The Myth and the Truth

The Man Without a Face

Robert Hooke named the cell, wrote the century's most beautiful book, surveyed half of London after it burned, and quarrelled with Newton. No authenticated portrait of him survives — and the reason usually given for that is itself a myth.

The myth

Everyone who knows the name knows the shape of the story. Robert Hooke was a clever, crook-backed, disagreeable man who claimed other people's discoveries as his own. He picked a fight with Isaac Newton over gravity, a fight he had no business picking, and he lost. Newton crushed him, outlived him, and when Hooke died, had his portrait destroyed so that posterity would not have to look at him. That is why, uniquely among the great figures of the seventeenth century, we do not know what Robert Hooke looked like.

The last part is true: there is no authenticated portrait. Almost everything offered as the explanation is unsupported.

What he actually did

Start with the scale of it, because the myth survives partly by keeping the achievements vague.

In 1665 Hooke published Micrographia, a folio of observations made through a compound microscope, illustrated with engravings he drew himself. It contains a foldout of a flea rendered at a size that still stops people, and a louse, and the compound eye of a fly. It was a popular sensation, not merely a scientific one. Samuel Pepys bought a copy and sat up until two in the morning with it, recording in his diary that it was the most ingenious book he had ever read.

In it, examining a shaving of cork, Hooke described the tiny chambers he saw and reached for a word from the architecture of monasteries. He called them cells. Every use of that word in biology descends from that page.

He stated the relationship between the extension of a spring and the force applied to it — ut tensio, sic vis, as the extension, so the force. It is still taught as Hooke's law. He did not publish it plainly at first. In 1676 he issued it as an anagram, `ceiiinosssttuv`, and only unscrambled it in 1678. This looks like eccentricity and was in fact ordinary practice: it timestamped a claim without giving rivals the result, in a period when priority disputes were constant and there was no reliable mechanism for establishing who had got somewhere first. That absence is going to matter.

He was the Royal Society's Curator of Experiments, a post that obliged him to bring several significant new experiments before the Society at its weekly meetings. Consider what that means as a working life: a standing requirement, for decades, to generate original experimental demonstrations on demand, across every subject the Society happened to be interested in that month — air pressure, combustion, respiration, optics, gravitation, springs, fossils, clocks.

After the Great Fire of 1666 he was appointed one of the City surveyors, and with Christopher Wren he did an enormous share of the practical work of laying out and rebuilding London — settling boundary disputes between ruined properties, plot by plot, in a city that had lost its landmarks. He worked as an architect in his own right. The Monument to the Great Fire, which he designed with Wren, was built as a functioning scientific instrument as well as a memorial: a hollow shaft intended for use as a zenith telescope and for experiments on gravity and air pressure, with a laboratory in the base.

He also proposed, from his study of fossils, that some species had been extinguished entirely and that the Earth's surface had changed profoundly over immense periods — an argument well over a century ahead of its general acceptance.

This is not the CV of a footnote.

The quarrel

The fight with Newton was real, and Hooke's position in it is routinely misstated.

In correspondence in 1679 and 1680, Hooke put to Newton the idea that a body might be attracted with a force falling off as the inverse square of the distance, and asked what curve would result. He was not alone in suspecting the inverse square; the notion was in circulation. What Hooke never claimed was the mathematics. He could not demonstrate that an inverse-square attraction produces an ellipse. Newton could, and did, and that demonstration is the Principia — a work of a different order from anything Hooke ever produced.

Hooke's request was for acknowledgment of the suggestion. Newton's response was to strip mentions of Hooke from the manuscript, and to remark to Edmond Halley that mathematicians who do the work get nothing but the drudgery while others claim the discovery. The two positions are not as far apart as the feud suggests: Hooke wanted credit for an idea he genuinely contributed and could not prove, and Newton refused to concede that an unproven idea is a contribution at all. It is a disagreement about what science is for — and it has never been settled.

The most quoted sentence in the history of scientific modesty belongs to this quarrel. Newton's line about having seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants comes from a letter written to Hooke, in 1676. It is frequently read as a veiled insult, on the grounds that Hooke was short and stooped. That reading is plausible and popular; it is also not provable, the giants image was already an old commonplace by then, and the letter's surrounding tone is civil. It belongs in the category of things we would like to be true.

The face

So: the portrait.

No authenticated likeness of Hooke is known. The claim that Newton destroyed one is repeated constantly and rests on nothing solid. What is documented is duller. Hooke's portrait, if the Royal Society held one, would have been among the Society's possessions when it moved to new premises at Crane Court in 1710 — seven years after Hooke's death, during Newton's presidency. Items went missing in that period. Whether any portrait of Hooke was among them, and whether anyone intended it, is not established. Newton had motive, which is not the same as evidence, and historians have been careful about the difference even while the story has hardened everywhere else.

There have been false dawns. A portrait was proposed in 2003 as a possible Hooke and was subsequently identified as the chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont. What we have instead are descriptions — that he became bent and thin, that he slept badly, that he was quick-tempered and quick to claim priority — and these descriptions come to us disproportionately through people who disliked him, chiefly through the antiquary John Aubrey's affectionate account and through the hostile framing of others. The man's appearance survives only as characterisation written by his critics, which is close to a definition of an unfair trial.

Why the truth is the better story

The myth explains Hooke's obscurity with a villain. It is a satisfying explanation and it lets everyone off: Hooke was wronged, Newton was petty, and history was distorted by a single act of spite.

The likelier explanation implicates no one and is far more useful. Hooke was destroyed by his job.

The Curator of Experiments was required to be endlessly, weekly inventive across every field at once. Hooke was superbly suited to it and it consumed him. The consequence is that his output is enormous and almost entirely scattered — a suggestion here, a demonstration there, a claim lodged as an anagram, an idea raised in correspondence and never carried to completion because the following Thursday demanded three more experiments on something else. He was the best experimental mind of his generation, and he spent it in pieces.

Newton wrote one book. He spent years on it, and it settled a question permanently. Hooke spent those same years being brilliant on demand about whatever was in front of him, and left behind no single object into which his reputation could be poured. Reputations attach to works, not to careers. Hooke's career was magnificent and his works are fragments — which is also why his priority claims sounded so much like grievance. He usually had been there first, and he usually could not prove it, because proving it had never been his job.

There is a final indignity that no feud accounts for. Hooke was buried in 1703 at St Helen's Bishopsgate. In the nineteenth century his remains were moved, along with others, and their whereabouts are now unknown. We have no portrait, and no grave.

What we have is a word. Every time a biologist says cell, they are quoting a man whose face nobody can produce.

On sources. Micrographia (1665) is the source for the naming of the cell; Pepys's reaction is from his diary entry of January 1665. Ut tensio, sic vis was published as the anagram `ceiiinosssttuv` in 1676 and unscrambled in 1678. The inverse-square correspondence with Newton dates from 1679–80, and the "shoulders of giants" letter from February 1676 — its reading as an insult is a modern inference, not a documented intent. The destroyed-portrait story has no contemporary source and is reported here as unsubstantiated; the 2003 candidate portrait was later identified as Jan Baptist van Helmont. Aubrey's Brief Lives is the main early source for Hooke's appearance and temperament and is not a neutral one.