Robert Hooke is better than you

Today marks 308 years since the death of Robert Hooke, whom I know of because of having to learn Hooke's Law for AS Physics. (The extension of a spring is proportional to the force or load applied to it, or F = ke if you were wondering.) ((I know you weren't.)) Anyway, I thought he was just that bloke who did that thing with bits of wire or whatever it was that I knew at one point but now I just vaguely recall was important somehow. But he totally wasn't! Robert Hooke did lots of things; and here's a lovely list of his top ten achievements, chosen by me:

1) Being the last of four children living on the Isle of Wight, Hooke obviously wasn't in a position to go very far in life - or so it seemed. He took 20 lessons on the organ, however, and gained a chorister's place at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was introduced to many of the leading scientific thinkers of his day.

2) Hooke was one of the very first people to use a microscope to see cells (in cork, apparently), and so gave them the name 'cell', because he believed that they resembled the small quarters monks lived in.

3) He invented the balance spring in a watch independently and fifteen years before anyone else did (though others get the credit mainly because he was didn't patent his design).

4) He was an extremely talented artist - the picture on the right is a copy of his drawing of a louse - who drew pictures of anything he could find to stick under his microscope. 

5) He built a lot of specialized equipment for himself and other prominent scientists of the day to use when experimenting, one of the most famous examples being his invention of the vacuum pumps Robert Boyle used during his gas law experiments.

6) He was a well-known architect of his day, with building all over London being made to his specifications (though sadly few survive today).

7) He also built some of the first telescopes, and used them to study the planets, becoming an expert on the rotations of Mars and Jupiter.

8) After the Great Fire of London, in 1666, Hooke was asked to be one of the city's official Surveyors, tasked with assessing the damage caused by the fire, and the cost of repairs - an important job, given that 70,000 of the city's 80,000 inhabitants had their homes at least partially destroyed.

9) He was one of the first people to put forward an argument for biological evolution from looking at fossils - a very risky argument in the seventeenth century, given the status of the church.

10) Hooke argued with Isaac Newton about laws of gravity. And not many people can say that.