The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The god of small things
Robert Hooke claimed to have beaten Newton to a theory of gravity – but it was his microscopic discoveries that changed the way we see, says Ruth Scurr
When Robert Hooke’s Micrographia was published in 1665, Samuel Pepys called it “the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life”. Featuring Hooke’s spectacular drawings of his observations under a microscope alongside verbal descriptions both beautiful and precise, Micrographia – which reappears in a lavish new edition from The Folio Society this month – was a masterpiece that transformed the public’s understanding of science.
“By the means of telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our enquiry,” claims Hooke in his preface. “Hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.”
The excitement his readers felt was akin to that experienced by the millions who watch David Attenborough’s Planet Earth programmes today. But Hooke – a prodigiously talented scientist, artist and writer – had only his eyes, lenses and pens with which to describe the new visible world.
When Hooke puts a bookworm under his microscope, he observes a conical body divided into 14 segments covered in reflective shells that explain the worm’s pearly appearance. He identifies the little creature as “one of the teeth of time” and describes evocatively the destruction that it wreaks: Micrographia – literally meaning tiny writing or drawing – was published under the aegis of the recently formed Royal Society, where Hooke served as curator of experiments. Much of our knowledge of his life comes from his friendship with John Aubrey, a fellow founding member of the Royal Society, antiquary and biographer. We learn from Aubrey’s writings, for example, that Hooke was born at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight in 1635. Aubrey also records that when the painter John Hoskins visited the Isle of Wight during Hooke’s childhood, Hooke watched and imitated him, grinding up chalk, red pigment and coal on a trencher and setting to work with his pencil.
In Micrographia, Hooke frequently discusses colour, even attempting to define it. Observation IX, Of Fantastical Colours, includes: He puts pigments and compounds under the microscope, trying to understand the relationship between the colours we see and the external world. He describes experiments to prove that all varieties of colour are produced from yellow and blue, mixed with white and black. He insists there is a difference between diluting a colour and whitening it and deploys the technical vocabulary of painters and limners when he lists the colours used in their work: