Out of the Shadow of a Giant Read online

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  William Collins

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  This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

  Text © John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, 2017

  Cover design by Jonathan Pelham

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  Source ISBN: 9780008220594

  Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008220600

  Version: 2017-04-27

  PREFACE

  The seed from which the idea for this book grew was planted during a conversation with Lisa Jardine at the Royal Society, following a talk by one of us (JG). We got to speculating about how science in Britain might have developed if Isaac Newton had never lived. Our conclusion, such as it was, was that although Newton had inspired a great advance, and fully justified his status as the scientific giant of his day, there were only slightly lesser men who would have been well able to set British science off on the road it followed after Newton, although the journey down that road might have taken a little longer. Two men, in particular, stand out as thinkers who made major contributions, not just to scientific discovery but also to the development of the scientific method itself, who lived and worked in the shadow of Newton. They have by no means been forgotten, but even many of the people who still know the names of Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley have little knowledge of the remarkable breadth and depth of their work. Hooke is remembered for a rather mundane ‘law’ describing the behaviour of a stretched spring; Halley for the comet that bears his name, but which he did not discover. Their other achievements, however, are so important that between them they arguably add up to the scientific equivalent of another Newton. So rather belatedly (and, alas, too late for Lisa Jardine to see it) we have decided to attempt to bring them out from the shadow of Newton, and present the men and their achievements in all their glory.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Introduction: Out of the Shadows

  A Note on Dates

  Chapter 1: From Freshwater to Oxford

  Chapter 2: The Most Ingenious Book That Ever I Read In My Life

  Chapter 3: Monumental Achievements

  Chapter 4: Meanwhile …

  Chapter 5: From Hackney to the High Seas

  Chapter 6: Of Spring and Secretaryship

  Chapter 7: A Mission of Gravity

  Chapter 8: Halley, Newton and the Comet

  Chapter 9: Not Fade Away

  Chapter 10: To Command a King’s Ship

  Chapter 11: Legacies

  Coda: How to do Science

  Picture Section

  Footnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  Isaac Newton famously commented that if he had seen further than other people it was ‘by standing on the shoulders of giants’. But even within his own lifetime, and increasingly since then, Newton was widely acknowledged as the greatest of all scientific giants, to such an extent that the remarkable achievements of his colleagues and contemporaries are often overlooked. Two of the pioneering scientists who lived and worked in the shadow of Newton would each have been regarded as giants in their own right if he had not been around, and it is our intention to bring them out of Newton’s shadow to put their achievements in perspective. They are (in chronological order) Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who was slightly older than Newton (1642–1727), and Edmond Halley (1656–1742), who outlived Newton. Their overlapping lives neatly embrace the hundred years or so during which science as we know it became established in Britain.

  But what of Newton? He was, to say the least, economical with the truth, and attempted to write Robert Hooke out of history, having ‘borrowed’ many of Hooke’s best ideas. It has been established, for example, that the famous story of the falling apple seen during the plague year of 1665 is a myth, invented by Newton to bolster his (false) claim that he had the idea of a universal theory of gravity before Hooke. In fact, Hooke described such an idea, and the rule that every object (such as a planet) moves in a straight line unless acted upon by some outside force (ironically, now known as Newton’s First Law), in the mid-1660s, when Newton was an unknown and very junior member of Cambridge University (he only graduated in 1665). Until Hooke mentioned these ideas to Newton several years later, Newton subscribed – as surviving documents show – to the idea that planetary motion was caused by whirlpools in some kind of fluid filling the Universe. Newton also lifted much of Hooke’s work on light and colours, and Newton published (significantly, immediately after Hooke’s death) as ‘his’ own theory of heat, an idea that has been described by historian Clara de Milt as ‘very, very’ like Hooke’s earlier work. In one respect, though, Newton was a better scientist than Hooke: he was a brilliant mathematician. And he outlived Hooke, so he had the last word – until now.

  We have not attempted to provide complete biographies of our subjects, who have been well served in that regard by Lisa Jardine (Hooke) and Alan Cook (Halley); our focus is on their scientific achievements, and how these were fundamental to the development of science in England. But there is, we hope, enough biographical background here to give some insight into the kind of people they were, and how they were both, in their different ways, products of the society they lived in.

  Hooke has been described as ‘England’s Leonardo’, a polymath whose achievements extended far beyond the realm of science. He came from a poor but respectable background, the son of a curate on the Isle of Wight. With the aid of a modest inheritance, he was able to attend Westminster School, and go on to Oxford as a choral scholar without having to pay fees. This was in 1653, during the Parliamentary Interregnum, and since music was banned in church services at the time he got the scholarship without having to sing for it. He eked out a living by acting as a paid servant for one of the wealthier undergraduates, normal practice at that time. He then moved on to become assistant to Robert Boyle, the ‘father of chemistry’. It is now widely accepted that it was Hooke who discovered what is now known as ‘Boyle’s Law’ of gases; Hooke was the only one of Boyle’s various paid assistants to be credited by name in his writings. Through Boyle, Hooke became a member of the inner circle of British scientists of the day, and became the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society. He was the man who made the Society a success, but (perhaps because of his humble background) he was always touchy about priority and famously got involved in rows with Newton and the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. Hooke pioneered the use of the microscope, wrote the first popular science book (praised by Samuel Pepys), made astronomical observations, and kept the Royal running. One of his great friends was Christopher Wren, and after the Fire of London the two of them worked together on the rebuilding of the City – many ‘Wren’ churches are now thought t
o be Hooke’s work. Hooke was the best experimental scientist of his time, the leading microscopist of the seventeenth century, an astronomer of the first rank, and developed an understanding of earthquakes, fossils and the history of the Earth that would not be surpassed for a century.

  Edmond Halley is remembered today for the comet that bears his name, but, like Hooke, he had several strings to his bow. Halley came from a relatively prosperous background, did well at school, and went up to Oxford in 1673. There, he was able to indulge his passion for astronomy by taking with him equipment including a telescope and sextant that would have been the envy of a contemporary professional astronomer. His work impressed John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, and with his (and other) help Halley was able to wangle a trip to the island of St Helena to carry out a survey of the southern skies. His father provided an allowance of £300 a year (three times Flamsteed’s salary!), the degree was abandoned, and at the age of twenty Halley went off on his adventure. The survey was a great success, with Halley’s Catalogue of the Southern Stars establishing his reputation. The King ‘recommended’ that Halley be given a degree, which was awarded three days after he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was not, however, in a hurry to build on this success. Comfortably supported by his father, he led the life of a gentleman in Restoration England, including the Grand Tour of Europe, before settling down, getting married and publishing astronomical observations from his home in Islington. The death of his father (in suspicious circumstances) in 1684 brought a change of priorities, and Halley became more involved with the work of the Royal Society. It was around this time that Halley, Hooke and Wren, puzzling over the nature of planetary orbits, asked Newton if he could explain why they seemed to be governed by an inverse square law. This led to the publication, overseen and funded by Halley, of Newton’s great work, the Principia. Alongside all this, Halley carried out a survey of the Thames estuary and invented a practical diving bell. He made the first scientific estimate of the size of atoms, calculated how to work out the distance to the Sun from a transit of Venus, and set out on an official voyage of exploration to the southern seas – a predecessor of the famous Beagle voyage. But, unlike Darwin, he was not a mere passenger; he was given a King’s ship and made Master and Commander (in modern language, a Royal Navy Captain) to run it, the only ‘landsman’ ever to hold such a post. This led to secret work as a spy (the details are lost) in the Adriatic, and then his appointment as a Professor at Oxford University. His life became less exciting, although it was recorded that he ‘talks, swears, and drinks brandy like a sea captain’. But there remained many scientific contributions, including the prediction of the return of ‘his’ comet and Halley’s appointment as the second Astronomer Royal, in 1720.

  So far, so good. This outline is essentially the story we expected to tell. But as we delved into the historical material, we found that the importance of Hooke and Halley is even greater than we had anticipated, while Newton turned out to have feet of clay. Newton got some of his best ideas – including ‘Newton’s First Law’ of motion, and the idea of gravity as a universal attractive force – from Hooke, and shamelessly took credit for them. He is known to have lied about his priority more than once, and to have deliberately tried to write Hooke out of the story. But he was only in a position to do so thanks to Halley. Preferring the quiet life as a reclusive Cambridge academic to the rough and tumble of scientific debate in Restoration England,fn1 Newton would have remained an obscure minor figure, remembered in the footnotes of science only for his (incorrect) theory of light, if Halley had not first prodded him into writing his masterpiece, the Principia, and then paid for its publication out of his own pocket. Without Hooke and Halley, we might never have heard of Newton. Without Newton, we would have heard a lot more about Hooke, in particular, and Halley. The legend that grew up about Newton was largely Newton’s invention, and became regarded as fact. For some three hundred years Newton has been venerated in the spirit of the famous line from the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence – ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ But it is our intention to print the facts.

  We tell the story from the perspective of the intertwined lives of Hooke and Halley, from 1635–1742, starting with the birth of Hooke and taking his story forward, then picking up Halley’s story and carrying both forward. The greatest overlap concerns the time when Hooke and Halley were involved in stimulating Newton’s greatest work, which we describe both from Hooke’s perspective (Chapter Seven) and from Halley’s perspective (Chapter Eight); this inevitably involves some repetition, but by dealing with this from the different perspectives we hope to make their intertwined relationships clear. Along the way, we also describe their interactions with other scientists, not just Newton. And we will leave them, we hope, basking in the sunlight of the recognition they deserve.

  The key development in seventeenth-century science, certainly in Britain and arguably in the world, was the establishment of the Royal Society in the 1660s. It was through the Royal Society that Hooke, Halley and Newton met and interacted with each other. Before then, there had been individual scientific pioneers, notably the philosopher Francis Bacon and the experimenters William Gilbert and Galileo Galilei. But the Royal provided a forum for those of a scientific bent to meet, discuss ideas and experiment, as well as being a kind of clearing house for scientific information gathered through a network of correspondents. It was Robert Hooke, more than anyone else, who made the society a success in its early days, when without his enthusiasm, hard work and skill it might have foundered. But to put this in context, we need to begin before Newton, Halley or the Royal Society were even conceived, as Hooke’s early life brings out the changes in British society around the time of the Civil War and paved the way for a scientific revolution.

  John Gribbin

  Mary Gribbin

  November 2016

  A NOTE ON DATES

  Until 1752, the English used the old Julian calendar, which was ten days behind the Gregorian calendar (our modern calendar) used across mainland Europe, which had been introduced because the calendar dates on the old calendar had gradually slipped out of sequence with the seasons. Hooke and Halley therefore used Julian (‘Old Style’ or OS) dates, and we have kept these except where we have indicated ‘New Style’ (NS). At the time, the New Year officially began on 25 March, the start of the tax year, but most people, as today, regarded 1 January as the start of the year. Astronomers, in particular, dated the new year from 1 January, and as both Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley were astronomers, that is good enough for us. In some sources, dates between 1 January and 24 March are written with both numbers, as for example 1650/1, but we give all our dates assuming the year began on 1 January.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROM FRESHWATER TO OXFORD

  According to his own account, Robert Hooke was born at exactly noon on 18 July 1635, at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. What we know of his early life comes from two sources. John Aubrey’s Brief Lives is always entertaining, although not always accurate, but Aubrey was a friend of Hooke and had many conversations with him. Another friend, the naturalist Richard Waller, knew Hooke in later life, and was responsible for publishing the Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke in 1705, putting into print some of Hooke’s previously unpublished lectures. Waller’s introduction to that book drew, he tells us, on an autobiographical memoir that Hooke started to write but never finished, and which is now lost. The story pieced together from these two sources can be fleshed out, however, with other information about events on the Isle of Wight in particular, and across Britain in general, at the time Hooke was growing up. It was certainly an interesting time to be alive, taking in civil war and the execution of a king before the boy was fourteen.

  Hooke’s father, John, was the curate of All Saints Church, where the rector was Cardell Goodman, a staunch Royalist and former member of Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford – connections that would in due course become important to Robert
. His mother, Cecellie, was the second wife of John Hooke, presumably a good deal younger than him, and Robert was by some way the youngest of four children. He had two sisters, the younger of whom was seven years older than him, and a brother, John junior, born in 1630.

  Robert was a sickly baby who was christened the day after his birth, probably because he was not expected to live, but he survived to become a sickly child. He was too delicate to be sent away to school in Newport like his brother but was educated at home by his father. Although plagued by recurrent headaches and other ailments, this left him plenty of time to wander the south-west corner of the island, gradually becoming stronger, and to follow his own interests, which leaned towards practical activities such as making working models. These demonstrated a rare skill at an early age. He built a model ship, described by Waller as ‘about Yard long, fitly shaping it, adding its Rigging of Ropes, Pullies, Masts, &c. with a contrivance to make it fire off some small Guns, as it was sailing cross a Haven of pretty breadth’ (probably Yarmouth). When he saw a brass clock that had been taken to pieces for repairs, he copied the components in wood and put them together to make a clock, which worked tolerably well. The downside of all the hours he spent over a workbench was that by the time he was sixteen Robert had, he told Waller, developed a pronounced stoop, sometimes referred to by his biographers as a hunchback. As these examples show, Robert Hooke was a precocious ‘mechanic’ of rare skill. But his skills extended beyond the practical. When the artist John Hoskins, a painter at the court of Charles I, visited the island, Robert watched him at work, then made his own paints from materials to hand, such as coal, chalk and an iron ore known as ruddle, and used them to copy paintings hanging in the house, to such good effect that Hoskins suggested he could have a career as an artist.

  The other formative influence on the young Hooke was the world around him. That part of the Isle of Wight offers spectacular scenery, chalk cliffs, and the dramatic sight of the Needles, a series of chalk spires rising from the sea at the end of a chalky spine running across the island. Many of the island strata are rich in fossils. Even as a child, Robert was intrigued by the discovery of the shells of sea creatures at the top of these cliffs, a long way above the waves. Most people in those days, if they thought about such things at all, assumed that this must be something to do with the biblical flood. But even though he was the son of a curate, Hooke had doubts, which developed over the years into ideas that culminated in a series of lectures at Gresham College, published posthumously as A Discourse on Earthquakes. Way ahead of his time, as we shall see, Hooke realised that the landscape we see around us today is a result of geological processes operating over immense spans of time, far longer than the then popular biblical timescale of Bishop James Ussher. Much later, he recalled how as a child he had observed a cliff made of layers of material, one of which, far above he sea, was a band of sand ‘filled with a great variety of Shells, such as Oysters, Limpits, and several sorts of Periwinkles.’fn1