How Robert Hooke Discovered The Cell

Hooke was an amazing guy. He was what we call a polymath. He could work on anything. People don't realise this guy, Robert Hooke, he redesigned London after the Great Fire, but they wouldn't accept his designs. He wanted a grid system like New York. This was back in the 1600s, and he was too advanced, so they actually rebuilt London on its old pattern of curved roads and everything. But he was an architect. He worked with Christopher Wren on redesigning and rebuilding London after the Great Fire. He worked with Robert Boyle. Do you remember Boyle's Law? Do people remember that, on gases and things? He was a chemist as well. But the important thing was, and in those days it was sort of an amateur science, he liked microscopes. So this is the kind of microscope Hooke worked on, and he just drew whatever he could see down a microscope. They were pretty crude instruments. We're much better off nowadays, as you'll see. But he drew fleas, he drew fly's heads, and people were actually saying, well, his microscope, he couldn't have seen all of that. There's a bit of imagination going on there. But the next one is even better, I think, the fly's head. These are the kind of things we see in Sunday Times magazines from scanning electron microscopes and everything. But if we have the next one, which is a much more simpler diagram, there's a piece of cork that he'd sectioned, and he saw all these structures in there that were around. Different people have different stories about this guy. Some say, well, he said that looked like the cells in honeycomb. Other people said he thought it looked like the cells that monks used in abbeys and things like that, where they used to go and pray. So he termed these structures cells. So that's where the word cell comes from. So Robert Hooke coined the term cell, and for microscopists, that was the key thing. And he published all these pictures in the first ever publication from the Royal Society, 350 years ago this year. So it's a 350-year anniversary of that micrographia magazine, if we go back a couple of slides. So this was 350 years ago. And actually, at that time, this was quite a revelation, because all his drawings, this was the first time society was seeing these tiny things. Yeah, he was miles ahead of his time, miles ahead.