Out of the Shadow of a Giant: How Newton Stood on the Shoulders of Hooke and Halley. John Gribbin
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 to 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