(July 28, 1635 – March 3, 1703)

About one-and-a-half centuries before Michael Faraday served Humphry Davy, Robert Hooke served another great chemist named Robert Boyle. It was Hooke that assembled the equipments and readied the laboratory in which Boyle conducted his famous gas law experiments. And prior to serving Boyle, Hooke had served Thomas Willis in similar capacity. He learned well, and was able to make his mark on various scientific fields. His tensile investigations enabled him formulate his law of elasticity, which is fundamental to metallurgy and engineering. He would later become the 9th Gresham Professor of Geometry at London. And based on his cells and tissues studies in 1665, he was deemed the discoverer of cell: long before Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann propounded their Cell Theory in 1839. Alongside Cornelis Drebbel, Giovanni Faber, Galileo Galilei and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke was at the forefront of 17th century microscopy. His diagrammatic exposition titled Micrographia, was the first publication which illustrated how distinct various parts of plants and animals appeared under the microscope. It is as well, the first book in which the term “cell” was first used to denote the basic unit of a living entity. Apart from arousing interests in microscopy, Micrographia did underscore Hooke’s versatility through its discourses on optics, astronomy, cytology, entomology and paleontology. Its innuendo of Wave Theory of Light succeeded René Descartes’ and preceded Christaan Huygens’. As acknowledgments of his scientific inputs, the 139-kilometer-wide Hooke Martian crater, the 36-kilometer-wide Hooke lunar crater, and 3514 Hooke asteroid were named after him.

 

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37 Comments

  1. I’m so happy that I found this site while searching for some scientists. Excellent is the right word for it.

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