“In 1658 or 1659, I contrived and perfected the ‘air-pump’ for Boyle, having first seen a contrivance for that purpose made for Boyle by Gratorix, which was too gross to perform any great matter.”

— Robert Hooke (c.1670), Posthumous Works (pg. iii-iv); cited by Richard Waller (1705) in “Life of Robert Hooke” [4]

Compare: Giovanni Porta

“Hooke’s ‘pondere [weight] premit [exerts] aer [air] vacuum [vacuum] quod ab igne [from] relictum [left] est [it is]’ is one of the principles upon which Savery's late invented engine for raising water is founded.”

— Richard Waller (1705), The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (pg. xxi)

“This [Hooke engine principle], which was restated by Jean de Hautefeuille [1678] and Huygens [1678] in the late 1670s, was regarded by some of Hooke’s admirers as the principle behind the invention of the steam pump by Thomas Savery in the 1690s.”

— Stephen Inwood (2002), The Main Who Knew Too Much (pg. 211)

An un-annotated version of the pneumatical engine built by Hooke (1659), under the commission of Robert Boyle, with which the first gas law (Boyle's law) was derived.

“Heat is nothing else but a very brisk and vehement agitation of the parts of a body.”

— Robert Hooke (1665), Micrographia (pg. 12)

“Hooke's kinetic theory of heat and matter was then forgotten for many years, until the Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli rediscovered the kinetic theory of gases in 1738. Bernoulli's work was in turn ignored until the idea was revived by two uninfluential English amateurs, John Herapath and John Waterston, in 1820 and 1845. Only with the work of James Joule in the 1840s, and Rudolf Clausius and James Maxwell in the 1860s, did the kinetic theory of heat and matter achieve general acceptance.”

— Stephen Inwood (2001), The Man Who Knew Too Much (pg. 276)

“He is but of middle stature, something of a crooked, and his face but little below, but his head is large; his eyes full and popping, and not quick; a grey eye. He has a delicate head of hair, brown, and of excellent moist curl. He is and ever was very temperate, and moderate in diet”; he was “of great suavity and goodness.”

— John Aubrey (c.1688)

“As to his person, he was despicable, being very crooked, though I have heard from himself, and others, that he was straight until about 16 years of age when he first grew awry, by frequent practicing with a turn lathe, and the like incurvating exercises, being but of a thin weak habit of body, which increased as he grew older, so as to be very remarkable at last.”

— John Aubrey (c.1688)

“As to his person he was but despicable, being very crooked. This made him but low of stature, though by his limbs he should have been moderately tall. He was always very pale and lean, and laterly nothing but skin and bone, with a meagre aspect, his eyes grey and full, with a sharp ingenious look whilst younger; his nose but thin, of a moderate height and length; his mouth meanly wide, and his upper Lip thin; his chin sharp, and forehead large; his head of a middle size. He went stooping and very fast (till his weakness a few years before his death hindered him) having but a light body to carry, and a great deal of spirits and activity, especially in his youth?”

— Richard Waller (c.1700), “Description of Robert Hooke”; cited by Stephen Inwood (2002) in The Man Who Knew Too Much (pg. 52)

“Hooke was meanly ugly, very pale and lean.”

— Tom Shactman (1999)

“Friends who described him in his middle and later years agreed that he was a sorry sight, with his thin and crooked body, his over-large head, sharp facial features and protruding eyes.”

— Stephen Inwood (2002), The Man Who Knew Too Much (pg. 11)

Six artistic reconstruction attempts at what Hooke might have looked like, based in extant verbal descriptions of him.

“Hooke’s father, John Hooke, briefly hoped that he might be trained for a career in the Church, but study gave the boy headaches, and John, whose own health was failing, abandoned his son’s education. The smell of paint, like the study of religion, made his head ache.”

— Stephen Inwood (2002), The Man Who Knew Too Much (pgs. 7 & 10)

“Thanks for the extracts from Hooke. I know him very well. He understands no geometry at all. He makes himself ridiculous by his boasting. I know his name machine [for grinding lenses] well – it is quite inept. And a bad example of his mechanical algebra.”

— Christiaan Huygens (1665), “Letter to Father” [26]

“I acknowledge my indebtedness to the very famous Master Robert Hooke for this experiment—by which the lungs are kept continuously dilated for a long time without meanwhile endangering the animal's life—and the opportunity thereby given me to perform this piece of work.”

— Richard Lower (1669), On the Heart (Ѻ); cited by Stephen Inwood (2002) in The Man Who Knew Too Much (pg. 106)

“What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking ye colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants [sic].”

— Isaac Newton (1678), “Letter to Hooke”, Feb 5 [21]

“The screw-propeller, which, as has been stated, was probably first proposed [by Leonardo da Vinci (c.1495) (Ѻ)] by Robert Hooke (Ѻ) in 1681, and by Daniel Bernoulli [1752], of Groningen, and by Watt in 1784, was, at the end of the century, tried experimentally in the United States by David Bushnell, an ingenious American, who was then conducting the experiments with torpedoes.”

— Robert Thurston (1878), A History of the Steam Engine (pg. 292)

“Hooke’s great work, the Micrographia, published in 1665, contains his theory of combustion, a theory similar to that of John Mayow which did not appear until 1674, except that whereas Mayow's presentation is indirect, rather complicated, at times even obscure, Hooke's postulates are simply, clearly, and concisely stated. For a period of about seventeen years, from February, 1663 to about 1680, Hooke performed experiments before the Royal Society to prove the correctness of his theory. Besides these direct efforts he worked with Richard Lower in his experiments on respiration and was all during this period, according to the ‘Diary’, a very frequent visitor to the home and laboratory of Robert Boyle.”

— Clara Milt (1939), “Robert Hooke, Chemist” [29]

“Hooke’s name is mentioned, in the index of the authoritative Instruments of Science: an Historical Encyclopedia (1998) (Ѻ), more times than that of any other inventor: eighteen entries for Lord Kelvin and Carl Zeiss, eleven for Jesse Ramsden, eight or nine for Isaac Newton, James Maxwell, and Ptolemy, and twenty for Robert Hooke.”

— Stephen Inwood (2002), The Man Who Knew Too Much (pgs. 4-5)

“Isaac Newton's seven pages of densely packed notes on Micrographia still exist among his papers in the Cambridge University Library. They show that he was interested in Hooke's theory of combustion, his ideas on the congruity of matter, and his description of the nettle's sting, and had thought of several ways of pursuing the problem of atmospheric refraction. The section of Micrographia which stimulated him the most, though, was Hooke's work on light and colours. Newton was not convinced by Hooke's theory that light was composed of waves, like sound, and he could not see why Hooke's 'weaker' waves should travel as fast as 'stronger' ones. ‘Why then may not light deflect from straight lines as well as sounds &c? How doth the foremost weak pulse keep pace with the following stronger & can it be then sufficiently weaker?’ Still, he accepted that the rings of colour produced by thin plates (which we now call Newton's rings) might provide clues to the nature of light and colour, and set to work on them.”

— Stephen Inwood (2002), The Man Who Knew Too Much (pg. 76)

“The vacuum left by fire lifts a weight.”

— Robert Hooke (1675), “A New Invention in Mechanics of Prodigious Use, Exceeding the Chimera’s of Perpetual Motions for Several Uses”, in: A Description of Helioscopes and some other Instruments (future invention #9) (penned as the following encrypted Latin cypher: "Pondere premit aer vacuum quod ab igne relictum est", the key for which he did not divulge until a decade or two later)

“The calm prosperity of your reign has given us the leisure [see: flow state] to follow these studies of quiet and retirement.”

— Robert Hooke (1665), “Epistle to the King” of Micrographia [25]

“Avoid dogmatizing and espousal of any hypotheses not sufficiently grounded and confirmed by experiment.”

— Robert Hooke (1665), 1st rule of Royal Society, in: “Foreword to Royal Society” of Micrographia [25]

“Thus all the uncertainty, and mistakes of humane actions, proceed either from, the narrowness and wandering of our senses, from the slipperiness or delusion of our memory, from the confinement or rashness of our understanding, so that it’s no wonder, that our power over natural causes and effects is so slowly improved, feeing we are not only to contend with the obscurity and difficulty of the things whereon we work, and think, but even the forces of our own minds conspire to betray us.”

— Robert Hooke (1665), “Preface” to Micrographia [25]

“So many are links, upon which the true philosophy depends, of which, if any one be loose, or weak, the whole chain is in danger of being dissolved; it is to begin with the hands and eyes, and to proceed on through the memory, to be continued by the reason; nor is it to stop there, but to come about to the hands and eyes again, and so, by a continual passage round from one faculty to another, it is to be maintained in life and strength, as much as the body of a man is by the circulation of the blood through the several parts to the body, the arms, the feet, the lungs, the heart, and the head.”

— Robert Hooke (1665), "Preface" to Micrographia; cited by Lawrence Henderson in “Sociology 23” (pg. 77)

“The truth is, the ‘science of nature’ has been already too long made only a work of the ‘brain’ and the ‘fancy’: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of observations on material and obvious things. It is said of great empires, that the best way to preserve them from decay, is to bring them back to the first principles, and arts, on which they did begin. The same is undoubtedly true in philosophy, that by wandering far away into invisible notions, has almost quite destroyed itself, and it can never be recovered, or continued, but by returning into the same sensible paths, in which it did at first proceed.”

— Robert Hooke (1665), "Preface" to Micrographia (preface) [23]

“Who could be so sottish as to think all those things [e.g. flying mechanism of insects] the productions of ‘chance’ [see: anti-chance]?”

— Robert Hooke (1665), Micrographia (pgs. 171-72); cited by Stephen Inwood (2002) in The Man Who Knew Too Much (pg. 73)

“Some may say I have turned the world upside down for the sake of a shell.”

— Robert Hooke (1687), “Lecture in support of his Axial Tilt Theory of a Prolonged Global Flood”, Feb 19; the ‘turned the world upside down’ is from John Wallis and his criticism of Hooke’s theory on Biblical grounds [27]

“If we must not believe our senses, if we must not judge of things by trials and sensible proofs, but must remain tied up to opinions we have received from others, and disbelieve everything, though never so rational, if our received histories do not conform to them.”

— Robert Hooke (1694), “On the the ‘species’ of nature, in respect to the beginning of things”, Royal Institute, Jul 25 [24]