Robert Hooke Facts
Robert Hooke Facts
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| Interesting Robert Hooke Facts: |
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| Robert Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight where his father was a priest in the Church of England. |
| Robert Hooke suffered from ill health as a child and was tutored at home by his father. |
| As a boy he became fascinated by mechanical devices and drawing and taught himself to draw. |
| He studies at the Westminster School in London where he quickly learned Greek, Latin and mathematics. |
| His professor, Dr. Richard Busby, offered extra educational opportunities to a group of promising pupils which included Hooke. |
| In 1653 he entered Christ Church, Oxford and secured a position as a chemical assistant. |
| From 1655 to 1662 he was a laboratory assistant to Robert Boyle. |
| In 1660 the Royal Society was founded and Hooke presented a paper reporting that water rose in slender tubes due to capillary action. |
| In 1660 he discovered the law of elasticity which describes the variation of tension with extension in a spring. |
| He invented the balance spring which greatly increased the accuracy of watches. |
| On November 5, 1661 it was proposed that the Society establish a Curator of Experiments position and Hooke was elected. |
| In 1664 Sir John Cutler created an annuity of fifty pounds to be used for the founding of a Mechanick Lecture and Hooke received the appointment. |
| In 1664 he became Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. |
| Hooke's experiments on the nature of air and on barometric pressure at different altitudes were demonstrated to the Royal Society. |
| Hooke invented instruments to measure the strength of gunpowder and to cut gears for watches which were much more precise than could be made by hand. |
| In 1665 he published Micrographia which was a collection of his microscopy observations. |
| In his lecture "On Gravity' he stated that all bodies move in straight lines until deflected by a force. |
| Hooke made many contributions to timekeeping devices and introduced the pendulum as clock regulator and proposed that a precise clock could be used to find longitude at sea. |
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