Tryalls and Tribulations
I’m transcribing the first half of the folio now, which is incredibly densely covered in tiny writing. It is taking a very long time…
Well, thats my moan over, lets move onto Hooke’s. Hooke usually refers to himself in the third person, adopting the formal style of the journal book that he is copying in this part of the folio. However, the section of notes taken in late 1668 and 1669 is annotated with several notes that express Hooke’s growing irritation with the Royal Society and his role within it. For example, on Feb. 11. he notes grumpily that ‘The Curator Absent a Comitte appointed for Expts. [which never did any thing] ‘.
In several places Hooke records what he sees as unreasonable obstructions to his theories. A cause of particular annoyance was the Society’s response to his attempt to prove that ‘a body once put into motion would move perpetually if it met w[th] noe resistance’, and that the decrease of motion was proportional to the resistance it met with. The first part of this argument would later be expressed in Newton’s first law: ‘An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force’. However, the Royal Society were unconvinced by Hooke’s arguments, as he notes, ‘insteed of hearing grounds & reason, experim[t] were always calld for. and all loaded with objections little to purpose]’.
This was particularly frustratring given that the perpetual motion of a body not acted on by force was not something that could be readily proved by experimentation. In his attempt to demonstrate this law, Hooke constructed first a simple experiment with two wooden balls. To demonstrate that resistance decreases motion, at the meeting of 12 November 1668, a trial of three balls, now known as a ‘Newton’s cradle’ was made:
‘either of the two extremes being Lett fall from a certaine height against the intermediat ball y[e] other extreme was impelled vpward to neer the same height that is the middle mouing very little of wch the Presid conceuid this the reason that the intermediat when struck by one of the Laterall found the Resistance of the other Laterall ball but this other Laterall met noe other resistance but that of y[e] air.’
A final complaint allows us to date the copying from the Journal Book to after 1672: next to his own proposition in October 1668 that rebounding did not arise from ’springy particles’ but from the amount of air contained within a body, Hooke notes ‘Wallis prsented this as his own. 1672′. Hooke was apparently particularly concerned with this period of his engagement with the Royal Society. In several places he makes notes to himself to cross-check entries copied from the Journal Book with entries in the Letter Book.
The best explanation for the copy and notes seems to be that the copies were intended to be incorporated in the record of his life’s achievements that Waller reported Hooke began in 1697. In the fragment copied by Waller, Hooke expresses his intention ‘to write the History of my own life, wherein I will comprize as many remarkable Passages, as I can now remember or collect out of suchg Memorials that I have kept in Writing or are in the registers of the ROYAL SOCIETY’.
Comments :
[…] The section at the end of Hooke’s list of page numbers from Vol. 4 also contains a date, 8 September 1694. This is three years before Waller claims that Hooke began to write his autobiography (mentioned in the previous post). Another reason that Hooke might have been scouring the Journal Books in 1694 was his on-going dispute with John Cutler over the non-payment over the salary he claimed was due to him for the Cutlerian lectures that he was supposed to deliver at Gresham College from around 1665-6 onwards. This dispute had been ongoing since the late 1670’s, but had taken a new turn with the death of John Cutler in 1693. The affair was then taken on by Cutler’s nephew, Edward Boulter, who had initially been forthcoming in response to Hooke’s demands for payment but . Although the Cutlerian lectures seem to have been conceived of as separate from the affairs of the Royal Society, Boulter’s defense of 1695 contended that he should be allowed to inspect the records of the Society to verify whether or not Hooke had performed the duties he claimed that he had. Although Boulter does not finally seem to have consulted the records to prove his case, it is likely that Hooke did: an entry in the Council Minutes of 20 June 1683 notes that Hooke was to be allowed access to the records of the Royal Society ‘on occasion of his business with John Cutler’. Mid-1693 would have been quite a feasible date for Hooke to begin making his copies from the Journal Books, a process which perhaps led him to reflect on the other injustices apparently done to his reputation in the official records of the Society and to begin to plan an autobiography to correct these apparent errors. […]