Book description
Robert Hooke was one of the most inventive, versatile and prolific
scientists of the late 17th Century, but for 300 years his reputation
has been overshadowed by those of his two great contemporaries, his
friend Sir Christopher Wren and his rival Sir Isaac Newton. If he is
remembered today, it is as the author of a law of elasticity or as
amisanthrope who accused Newton of stealing his ideas on gravity.
This book, the first life of Hooke for nearly fifty years, rescues its
subject from centuries of obscurity and misjudgement. It shows us Hooke
the prolific inventor, the mechanic, the astronomer, the anatomist, the
pioneer of geology, meteorology and microscopy, the precursor of
Lavoisier and Darwin. It also gives us Hooke the architect of Bedlam and
the Monument, the supervisor of London's rebuilding after the Great
Fire, the watchmaker, the consumer of prodigious quantities of medicines
and purgatives, the candid diarist, the lover, the hoarder of money and
secrets, the coffee house conversationalist. This is an absorbing study
of a fascinating and unduly forgotten man. Dr Stephen Inwood was born
in London in 1947, and was educated at Dulwich College and at Balliol
and St Antony's College, Oxford. For twenty-six years he was a college
and university history lecturer, but he became a professional writer in
1999, after the publication of A History of London. He also holds posts
at Kingston University and at New York University in London. He lives in
Richmond, west London, with his wife and three sons.
