Royal Society to house Hooke journal

[Dave Monroe]

LONDON (Reuters) - A last-minute deal reached on
Tuesday ensures a manuscript charting the birth of
modern science, lost for more than 200 years, will be
housed at the Royal Society rather than falling into
private hands.

Hailed as "science's missing link", the journal of
Robert Hooke had been due to go on sale at auction
with a price tag in excess of 1 million pounds.

But just before the sale was due to take place,
auctioneers Bonhams said an anonymous private bidder
had agreed to buy it and give it to the Royal Society,
Britain's academy of leading scientists, which had
said it could not afford to buy it.

"This is great news for science and great news for
Britain," said Lord Rees of Ludlow, President of the
Royal Society.

"Robert Hooke was a colossal figure in the founding of
modern science, and these documents represent an
irreplaceable record of his contribution," he said,
adding that the payment amounted to "about 1 million
pounds".

The journal contains details of experiments Hooke
conducted as curator at the Royal Society from 1662
and his correspondence as secretary from 1677. It was
found by chance in a cupboard at a private house in
the county of Hampshire.

The notes include Hooke's row with Isaac Newton over
planetary motion and gravity, and the lost record
confirming the first observation of microbes by Antoni
van Leeuwenhoek.

Hooke was a keen observer of nature with a fascination
for things mechanical but, because of ill health as a
child, he was initially left largely to educate
himself.

He studied astronomy at Christ Church College, Oxford
and helped found the Royal Society in the early 1660s.

In 1665 Hooke finally found fame with publication of
his Micrographia containing pictures of objects he had
studied through a microscope he had made himself, and
a number of biological discoveries.

Diarist Samuel Pepys said of the book that it was the
most ingenious he had ever read.

Hooke also discovered that Jupiter revolved on its own
axis, suggested that gravity could be measured using a
pendulum and invented, among other things, the
reflecting telescope.

Despite Hooke's huge contribution to science and
understanding, the only innovation to bear his name is
Hooke's Law -- ut tensio sic vis (extension is
proportional to force) -- the shortest law in physics.

Hooke died in London in March 1703 aged 67.

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