Who is Robert Hooke and What Did He Do

Robert Hooke, 1665

Hooke was a gifted scientist and a talented instrument maker. A founding member of the Royal Society, he made great strides in microscopy, astronomy and the theory of gravity. He made the world’s first microscope. The drawing shows the microscope he invented, while the photo shows a modern-day reconstruction of the same instrument. The glass ball is filled with water and used to focus candlelight onto the specimen. Hooke’s microscope was at the cutting edge of technology, with a magnification of 30 times.

Hooke’s Micrographia: a book of beautiful drawings by Hooke, showing what he saw with his microscope. Newton had a copy in which he noted down his own comments. A first edition copy of Hooke’s masterwork was sold for $52,500 in 2008.

Hooke was the first person to see cells, although he had no idea of their significance at the time. He happened to look at a very thin slice of cork (from a tree) and saw that it was made up of tiny compartments, which he called ‘cells’ (either after the cells made by bees, or after the little rooms or ‘cells’ in which monks live).

So this is all that was know about the cell in 1665: that it existed, as a tiny compartment, in cork.