The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Inventive Life of Robert Hooke, - Tapa dura

The strange and eventful story of one of the great unsung heroes of modern science.Robert Hooke was one of the most inventive, versatile and prolific scientists of the late 17th Century, but for 300 years his reputation has been overshadowed by those of his two great contemporaries, his friend Sir Christopher Wren and his rival Sir Isaac Newton. If he isremembered today, it is as the author of a law of elasticity or as amisanthrope who accused Newton of stealing his ideas on gravity. Thisbook, the first life of Hooke for nearly fifty years, rescues itssubject from centuries of obscurity and misjudgement. It shows us Hookethe prolific inventor, the mechanic, the astronomer, the anatomist, the pioneer of geology, meteorology and microscopy, the precursor of Lavoisier and Darwin. It also gives us Hooke the architect of Bedlam andthe Monument, the supervisor of London's rebuilding after the Great Fire, the watchmaker, the consumer of prodigious quantities of medicines and purgatives, the candid diarist, the lover, the hoarder of money and secrets, the coffee house conversationalist. This is an absorbing study of a fascinating and unduly forgotten man.

Stephen Inwood is the son of a London taxi driver and has lived in London all his life. He completed a doctorate at Oxford at the age of 23. He was a lecturer in English and social and economic history for 20 years. He is author of the very highly acclaimed A History of London.