When Michael Cooper set out in 2001 to find the remains of Robert Hooke, the greatest experimental scientist of the 17th century, he immediately ran into a problem. Hooke had been buried at the church of St Helen Bishopsgate in the City of London in 1703 – but by the time Cooper got there Hooke appeared to have vanished. In 1891, workmen restoring the floor of the nave had uncovered a jumble of crushed coffins, corpses and old bones. Work stopped. The remains were packed into crates and carted off to a new burial place at Wanstead, 10 kilometres away.
Cooper followed. But he found no trace of Hooke at Wanstead. As many as 1000 dead had lain under St Helen’s nave. Only 10 were identified and Hooke wasn’t one of them. All unclaimed bones were buried in a common grave. There was little prospect of finding his man there. Digging among the City of London archives proved more fruitful. There, Cooper exhumed a very different Hooke from the sick, crotchety old man of the history books. This Hooke was hugely energetic, easy to get along with, and did more than anyone else to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666.
THE worthies of the Royal Society were not pleased. Mr Hooke, the society’s Curator of Experiments, was supposed to demonstrate “three or four considerable experiments” each week for the edification of its members, but when they met on 17 June 1669 he had nothing at all to show them. Next week, they warned, he’d better come up with something good.
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Hooke wasn’t exactly a slacker. In the six years since the Royal Society had taken him on he had provided an amazing variety of experiments from every field of enquiry. He tackled the nature of light and gravity, magnetism, geology, astronomy and anatomy. He presented all manner of ingenious instruments of his own invention. And he already had a bestseller under his belt, the Micrographia, which described and illustrated all the wonderful things he saw under the microscope he had made himself. For the past 3 years, however, his mind had been occupied by other matters.
Since the Great Fire swept through the city in September 1666, he had spent six mornings a week striding among the ruins, staking out new roads, measuring foundations and settling disputes about who could build what and where. As surveyor to the ruined City of London, he was doing his utmost to ensure people would have their homes and businesses back as soon as possible. That week he simply ran out of time to prepare his experiments.
In recent years, Hooke’s reputation as the greatest experimental scientist of the age – a reputation that his great enemy Isaac Newton had destroyed – has gradually been restored. But Hooke the surveyor still languished in obscurity. The man who won most of the credit for reconstructing London was Christopher Wren. Wren was a great friend of Hooke’s. But unlike Hooke, he had a son to ensure no one forgot his achievements. When Michael Cooper, emeritus professor of engineering surveying at London’s City University, began to investigate Hooke’s role in rebuilding the capital he was astonished by what he discovered. “Hooke played a bigger part than anyone else and Wren couldn’t have done what he did without him,” he says.
What’s more, the thousands of papers dating from Hooke’s time as city surveyor painted an unfamiliar portrait. “For 300 years he has been generally thought of as misanthropic, reclusive and bitter, envious of the achievements of greater men,” says Cooper. But this Hooke was a human dynamo, brave, fair-minded and deeply sympathetic to those ruined by the fire. He could chat about a problem as easily with kings and courtiers as with brickies and carpenters. The man who fought with Newton was diplomacy itself, arbitrating in disputes between neighbours and with the city authorities.
Before the fire, London was a medieval city built mainly of wood, with narrow streets and buildings that flouted every regulation. “Other European cities had better civic buildings and monumental architecture. London was powerful but disgusting, a squalid huddle of warehouses, workshops and detritus with the odd grand building,” says Cooper. On 2 September 1666, the fire broke out. Four days later, it had done what any self-respecting city planner dreamed of doing: it had reduced about 80 per cent of the city to rubble. The fire destroyed some 13,000 houses, making as many as 80,000 people homeless. And it provided an opportunity to create a city fit to call itself the capital of a great European nation.
Even before the ashes had cooled, at least half a dozen people had put forward plans for a new city. For the king and his parliament it must have been tempting to go for a city of sweeping boulevards and wide piazzas. But they resisted. They couldn’t afford it. Nor could they afford to waste time. “Faced with such disaster it was possible that London as a major mercantile centre would disappear if they were slow or alienated portions of society. Business would leave London and go elsewhere,” says Cooper. Pragmatism won the day: the city would be rebuilt on much the same plan as before, but with some widened streets and buildings that conformed to strict new standards.
Six men were charged with getting the job done – Wren and two others representing the king and Parliament, and three for the city. To complement the king’s intellectuals the city chose a master bricklayer and a glazier – and Hooke, a man with no experience of building or architecture. But Hooke was both practical and an intellectual match for Wren: the city trusted him to look after its interests. Within weeks, the six were drawing up new building regulations. Wood was out, stone and brick were in. There would be no more crazy extensions overhanging the streets, no more fires and furnaces in cramped courtyards.
The following March, six months after the fire, Hooke and fellow city surveyor Peter Mills began staking out the new, wider streets. This was not just a question of trundling about with a cart of marker posts and driving one in at regular intervals. Wider streets sliced away part of the properties either side and the owners had to be compensated. Hooke measured how much each had lost and calculated who was to be paid what. It took less than 10 weeks. “Hooke had to be there on the spot to deal with the outcry and the objections,” says Cooper. Even then he fitted in some science. Striding about amid the rubble, he worked out a way to measure the radius of the Earth with the aid of a telescopic sight, three stakes and some simple geometry.
With the streets staked out, the next step was to get people back into their homes and businesses. Property owners were allowed to rebuild, but had to keep to the original foundations… if they could find them. For the next few years Hooke located, measured and staked out thousands of foundations before issuing each owner with the certificate they needed to start work. Inevitably, there were spats between neighbours over who owned what and Hooke had to act as arbiter as well as surveyor. “People had a lot of confidence in Hooke’s fairness,” says Cooper. Once building began, not everyone stuck to the rules. Again, Hooke investigated and reported back to the city. By late 1671, 95 per cent of private rebuilding was complete. And just 10 years after the fire, more than 80 per cent of London had been rebuilt.
But Hooke was more than a jobbing surveyor. He was in the thick of it when it came to laying new sewers and pipes to supply clean water, building public toilets, new wharfs and quays. Later, when it came to rebuilding the city’s churches, he and Wren worked as partners. Officially, Wren was chief architect but, says Cooper, “in some cases it’s hard to separate who did what”. It was Hooke, though, who saw to it that the churches were built according to the design they had agreed on, says Cooper. The dome of St Paul’s, Wren’s masterpiece, was based on Hooke’s idea that the best shape for a dome would be the same as the shape of a chain hanging freely from its ends, turned upside down.
Hooke’s bones may be lost, but he will soon have a memorial fit for a man of his genus. Later this year, a stone tablet will be laid in Westminster Abbey – within spitting distance of Isaac Newton.