would be formally recognised and certificated.

[168] According to Lisa Jardine: "in the four weeks from the 4th of October, [Hooke] helped map the fire-damaged area, began compiling a Land Information System for London, and drew up building regulations for an Act of Parliament to govern the rebuilding".

[169] Stephen Inwood said: "the surveyors' reports, which were generally written by Hooke, show an admirable ability to get to the nub of intricate neighbourly squabbles, and to produce a crisp and judicious recommendation from a tangle of claims and counter-claims".

[180] In 2003, historian Lisa Jardine conjectured that a recently discovered portrait was of Hooke,[174] but this proposal was disproved by William B. Jensen of the University of Cincinnati who identified the subject as the Flemish scholar Jan Baptist van Helmont.