Thursday 11 July 1667

Up betimes and to my office, and there busy till the office (which was only Sir T. Harvy and myself) met, and did little business and then broke up. He tells me that the Council last night did sit close to determine of the King’s answer about the peace, and that though he do not certainly know, yet by all discourse yesterday he do believe it is peace, and that the King had said it should be peace, and had bidden Alderman Backewell to declare [it] upon the ’Change. It is high time for us to have peace that the King and Council may get up their credits and have time to do it, for that indeed is the bottom of all our misery, that nobody have any so good opinion of the King and his Council and their advice as to lend money or venture their persons, or estates, or pains upon people that they know cannot thrive with all that we can do, but either by their corruption or negligence must be undone. This indeed is the very bottom of every man’s thought, and the certain ground that we must be ruined unless the King change his course, or the Parliament come and alter it. At noon dined alone with my wife. All the afternoon close at the office, very hard at gathering papers and putting things in order against the Parliament, and at night home with my wife to supper, and then to bed, in hopes to have all things in my office in good condition in a little time for any body to examine, which I am sure none else will.

22 Annotations

First Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Meanwhile....

The Royal Society today at Arundel House — from the Hooke Folio Online

Iuly. 11. 1667. mr Hooke desiring to be excused for making the Expt of opening the thorax of a Dog. Dr Ball & Dr King were desired to take care of it for the next meeting - mr. Hooke hauing made this Expt. formerly was desired to giue some account of it who Related that he had cutt away all the Ribbs of the Dogg, taken out the Diaphragme left only the spine and the great vessells and that blowing with a pair of bellows and a pipe thrust into the wind pipe of the Dog, the heart continued beating & the Eyes very liuely for the space of 2 howres & might haue lasted much longer, but vpon Ceasing the bellows, the heart would be convulsiue and Dying which also would Recouer againe as soon as the motion was Renewed. And that he designed this Expt. to vnderstand the nature of Respiration.

(Sr P Neiles Story of a Deer. that had lost all its gutts in the chase)
mr Haak desired to translate mirians Booke of the Alps) mr Mercators obseruations of the Barometer were brought in by mr Hooke being from Dec 6. to Iuly the 7. the paper was orderd to be entred.

(Bp of Exeter mentiond tht mr Mercator had aquainted him wth. his Theory of Longtitudes which did consist of 3 things
1 aequation of time. 2 Libration of instruments that noe motion may discompose them, and a defuse from the air, and to be performed wth. a pendulum clock.)
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nich… ]

mr Hooke reported that Dr. Croon had Recieued from mr Townly mr Gascoynes instrument for measuring Diameters of the starrs with great exactnesse which instrument was afterwards shewn to the society. with the modules of some others and the improuement of the first inuention. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will… ]

mr Hooke mentiond that he had Inuented an instrument of this kind but vpon another principle which would perform the same thing [In margin]VZ. better with more certainty & more ease.

He related also that he hath a theory which will solue all the vnequal motions of the planets. this he was desired to shew the Society at their next meeting. the same brought in the Rarifying engine fitted with an wooden vessell big enough for a man to sit in which was tryed but not being extraordinary tight it was orderd to be fitted against next day. and to be experimented.

Expt. for next D. tht of Dog. Rarifying Engine. Conuexity of Canall. Ball magneticall expt.

http://webapps.qmul.ac.uk/cell/Ho…

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Meanwhile...news of Mr. Gascoigne's micrometer reaches the Royal Society.

JWB  •  Link

"mr Hooke mentiond that he had Inuented an instrument of this kind but vpon another principle which would perform the same thing [In margin]VZ. better with more certainty & more ease."

No matter efforts of the Royal Society, et al. to habilitate this man in a freshly laundered white lab coat, his true colors keep shining through.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"his true colors keep shining through"

The Rodney Dangerfield of the Royal Society, who "I [ got ] no respect"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodn…

As a mere lab tech, never given the respect he deserved -- even if we regard him as but an elaborator and adapter -- his employer, Robert Boyle, having ceased to produce new ideas -- Hooke exaggerated what he could do in this domain; we do not hear of his OCD-replatting of the city of London, property by property .

These notes to himself show a pathological relation to the truth.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Hooke also designed and built the instruments for an amazing variety of experiments -- on demand -- which stimulated his imagination.

tg  •  Link

Robert Hooke's character. What is his true nature? I have read the Curious Life of Robert Hooke by Lisa Jardine only. Is there other sources to shed more light for me?

Mary  •  Link

Mr. Mercator's Theory of Longitudes.

It's that fixation on a pendulum that's going to hold up progress.

Sjoerd  •  Link

It might be of interest to read the story "The Scientist, The Grocer, The Governor and Grace." on The Isle Of Wight History Centre site ( http://freespace.virgin.net/ric.m… )

The story links Hooke to Robert Holmes, from "Holmes' Bonfire", mentioned here a while back.

Carl in Boston  •  Link

Robert Hooke: Wikipedia says, "after a long period of relative obscurity he is now recognized as one of the most important scientists of his age". I believe it. Hooke's Law on the restoring force of springs F = -kx is enough for any reputation. F = -kx was the foundation of chemical physics, which I studied at MIT, and I thought of Hooke's Law numerous times every day for four years. True that he isn't well known, but every school kid studies Hooke's Law in high school physics. Now if Samuel were doing more today than stirring his papers, that would be something.

Larry Hill  •  Link

Up betimes __________________________________

Anyone have any idea what time that might be? Just for curiosity of us current wage slaves, I was wondering what the working hours would be at this time for the "normal" office? Have we truly progressed?

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Betimes

Sometimes Pepys will specify 6; rarely 5; usually out and about before 8, I'd say.

Anyone else have a view of this?

Carl in Boston  •  Link

The New Yorker once had a cartoon of a rooster writing in his diary: up betimes, and crowed.

tonyt  •  Link

Betimes. We have gone over this ground before but I think Carl has the answer. It is linked, somewhat imprecisely, to the coming of daylight so that in terms of the clock the meaning can be quite different between summer and winter (and perhaps also between a dawn with clear skies and one with heavy rain clouds).

JWB  •  Link

Why's Hooke's Law Hooke's?

Springs from '78 lecture "Of spring explaining the power of springing' in which Hooke conflates what we now call Hooke's Law with Boyles Law, thinking they one and the same. In his discussion of the mechanism, the man who claimed origination of the inverse square rule for gravity, confuses inverse square with direct proportion.

Don O'Shea  •  Link

"mr Hooke mentiond that he had Inuented an instrument of this kind but vpon another principle which would perform the same thing [In margin]VZ. better with more certainty & more ease."

Hooke drove Newton a bit crazy (the alchemy did the rest!) with his claims that he had constructed a reflecting telescope that was better than Newton's. Yet he never produced it. After a while, I bet the Fellows of the RS, just rolled their eyes whenever Hooke made his latest claim.

Second Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

August 2000
SCIENCE, SEX AND SUICIDE
At 13 years of age Robert Hooke left the Island to eventually become one of the great scientific minds of the 17th century. He never returned here but retained connections. Emerging from these connections is the tragic story of the Scientist, the Mayor, the Governor and Grace.
Researchers from different fields have recently pooled evidence to bring together a series of events in London and the Island which culminated with the suicide of John Hooke, Mayor of Newport and brother of Robert Hooke. Why did an apparent pillar of society take his life? A number of situations have now been revealed, any one of which may have brought poor John Hooke to the edge.
Was it the burden of the huge debt he owed to brother Robert? And what does this debt say of the crippling expense of being a Mayor in 1670's Newport?
Having placed the upbringing of his daughter, Grace, in the care of Robert in London, did he discover his brother had been having regular sex with her? And had the debt to his brother obliged him to tolerate this unsavoury situation?
Perhaps Newport gossip that he was an ineffective and parsimonious Mayor brought unbearable shame. Did his brother's fame push a grocer of modest means into a status he couldn't sustain?
Shortly before his suicide, Grace began courting the powerful Island governor, Sir Robert Holmes. Why was John Hooke among the last to hear of this? Was he aware Holmes had made his daughter pregnant? Had Holmes already indicated his intention to keep the child but abandon the mother?
And what of Grace: an innocent plaything or scheming beauty? Investigation into these sleazy events is, as yet, incomplete. The History Centre has exclusive access to this research. Expect a web site in due course, laying out the evidence and telling the full story. http://www.iwhistory.org.uk/archi…

The full story under the title cited by Sjoerd (above) migrated to a defunct website. ( freespace.virgin.net/ric.martin/v… )

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Rarifying Engine
The most important points to be noticed about it are, that unlike any later air-pump, the cylinder and the receiver were directly connected, and, further, that it was provided with only one barrel or pump. It appears to have been partly in reference to the former of those peculiarities, but also because he did not pretend to be able to produce an absolute vacuum, that Boyle named his instrument. He seldom calls it an air-pump. Once he speaks of Guericke's instrument as “the wind-pump, as somebody not improperly calls it.” “Pneumatic-pump” also but rarely occurs. The title he preferred for his instrument was that of “pneumatical engine.” Others called it the “rarefying engine,” and it was known over Europe as Machina Boyleana—Boyle's machine. It was strictly a pneumatical, not a rarefying , engine. It could be used to condense air into the globular receiver, as well as to withdraw air from it, as Boyle showed, and was thus something else than a mere vacuum-producer.
https://books.google.com/books?id…

john  •  Link

"It is high time for us to have peace [...]"
How that has rung through the ages.

Randy  •  Link

Four years since last post. Then you and I within 8 hours. Fascinating!

Third Reading

jimmigee  •  Link

I confess that I cringe when I read about these experiments on live animals.
Yes, I understand that they often furthered scientific knowledge.

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