Robert Hooke
1635 - 1703Robert Hooke was born in 1635 at Freshwater, Isle of Wight. He was initially educated at home then entered Westminster schol at age 13, from whence he went up to Christ Church, Oxford. He is perhaps best known to generations of schoolchildren as the discoverer of "Hooke's Law" of elasticity. This he announced in his 1678 lecture "Of Spring".
Hooke was a man of many talents. As an architect, he worked with Chisopher Wren rebuilding London after the Great Fire and also in the design of the Greenwich Royal Observatory. He was a great biologist and is sometimes credited with the discovery of the compound microscope. In 1665 he published his famous "Micrographia". Hooke also coined the term "cell" as used in biology, based on his observation of cork cell tissue.
Anchor Escapement
In horology, Robert Hooke is best known for his invention of the "Anchor Escapement". An escapement is a device that regulates the release of energy and translates it into regular timekeeping - in other words, "tick-tock".Before Hooke, early clocks were usually regulated by a "verge and foliot" escapement. This was crude, inaccurate and sensitive to temperature variation.
Hooke's anchor escapement, which worked with the newly developed pendulum, was simpler and more reliable allowing a great increase in timekeeping accuracy. Many older clocks were converted to use the new system.
Balance Spring
As well as the anchor, Robert Hooke's other main contribution to horology was the balance spring, a regulator for watches. There has always been some dispute as to whether it was Hooke or Christiaan Huygens who "first" developed this. The likely sequence of events seems to be that Hooke definitely first proposed the concept but that Huygens was the first to produce a working version using a spiral spring.
External Links:
"Micrographia" at Project
Gutenberg