The Fellowship by John Gribbin

Author:John Gribbin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-06-17T21:00:00+00:00

6

The Man Who Made It Work

The founders of the Royal Society were mostly a remarkable group of men who had the enthusiasm and the connections that made it possible for the Society to get its start. But they all had other interests and careers to pursue alongside their interest in the fledgling society. The only founding Fellow who could be regarded as being anything like a full-time scientist was Robert Boyle – and even he had his duties and obligations as a member of the aristocracy to carry out, quite apart from the fact that in the early 1660s he was still based in Oxford. The early enthusiasm which led to the founding of the Society might well have faded away, and the Society with it, if it had not been for the indefatigable work of one man, Robert Hooke, who was recruited two years after the 28 November 1660 meeting, but did more over the next two decades than any other single person to make the Royal a truly scientific society. In the words of J. G. Crowther, ‘without Hooke the Society might have disintegrated’.

To see why, and to put Hooke’s contribution into perspective, we need to pick up the story of the Society itself, now that we have met its founders, after that inaugural meeting. The primary source of information is Thomas Sprat’s History, published in 1667. Sprat, as we have mentioned, was another of Wilkins’ protégés – he had gone up to Oxford in 1651, entering Wadham College two years after Christopher Wren; at the time he wrote his book he was a Fellow of Wadham, and although the History was his only significant contribution to the Royal, he went on to become a chaplain first to the Duke of Buckingham, then to Charles II, before ending up as Bishop of Rochester. Because of previous misunderstandings, it’s worth emphasizing just how official, and authoritative, Sprat’s History was.

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