Rediscovering Robert Hooke - Summer Science Exhibition 2006

The Hook Folio is 520 pages of original manuscript in the handwriting of Robert Hook. Robert Hook was a founder, original member of the Royal Society, although for the first two years he was an assistant to the members, became a member himself only in 1662. He was a great scientist in his own right, close friend of Christopher Wren, adversary of Newton. He invented Hook's Law, he published widely. He was between 1677 and 1683 the Secretary of the Royal Society and the Hook Folio is effectively all the papers dealing with his period as Secretary. We found that there is a huge gap of stubs like that which is where the... What's really endearing is that this volume is all the papers relating to Hook's time as of the Royal Society which he didn't file. So they are the kinds of things that we all find in our office, a stack of papers of great importance historically but which he should have put into the various volumes and filing systems of the Royal Society. Hook didn't do any of that, he bundled up these papers and when he died in 1703 they were removed from the Society. At the end of March this year, after a helter-skelter struggle to raise money from the public, the Wellcome Trust, the Fellows of the Royal Society, a million pounds was raised, the manuscript was bought at auction, returned to the Royal Society, snatched from under the noses of at least four collectors. So the minutes were continuous, there was just a gap left there for a few. First Hundred Pages will teach us a lot about Hook himself. They are Hook's obsessive transcriptions from Henry Oldenburg, his predecessors, rough notes in the Royal Society records as Hook indignantly tries to show himself, and I imagine he would ultimately have shown others, that he had been wronged by Oldenburg, that he had been deprived of the credit for inventions like the balance spring watch, various other important inventions, discoveries in microscopy, where he believed that due to Oldenburg's ill will and incompetence, he had not got the glory he deserved. The other half of the manuscript is 400 odd pages of Hook's rough drafts, minutes taken actually in the meetings of the Royal Society between the late 1677 and the end of 1683, when he was sacked. He was sacked as Secretary. Why? Because he was failing to get his minutes as taken in the meetings into the record books of the Society. So now what we have is the original minutes, which will help us fill in what are literally empty pages at various points through the transcribed records. You can go into the strong room of the Royal Society and find books with blank pages in. The contents of those blank pages are in the Hook folio.