Micrographia： turning the pages of Robert Hooke's masterpiece ｜ The Royal Society

Welcome to Summer Science Online. I am Louise-Anne Ferlier, the Digital Resources Manager in the Royal Society Collections and I'm delighted to share with you today the digital version of one of the treasures of the Royal Society Library. It is Micrographia by Robert Hooke which was published in 1665. It is really exciting because Micrographia remains today one of the most inspiring scientific books ever published and to me it is Robert Hooke's answer to the question what do you do when you see things that no one has ever seen before. With our digital reconstruction you are now able to turn the pages of our unique copy of Micrographia for yourself from home and I want to share five reasons to be inspired by Micrographia. First, it includes some of the most important scientific illustrations ever published. Although Hooke's writing really makes for a great read, it is clear that Micrographia was such a success because of the 38 illustrations included in the volume. Hooke had apprenticed with one of the most important painters of his time, Peter Lilly, and this along with his scientific precision explains why we get such amazing illustrations. Crucially, the size of the plates that he included in the book has a striking effect when you read it. This is why we chose not only to digitise the illustrations but place them back in their physical context within the book and as you're able to unfold the plates digitally yourself you can really recreate the experience of the reader discovering those illustrations for the first time. Let's take the louse for example. Here Hooke does something really cunning. He takes a very common pest and describes it in pretty frightening terms, as a creature which will never quiet until it draws blood, which is troubled at nothing, not even a man scratching his head, and which is so saucy, his word, not mine, that it occupies even a crowned head. As Micrographia is dedicated to King Charles II, I think that Hooke is being pretty daring here. So Hooke takes this tiny animal, describes in minute details how it sucks greedily on his own blood, but by describing this louse in pretty frightening terms. And then when turning the pages you expand this louse into a very large animal. I think you're trying to scare your public. So Hooke operates two changes of scale. The first with his new instrument, the microscope, which for the first time allows him to discover things that were so far invisible to the naked eye. And then he accentuates this first magnification by creating an illustration which is nearly twice the size of the rest of the book. And Micrographia is not a small book. Another famous example of this is his description of the flea. This time Hooke does the opposite than with the louse. And rather than scaring his public, he writes that the microscope demonstrates the beauty of the flea. He describes the flea as a little soldier writing that it is adorned with a curiously polished suit of fabled armour, neatly joined, beset with multitudes of sharp pins. This is a daring image as 1665, the year when Micrographia was published, is also the year when the human flea is responsible for spreading the great plague. So not only are those illustrations precise and skilful, but if you remember that no one had ever seen those creatures before, and if they read Hooke's pretty melodramatic setting for them, you can really imagine the effect that such large images could produce on the viewers. No wonder then that another fellow of the Royal Society, Samuel Pipps, describes Micrographia as the most ingenious book he has ever read in his life, and that he is said to have stayed up all night to stare at the images. My second reason is that Micrographia is a great way to understand the early days of experimental science. If you look at the way the book is constructed, you will quickly realise that it isn't divided into chapters as you would expect. Neither is it structured in laws and definitions like the other key scientific book of the 17th century, Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. Instead, it is structured into observations and interspersed with these wonderful illustrations. Another difference is that, as opposed to Newton's Principia, it isn't in Latin, but in English, making it an accessible read. The observations that structure the book are distinct experiments conducted by Robert Hooke and another famous fellow of the Royal Society, Sir Christopher Wren. Robert Hooke was the curator of experiment of the Royal Society, and in this capacity he was asked to bring new instruments, new experimentations, share and verify results with the men who were assembled at the Royal Society during its meetings. He used a new instrument that was developed specifically for him by instrument maker Christopher White, and for each of the observations he described the level of magnification that he used, how he prepared the specimens, and obviously what he saw. A famous example of this is his description of preparing the ant for observation 49, where he writes, this was a creature more troublesome to be drawn than any of the rest. The ant just does not want to lie calm in an actual posture. Hooke first uses glue to immobilise the ant's leg. That fails, and he ends up choosing to give it alcohol to keep it quiet. My third reason is that Micrographia is our best portrait of Robert Hooke. You've already seen from my first two points, Hooke at work as an experimental scientist, as a draftsman, and as a pretty entertaining scientific writer. Famously, despite his importance for the history of science and the Royal Society, there are no known portraits of Hooke. So in addition to all the manuscripts that we have in the archives that give us a pretty intimate portrait of Hooke, Micrographia is our best way to get to know him. One of the most striking things about Micrographia is that it isn't only composed of observations of insects, but is a real journey around our world. Hooke starts his narrative with man-made objects and closes it by turning from the microscope to the telescope to look at the surface of the moon. Of the man-made objects, a blade, a printed dot, the point of a needle, he shows us that changing the scale reveals obvious imperfections, whereas looking at mould or a flea through a microscope revealed beauty. This narrative is obviously constructed to make us change our outlook on the place of man within nature. Our constructions are imperfect, they're blunt, while nature provides us complex structures and wonderful images. So we get a good idea of his vision of the world, and Micrographia is also a self-portrait, because like many other scientists of his time, Hooke uses things that he finds around him and he literally put bits of himself through the pages. For instance, he uses a section of his hair and goes as far as tasting his own frozen urine. The least you can say is that his commitment to science was unflinching. My fourth reason is that it tells us a great deal about how the networks of science worked in the 17th century. At roughly the same time that Robert Hooke started experimenting with his microscope, Marcello Malpighi, a remarkable biologist, was observing microscopic anatomical structures in Bologna, and his Anatomy of Plants would be published by the Royal Society in 1679. The publication of Micrographia is also credited as the main influence on Anthony van Leeuwenhoek's decision to build his own microscope in Delft, and with his better instrument he made some of the most important discovery in cellular biology, observing microbes for the very first time. So Micrographia and Hooke are one part of a vibrant network of scientific exchanges that go far beyond London and far beyond England. My final and fifth point is that Micrographia still inspires scientists today. At another summer science, 10 years ago now, one of our fellows demonstrated a new generation of microscopic lenses known as the mesolens. Dr William Berracho Amos developed a giant microscope objective designed not for the human eye but for computer acquisition instead. The technical capabilities of the mesolens introduced yet another shift in our ability to see whole specimens with a resolution that had never been achieved before, and to demonstrate this wonderful new technology Dr Amos chose none other than the flea. We have to remember that Hooke's flea was an easy specimen to get. He had many fleas at the ready. Dr Amos on the other hand had to get a flea specimen from Dr William Foster of the Cambridge zoology department because the human flea has been on the decrease in the UK for decades, and we have to thank vacuum cleaners for that. Now why I take these examples is that if you put the two images side by side you can see how truly similar they are, and if you think about the effect of the scientific instrument on changing our vision and understanding of the very small, you can see how both technologies allow us to investigate our world in a new way. Finally as someone who is busy looking at science which is 100, 200, 300, 355 years old, I find it heartwarming to know that Dr Amos still teaches his students today about Hooke and his scientific methodology. So I hope that all that makes you want to discover micrographia for yourselves, and we can't wait to share with you more inspiring stories of science old and new. Thank you.