The Life of Dr. Robert Hooke.

"...watches of this kind; which (indeed he there says) were unsuccessful." Whether that was so or not, I cannot learn so many years later, though I am inclined to think that expression was born of anger, as the invention and principle used by Hooke and Huygens are the very same as those used today.

To this statement by Mr. Oldenburg, Mr. Hooke made his reply in a postscript to his Lampas. In response, Oldenburg printed a Philosophical Transactions No. 129, p. 749. declaration from the Council of the Royal Society to testify to his faithfulness in managing the Society’s correspondence. It is noteworthy, however, that there is no contradiction here to Hooke’s claim that he was the first to conceive of the invention.

It cannot be denied that Mr. Hooke was frequently urged to perfect his inventions regarding watches and timekeepers. Whenever pressed, he would promise to do so, and whenever someone else produced a new device, he would show something of his own—either the same thing or something better—proving he had attempted it before. For instance, when on August 9, 1666, Mr. Mercator showed the Society a watch of his own invention that represented the equation of time The difference between apparent solar time and mean solar time. to the approval of the company, Mr. Hooke simultaneously produced a new piece of clockwork of his own design to measure time exactly at sea and on land. He was asked to provide a description of it, which, although promised, was, I believe, never done.

It must be confessed that many of his inventions were never brought to their full potential or put into practice until some other person, whether a foreigner or a countryman of our own, cultivated the idea. When Hooke saw this, it prompted him to finish work that might otherwise have remained in its initial, defective state. I do not know if this mistake arose from the sheer volume of his business, which did not allow him enough time, or from the fertility of his invention, which hurried him onward in search of new amusements, leading him to neglect earlier discoveries once he was satisfied of their feasibility and certainty, even if they required some small detail to make their use more practical and general. Whatever the case in this specific instance, I believe it to be an undoubted truth that spiral springs were not generally applied to regulate watches until after this dispute with Huygens.

I have been particularly detailed in this matter so that I might, as far as I am able, attribute the invention to its true author, and I assume I have wronged no one. Those who require more on this subject may consult the Philosophical Transactions and Hooke’s own tracts in the places previously quoted. I have brought all that relates to this question together here so the reader may better understand the whole matter, even though I have thereby disrupted the chronological order of his life.

Returning from this digression—which I have enlarged upon for clarity—to Oxford, I find that in 1655 or 1656 there were many curious experiments, observations, and inquiries made, and instruments for those purposes were designed. Particularly the barometer, of which he says the first occasion for the invention was a suggestion by Sir Christopher Wren to determine whether the hypothesis of Des Cartes—which explained the tides by the pressure of the...