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Robert Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635, so frail that his parents did not expect him to live, and he grew up building mechanical toys, including a working wooden copy of a brass clock. When his father died in 1648 he went to London with 40 pounds and apprenticed with the portrait painter Peter Lely, until paint fumes gave him migraines. He went to Westminster School and entered Oxford in 1653 as a servitor, doing chores for wealthier students. There he built Robert Boyle’s air pump, and in 1660 the new Royal Society made him Curator of Experiments, required to produce three or four experiments a week. His 1665 Micrographia, with its giant flea and fly’s eye, kept Samuel Pepys up until two in the morning and named the cell after the bare rooms of monks.

After the Great Fire of 1666 he worked with Christopher Wren as a city surveyor, handling more than half of London’s property surveys, and designed buildings including Bethlem hospital. He used an inverted hanging chain to find the ideal shape for the dome of St. Paul’s and built the Monument to the Great Fire as a giant zenith telescope. In 1679 he wrote to Isaac Newton proposing that gravity weakens with the square of distance; Newton’s Principia proved the law mathematically and gave Hooke no meaningful credit. After Hooke’s death in 1703, Newton became president of the Royal Society, and during its move the only known portrait of Hooke disappeared. His diaries, published in the 20th century, revealed a sociable, ailing man very different from the bitter caricature.

• He invented the universal joint, still called Hooke’s joint and used in vehicle drive shafts.
• He first published his law of elasticity as a scrambled Latin anagram to establish priority.
• He identified the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and dropped musket balls into wet clay to study lunar craters.
• His diaries record self-medication with laxatives and heavy doses of opium, and a relationship with his niece Grace, whose death in 1687 devastated him.
• After his death an iron chest holding 8,000 pounds was found in his rooms at Gresham College.