Robert Hooke

Hooke, Robert (1635–1703), English experimental scientist and one of the greatest inventors of his age. Hooke entered his most creative period in 1662, when he became the Royal Society of London's first curator of experiments. He invented the compound microscope, the universal joint, the spiral spring for watches, and a type of telescope. His microscopic researches were published in the beautifully illustrated Micrographia (1665), a work that also introduced the term cell to biology. He is best remembered for Hooke's law (1678) that the deformation occurring in an elastic body under stress is proportional to the applied stress. He also theorized a precursor to Newton's law of universal gravitation.

See also: Microscope.