Search results
Jun 25, 2024 · Robert Hooke (born July 18 [July 28, New Style], 1635, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, England—died March 3, 1703, London) was an English physicist who discovered the law of elasticity, known as Hooke’s law, and who did research in a remarkable variety of fields.
- Hooke's Law
Hooke’s law, law of elasticity discovered by the English...
- Elasticity
elasticity, ability of a deformed material body to return to...
- Sir George Biddell Airy
Sir George Biddell Airy was an English scientist who was...
- The Discovery of Cells
Of the five microscopists, Robert Hooke was perhaps the most...
- Hooke's Law
- Overview
- The use of structure for classifying organisms
- Reorganization of groups of organisms
Of the five microscopists, Robert Hooke was perhaps the most intellectually preeminent. As curator of instruments at the Royal Society of London, he was in touch with all new scientific developments and exhibited interest in such disparate subjects as flying and the construction of clocks. In 1665 Hooke published his Micrographia, which was primarily a review of a series of observations that he had made while following the development and improvement of the microscope. Hooke described in detail the structure of feathers, the stinger of a bee, the radula, or “tongue,” of mollusks, and the foot of the fly. It is Hooke who coined the word cell; in a drawing of the microscopic structure of cork, he showed walls surrounding empty spaces and referred to the structures as cells. He described similar structures in the tissue of other trees and plants and discerned that in some tissues the cells were filled with a liquid while in others they were empty. He therefore supposed that the function of the cells was to transport substances through the plant.
Although the work of any of the classical microscopists seems to lack a definite objective, it should be remembered that these men embodied the concept that observation and experiment were of prime importance, that mere hypothetical, philosophical speculations were not sufficient. It is remarkable that so few men, working as individuals totally isolated from each other, should have recorded so many observations of such fundamental importance. The great significance of their work was that it revealed, for the first time, a world in which living organisms display an almost incredible complexity.
Two systematists of the 17th and 18th centuries were the English naturalist John Ray and the Swedish naturalist and explorer Carolus Linnaeus. Ray, who studied at Cambridge, was particularly interested in the work of the ancient compilers of herbals, especially those who had attempted to formulate some means of classification. Recognizing the need ...
Prior to Linnaeus, most taxonomists started their classification systems by dividing all the known organisms into large groups and then subdividing them into progressively smaller groups. Unlike his predecessors, Linnaeus began with the species, organizing them into larger groups or genera, and then arranging analogous genera to form families and related families to form orders and classes. Probably utilizing the earlier work of Grew and others, Linnaeus chose the structure of the reproductive organs of the flower as a basis for grouping the higher plants. Thus, he distinguished between plants with real flowers and seeds (phanerogams) and those lacking real flowers and seeds (cryptogams), subdividing the former into hermaphroditic (bisexual) and unisexual forms. For animals, following Ray’s work, Linnaeus relied upon teeth and toes as the basic characteristics of mammals; he used the shape of the beak as the basis for bird classification. Having demonstrated that a binomial classification system based on concise and accurate descriptions could be used for the grouping of organisms, Linnaeus established taxonomic biology as a discipline.
Later developments in classification were initiated by the French biologists Comte de Buffon, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Georges Cuvier, all of whom made lasting contributions to biological science, particularly in comparative studies. Subsequent systematists have been chiefly interested in the relationships between animals and have endeavoured to explain not only their similarities but also their differences in broad terms that encompass, in addition to structure, composition, function, genetics, evolution, and ecology.
Robert Hooke (28 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) The cover of Robert Hooke's Micrographia, published in 1665. In addition to illustrations of insects, snowflakes, and his famous slice of cork, he also described how to make a microscope like the one he used.
Jul 31, 2019 · Robert Hooke's rivalry with Newton condemned him to a forgotten place in history, but this English scientist was one of the most important researchers of his time.
Nov 21, 2023 · This diagram outlines the major discoveries that make up the creation of cell theory and highlights Robert Hooke's contribution.
- 4 min
May 14, 2018 · Not only did Hooke learn Latin, the staple of the secondary curriculum, together with Greek and a smattering of Hebrew; he also discovered mathematics. By his own account he devoured the first six books of Euclid in a week, and he proceeded to apply geometry to mechanics. Nor was mathematics all.
The cell was first discovered by Robert Hooke in 1665 using a microscope. The first cell theory is credited to the work of Theodor Schwann and Matthias Jakob Schleiden in the 1830s. In this theory the internal contents of cells were called protoplasm and described as a jelly-like substance, sometimes called living jelly.
