Out of the Shadow of a Giant: How Newton Stood on the Shoulders of Hooke and Halley. John Gribbin
would explicitly found their institution on their interpretation of Baconian philosophy. And some of those founders were experimenting in Oxford in the 1650s.
The first stirrings of the scientific debates that led to the founding of the Royal Society took place in London, in the mid-1640s, where a group of men, including Wilkins, used to meet to discuss ‘experimental philosophy’. This was at the height of the political and religious turmoil of the Civil Wars, and these gentlemen consciously made a decision not to discuss those contentious topics, but to stick with what we now call science – which must have been something of a relief to them from the uncertainties of everyday life. But at that time the group was essentially a talking shop, not a centre for experiments. After the success of the Parliamentary forces, the former Royalist stronghold of Oxford was reorganised, with many people regarded as King’s men ejected from their posts and being replaced. This took several of the London group to Oxford, where Wilkins became Warden of Wadham College in 1648, and a member of the triumvirate overseeing the University on behalf of Oliver Cromwell in 1652. In 1656, Wilkins married Cromwell’s widowed sister, Robina, who was a couple of decades older than him, cementing his position in the establishment. By then, Cromwell was the Lord Protector, and gave Wilkins a special dispensation to marry even though his post as Warden officially required him to remain celibate. This seems not to have been pure self-interest on Wilkins’ part, because John Evelyn, who knew Wilkins well, tells us that he was:
A most obliging person, [who] had married the Protector’s sister, to preserve the Universities from the ignorant Sacrilegious Commander and soldiers, who would fain have been demolishing all bothe [Oxford and Cambridge] and persons that pretended to learning.
By the time Hooke came to Oxford, the group of experimental philosophers was already holding regular meetings (sometimes referred to as a ‘philosophical club’) at Wilkins’ rooms in Wadham. It was at this time that they began to put the ‘experiment’ into experimental philosophy. Hooke was, of course, already known to Wilkins through Busby, and Thomas Willis was another member of the ‘club’, which was some thirty strong. Willis was a physician and chemist who was particularly interested in the workings of the brain. He was also a member of another ‘club’ – the Westminster/Christ Church old-boy network (indeed, he had been a contemporary of Busby at Christ Church as an undergraduate). So it is no surprise that Hooke became an assistant to Willis, living in his house, Beam Hall, opposite Merton College Chapel, and preparing the medicines for Willis’ patients, as well as helping out with chemical experiments. It was from Willis, too, that Hooke learned dissection.
If this meant that Hooke was neglecting his formal studies, it certainly did him no harm. And he was certainly more interested in learning, by whatever means, than many of the ‘young gentlemen’ who regarded their time at university as something of a holiday. Even at the height of the Puritan regime, with daily prayers at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m., services on Thursdays and Sundays and other devotions, it was necessary for the authorities to instruct the Dean of Christ Church to ‘take special care to reform all scandalous fashions of long and powdered hair, and habits contrary to the status of the University and that decency and modesty which is necessary for young students’, followed by a demand ‘to punish the abuse of swearing’. In 1653, the year Hooke went up, another edict took steps ‘for the repressing the immoderate expenses of youth in the College, that no gentleman commoner shall battel in the buttery above 5 shillings weekly’. Not that these financial restrictions would have meant much to the impoverished Hooke.
There was, however, one new temptation that Hooke fell for, and consumed eagerly throughout his life. The first record of coffee being brewed in England comes from the diary of John Evelyn, who wrote on 10 May 1637 ‘There came in my time to the College [Balliol] one Nathaniel, out of Greece … He was the first I ever saw drink coffee.’ Nathaniel was later sent down (expelled), we don’t know why, but went on to become Bishop of Smyrna, so whatever misdemeanour it was didn’t harm his career. Perhaps partly thanks to his example, in 1651 the first coffee house in England was opened on the site of what is now The Grand Café, on the High Street. Its proprietor was a man called Jacob, from the Lebanon; the first coffee shop in London was opened the following year, by Pasqua Rosee, from Turkey, in St Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill. By the end of the 1650s, there were more than eighty coffee houses in the City of London. Apart from Hooke’s personal addiction to coffee (which may help to explain both the long hours he worked and some of his later ailments), this was an important event for science, as well as society at large, because coffee houses became the preferred meeting places of natural philosophers such as Hooke, Halley and their friend Christopher Wren. A coffee house even comes into the story of the discovery of the inverse square law of gravity.
Although ‘only’ Willis’ assistant, Hooke attended meetings of the philosophical club, and absorbed knowledge from its other members, notably Seth Ward, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy; at Ward’s request, Hooke devised a mechanism to improve the regularity of a pendulum clock for astronomical timekeeping, and this led to a lifelong interest in clocks and the problem of finding longitude at sea. It was also here that he met Wren, and during his time in Oxford he continued his interest in flying. But the single most important thing that happened to Hooke in Oxford was that Wilkins introduced him to Robert Boyle, with the recommendation, which Boyle accepted, that Hooke should become Boyle’s assistant.
Boyle had reached Oxford by a circuitous route. Many accounts simply describe him as a rich aristocrat who had the time and money to indulge his interest in experimental philosophy. But things were never that simple in the England (and, especially in Boyle’s case, Ireland) of the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Boyle’s father, Richard Boyle, was indeed the Earl of Cork and filthy rich, but he was not the latest member of a long aristocratic line. Richard Boyle was what might now be called an entrepreneur, in the pejorative sense of the term. Born in England in 1566, into a respectable but unremarkable family, he became a penniless orphan before he was twenty and went to Ireland (then an English colony) to make his fortune. With the aid of marriages to a wealthy widow, and after she died to the daughter of the Secretary of State for Ireland, and financial dealings that were often on the shady side of legality, he succeeded in his aim so well that he became possibly the richest man in either Ireland or England, able to buy his title and the respectability that went with it.
Wheeling and dealing didn’t take up all of Richard Boyle’s time. Along the way he fathered seven daughters and six sons, before the late addition of Robert, on 25 January 1627, when Richard Boyle was sixty and his wife Margaret forty years old. Yet another daughter was born three years later, but complications associated with the birth killed Margaret. The last girl was named after her.
With no mother from the age of three, and far down the pecking order for any inheritance of either titles or money, the Honourable Robert Boyle (to give him the only title due to him) was initially brought up and educated at home, in the care of family retainers, but later went to Eton. There he was recognised as an outstanding scholar at a very young age, and first encountered the books of Nicolaus Copernicus and William Gilbert. But at the age of twelve, in 1639, Robert was plucked out of school and sent with his brother Francis, then fifteen, on the Grand Tour of Europe that was de rigueur for the sons of wealthy gentlemen. Their education was not forgotten. They were accompanied by a tutor, and visited many seats of learning – they were in Florence in 1642 when Galileo died. But when they were about to return home, rebellion broke out in Ireland. This was one of the early precursors to the Civil Wars, and although Francis was considered old enough to be summoned home to help suppress the rebellion, Robert was told to keep away until the fighting was over. The rebels, however, were not suppressed without serious consequences for the Boyle family. Two of Robert’s brothers (not Francis) were killed, and the grand old Earl of Cork lost most of his money and land. He died in 1643, soon after this phase of fighting finished. So when Robert returned to England in 1644, he had no money and had not been educated for any kind of useful career. Worse, by then the ‘proper’ Civil War was raging. He was saved by his sister Katherine, thirteen years older than Robert, who had married to become Viscountess Ranelagh, and lived in London but apart from her husband.
At first, Robert lived in Katherine’s house. She was a known Parliamentarian sympathiser with many powerful friends in London, which was controlled by Parliament. Robert judiciously never gave any indication