Robert Hooke was born in Freshwater, England on July 18, 1635. Since 1655, at the age of 20, worked with Robert Boyle in the construction of an air pump and five years later, he formulated the law of elasticity that bears his name.
This law establishes the direct proportional relationship between the stretch suffered by a solid body and the force applied to produce this stretch. In order to establish this law, Hooke applied his studies to the construction of watch components.
In 1662 he was appointed as head of the experimentation carried out by the Royal Society of London, where he was elected a member of the society the following year.
Two years later, in 1664, Hooke made a telescope of Gregory and he was able to discover the fifth star of the Trapezium in the constellation of Orion, also indicating for the first time that Jupiter rotates around its own axis.
Robert hooke had accurate comments regarding the planet Mars, which in the nineteenth century served a lot to determine its speed of rotation.
In 1665 he was appointed professor of geometry at Gresham College and published his work titled Micrographia, which includes studies and illustrations about the crystallographic structure of snowflakes.
On the other hand, he was in charge of starting discussions about the possibility of manufacturing artificial fibers through a process very similar to that followed by silkworms. But in general, all his research and studies on microscopic fossils made him one of the first promoters of the theory of the evolution of species.
Another of his great contributions came in 1666 when he suggested that the force of gravity could be determined through the pendulum movement and at the same time, he tried to demonstrate the elliptical path that the Earth describes around the sun.
In 1672 Hooke made the discovery of the phenomenon of light diffraction, being the pioneer also, in attributing to light a wave behavior, which served him a lot to explain this phenomenon.
Next to Boyle, designed a vacuum pump and invented the first barometer, hygrometer and anemometer, and was responsible for establishing the freezing point of water as a fixed reference on the thermometer.
On the other hand, highlighted their pre-evolutionist ideas, ensuring the existence of many extinct species, making great contributions to the physiology of respiration.
Thanks to his invention of universal joint used to this day in many motor vehicles, the iris diaphragm that can regulate the aperture of cameras and the spiral spring of watches.
The most outstanding thing is the elasticity law or Hooke’s law, where to date the elasticity of the springs can be calculated, extending to the study of the elasticity of deformable solids.
He died on March 3, 1703 in London at the age of 67.