Micrographia

In 1665, a book was published that inaugurated the use of the microscope to investigate the natural world. The author was Robert Hooke, a talented artist, and amateur scientist. Hooke wrote Micrographia: or some physiological descriptions of minute Bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries there upon, at the behest of the newly chartered Royal Society in London, for whom he was working as curator of scientific experiments. In Micrographia, he presented the first detailed observations of everyday objects made with his self-constructed light microscope. Although this book contains a treasure-trove of drawings (in Hooke’s own hand) of the appearance of various animate and inanimate specimens as viewed in magnified form, one of the drawings and its associated description stands out as particularly germane to our present topic of cell imaging techniques. In his description of a thin piece of clear cork cut with a penknife and observed with his microscope, Hooke described the honey-comb-like appearance of the cork with pores or cells representing the basic structural unit. This represents the first printed reference of the term “cell” to describe a unit structure of an organism.

Cell Imaging Techniques, Human Press, 2006




........In the words of Sir Francis Bacon, who more than anyone else championed the cause of experiment, and whose writings directly inspired Robert Hooke and the early Fellows of the Royal Society, nature must be 'put to the torture', and made to yield its reluctant secrets to the astute investigator. It was not for nothing that Bacon's distinguished legal career took place in one of the most sanguinary periods of English constitutional history!

And as the judicial inquisitor needed his special tools of assault and persuasion to make his victim speak, so the scientific experimentalist needed his, for the laboratory-which included the newly invented telescope, microscope, airpump, thermometer, and many other instruments that refined the perceptions-was the torture chamber wherein long-secretive nature would be cross-examined.


Oxford

In 1653, Hooke (who had also undertaken a course of twenty lessons on the organ) secured a chorister's place at Christ Church, Oxford.[2] There he met the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, and gained employment as his assistant from about 1655 to 1662, constructing, operating, and demonstrating Boyle's air pump. He did not take his Master of Arts until 1662 or 1663. In 1659 Hooke described some elements of a method of heavier-than-air flight to the Warden of Wadham College, but concluded that human muscles were insufficient to the task.

Hooke began to be noticed around 1655, at that time a gathering of erudite men would take place in Oxford that was devoted to the study and demonstration of various elements of natural philosophy. These individuals held "philosophical meetings", of which few records survive except for the experiments Boyle conducted in 1658 and published in 1660. This group went on to form the nucleus of the Royal Society. Hooke developed an air pump for these experiments based on the pump of Gratorix, which was considered, in Hooke's words, "too gross to perform any great matter."

It is known that Hooke had a particularly keen eye, and was an adept mathematician, neither of which applied to Boyle. Gunther suggests that Hooke probably made the observations and may well have developed the mathematics of Boyle's Law. Regardless, it is clear that Hooke was a valued assistant to Boyle and the two retained a mutual high regard.


ALLAN CHAPMAN, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and the art of experiment in Restoration England (the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 67, 239 - 275 (1996))
http://www.rod.beavon.clara.net/leonardo.htm


1- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition, vol.6 p. 44
2- Jardine, Lisa (2003). The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man who Measured London. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 65. ISBN 0-00-714944-1.