Diminutive Giant

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
—Isaac Newton, 1676.

It is one of the best lines ever. Poetically self-effacing; triumphantly self-congratulating. Made famous by one of history's brightest minds. But the mighty mind behind the line may not have meant it. He certainly didn't invent it. Yet it endures.

The line springs from Lucan. Newton probably swiped it from Robert Burton, who, like the French philosopher Bernard of Chartres, must've dug first century Roman poetry. In its original, and its echoes, the line made mention of a pygmy. Newton dropped the reference. Probably because the man he was addressing was a dwarf.

Okay, maybe the man wasn't a dwarf exactly, just dwarfish. Stooped. Crooked. With a mid-to-large head, full-size limbs and a diminutive torso. Why Newton would knock the pygmy off a giant's shoulders when attempting to end a feud with a dwarf is anyone's guess. But I bet the backhand hurt Robert Hooke, the short guy on the tail end of the swipe.

A hardly hale fellow scientist rarely well met, Hooke was one of those peripheral players central to the role of any game. An instigator. A provocateur. High color. Whether Newton was being snide or sincere with his comment really doesn't matter—he got the last word. And we all know, he who gets the last word wins history.

The Forgotten GeniusBut Sir Isaac didn't count on a cat of the caliber of Stephen Inwood, who's The Forgotten Genius (MacAdam/Cage $28.50) sets out to right all the wrongs in Robert Hooke's strange life, a life that ended with a fortune at its feet.

Literally. Hooke died a penniless rich man, a poor, poor polymath with a speckled reputation and an uncertain legacy. Hooke also died covered in lice, but that wasn't so unusual in Restoration England.

Hark back to a time of bubonic plagues, Great Fires, and fallen kings. A time when levity and gravity shaded the same heavy picture. When Natural Philosophy was science, and science was not yet a norm. Or safe. Like when the much-noted thinker/tinkerer Francis Bacon stuffed a chicken with snow to see if it could be preserved, then caught a chill and died. That kinda time.

'Twas when The Royal Society of London, led by Robert Hooke, its Curator of Experiments, made the world turn on its cauliflower ear. Repeatedly.

It's a fascinating tale about a fascinating life in a fascinating era and, in an inadvertent nod to fellow Brit Nick Hornby's listful High Fidelity, Inwood uses persistent lists to make it even more fascinating.

Take the inventions: wheel barometers, refractometers, wild-oat hygrometers, arithmetical engines, 36 foot tall vertical telescopes, coiled spring watches, and every imaginable manner of Swing Swang. The studies: frozen urine, sage leaves, dogs' blood, deer hairs, 'petrified snow,' viper powder and tiny eels in vinegar. The sufferings: vertigo (or 'giddiness'), indigestion, flatulence, blockages of the nose and ears, occasional loss of the sense of taste and smell, headaches, heart palpitations, sore and watery eyes, noises in the head, fevers, chills and insomnia. The cures: mercury, flowers of sulphur, Andrew's Cordial, senna, stewed prunes, iron chloride ('tincture of steel'), sal ammoniac ('ammonium chloride') and, of course, laudanum, aka 'syrup of poppies.'

All attributable to one (might've been mad) man.

But don't think for a minute that our sickly scientist was full of nothing but questionable potions and fanciful notions. Hooke performed the first CPR (on a dog), established the rotation period of Mars, survived in a sealed and depressurized cask, beat Leibniz at a calculating machine, saw 'tadpoles' in semen, proposed the medicinal use of cannabis, built a new Bedlam and, with (and without) Christopher Wren, replaced just about every church lost in London's Fire. All between lecturing against Hevelius's observation methods and arguing with Newton about light and color and who first knew the inverse square law. Hooke also invented—and is perhaps best known for—the universal joint. Whatever the hell that is.

Did I mention Hooke was mocked by Shadwell (in The Virtuoso) and satirized by Swift (in Gulliver's Travels)?

Yep. He was one wild bird who never met a nest he didn't dissect.

Haphazard achievements aside, when it comes to Hooke v. Newton, Inwood's decidedly betting on the broke back. If Hooke's "a producer, a collector, a manipulator, a purveyor, a communicator and a user of knowledge," Newton, the rather arch nemesis, is "neurotic, self-centered, ambitious, intolerant, oversensitive, secretive, unforgiving and highly argumentative." To be fair, Inwood baits Hooke as more than a bit the boy who cries wolf, and hence lays much of the blame for loosing claim after claim squarely on the diminutive giant's shoulders. But Inwood's revising is not so much revisionist as it is allowing the facts (upon facts) to speak for themselves. Like a Pope star-crossed with a Dee and a Ruskin, Hooke's one of those rare English gentlemen who make history more than a mere collection of boring old facts. With luck, The Forgotten Genius will enable Hooke to make and stake his rightful place in history.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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