Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (35 page)

11
Science Under the Microscope: More Anglo–Dutch Misunderstandings

I
t was not only in matters concerning pendulum clocks and balance- spring watches that Christiaan Huygens interfered in the affairs of British scientific practitioners like Alexander Bruce and Robert Hooke. In this chapter I offer a further example of the way the story of scientific advance is altered once we recognise that a Dutchman, resident mostly in Paris, and an Englishman employed by the Royal Society, were effectively engaged in a long-range collaboration, in spite of the body of water, national ideologies and differences of temperament that separated them.

In this instance, the fortunes of a set of scientific ideas depend on the movement of a copy of a published book – Hooke’s
Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon
(1665). This reminds us that books moved around the Continent of Europe with a speed and efficiency that almost match those achieved by online booksellers today. In August 1655, for example, the antiquarian William Dugdale received a letter from Sir Edward Walker, Garter King of Arms and loyal servant of Charles II, exiled in Amsterdam. Walker congratulated Dugdale on his recently published antiquarian history book, a copy of which he had seen in the hands of a friend to whom Dugdale had sent a personal copy. In reply Dugdale wrote that ‘God be thanked that we have disposed of above 400 of these allready, (though it came out but in Easter Terme,) the one half whereof are gone beyond sea; but our money for them will not come in till ye next spring.’
¹

What this second example of Anglo–Dutch scientific interaction shows is the way our understanding of the trajectory of development in emerging science has tended to get deflected and sidetracked, because accounts of the scientific debate are overly preoccupied with the local communities – treated as enclosed and self-sufficient – in which those who played a leading role (in this case, the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens in Paris, and the Englishman Robert Hooke in London) worked at the time.

The end of this particular story also reminds us how political upheaval can dramatically alter the perceived importance of an individual’s work, and thus posterity’s opinion of its significance. At the Royal Society, the arrival of William III of Orange in England at the end of 1688 resulted in a significant reorganisation in every English institution, as we might expect when a foreign invasion is followed by long-term occupation. The result for the Society was a particularly dramatic version of ‘régime change’: the meteoric rise of figures hitherto of only middling importance within the institution, while others were swiftly and permanently marginalised, the significance of their scientific work downgraded and thenceforth diminished in importance in the historic records.

The design, manufacture and skilled use of microscopes, like that of clocks, developed very much in parallel, in the seventeenth century, in England and the United Provinces. To the Dutch goes the credit for initially perfecting a lens-based device which could provide a high level of magnification of objects too small to be appreciated using the naked eye.
²

There is a measure of consensus amongst historians of science that the Dutch use of magnifying lenses originated in the hands of painters involved in creating ‘lifelike’ representations of natural phenomena, particularly plants and insects. The names regularly associated with the meticulous rendering of detail only accessible with a microscope are Jacob de Gheyn II and Joris Hoefnagel. Intriguingly for the present story, both men and their families were closely associated with the Huygens family. Sir Constantijn Huygens’s mother was a Hoefnagel, and he himself took lessons in miniature painting with a Hoefnagel uncle. The de Gheyns were neighbours in The Hague, and the young Jacob de Gheyn III was Constantijn’s companion on his first diplomatic visit to London. Huygens himself took a keen early interest in microscopy in the 1620s.

In the 1670s and ’80s, both Christiaan Huygens and Constantijn Huygens junior became enthusiastic grinders of lenses for telescopes and microscopes, and practising microscopists. Both corresponded with and visited the famous Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek in Leiden. So it is hardly surprising to find the entire Huygens family captivated by the newly published English book with which Robert Hooke’s name and reputation are most lastingly associated,
Micrographia
.

Although Robert Hooke’s reputation as an experimentalist and instrument-maker was already considerable at home in England in the early 1660s, he became a figure of note in the Europe-wide community of virtuosi beyond the Royal Society, particularly that in the United Provinces, with the publication of
Micrographia
in January 1665. The sumptuously illustrated book established his reputation in the international scientific community virtually overnight.
³
Immediately it appeared, intellectuals across Europe began exchanging views on the book, and above all its magnificent engravings, in their correspondence.
⁴

The interest of Christiaan Huygens, still at this time domiciled in the family house at The Hague, was immediately aroused when his London- based Scottish friend Sir Robert Moray mentioned
Micrographia
to him – and the fact that it included information on lens-making (a topic Christiaan was particularly interested in) – in January, and promised to send him a copy shortly thereafter. Moray expressed his satisfaction with the book, one of the first publications licensed by the new Royal Society, but confessed that he had not had time to do more than glance at it himself.
⁵

On 26 February Moray dispatched a copy of
Micrographia
to The Hague with a covering letter, entrusting it to the English diplomat Sir William Davidson to deliver.
⁶
Because Huygens somehow missed Davidson, however, the book and letter did not reach him until 25 March. The following day he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Moray telling him that he had had no idea the book was of such consequence, and particularly praising the quality of the illustrations and engraving.

But before the book reached him and gained his immediate respect, Christiaan Huygens had unfortunately had some less flattering things to say about Hooke’s abilities in general, based on face-to-face encounters with the Curator of Experiments while Huygens was visiting London some years earlier. Between the dispatch and arrival of his copy of
Micrographia
, Christiaan had formed some superficial views on it based on selected extracts from the text sent to him by his father, Sir Constantijn Huygens, who happened to be in Paris on Stadholder business in February 1665 and had swiftly obtained a copy.
⁷
Christiaan had at this point not yet had sight of the vital accompanying engravings of a whole sequence of natural phenomena much-magnified, nor had he any idea that the illustrations were the glory of the entire publication.

Writing to his son, Sir Constantijn was full of praise for
Micrographia
. Christiaan, by contrast, basing his judgement on the selected extracts, expressed surprise at the ‘rashness’ of some of Hooke’s conjectures. Hooke was neither amiable, nor a good enough mathematician for his activities in any field to be taken seriously, he confided to his father: ‘Thanks for the extracts from Hooke [
Micrographia
]. I know him very well. He understands no geometry at all. He makes himself ridiculous by his boasting.’
⁸

In Paris, Sir Constantijn did not keep his scientist son’s doubts about
Micrographia
to himself. Among the French virtuosi who seized eagerly upon
Micrographia
was Adrien Auzout, a talented observational astronomer and instrument-maker whose name is associated with the development of the eyepiece micrometer for long telescopes. As soon as he heard about Hooke’s book, he arranged to borrow Sir Contantijn’s copy.
⁹
Shortly after Huygens senior had returned to Holland, Auzout wrote from Paris to Christiaan Huygens in The Hague: ‘A few days ago I received a letter from Monsieur de Zulichem [Sir Constantijn], who told me that you, like myself, had found a quantity of interesting things in Hooke’s book.’
¹⁰

Auzout’s interest in
Micrographia
and its author began a chain of events which had a lasting effect on Hooke’s long-term reputation, largely without his own intervention or even participation. It is important to note that right at the start, Auzout had been shown Christiaan’s less than generous letter to his father about
Micrographia
, expressing reservations about some of Hooke’s findings and claims.

Among the ‘quantity of interesting things’ which had caught Auzout’s attention in
Micrographia
were those parts of the text dealing with Hooke’s technological innovations in microscope manufacture, rather than the extraordinarily minute details of natural phenomena seen under the microscope and reproduced in the plates. A description of a machine for grinding accurate lenses, interpolated into the preface, particularly intrigued Auzout, since he was already involved in a critique of a similar machine advertised by Giuseppe Campani in Italy, and was himself proposing one to the circle of astronomers lobbying for the setting up of the new Royal Observatory in Paris.
¹¹

In the course of some passing remarks on telescopes in the preface to
Micrographia
, Hooke had been drawn into an aside on the need for readily available, high-quality lenses. The way of meeting this need, he went on, was to invent a ‘ready way’ (a machine) for making telescope object glasses. And he announced that he was in the process of refining such an ‘engine’, ‘by means of which, any Glasses, of what length soever, may be speedily made’.
¹²

In an elaboration of these remarks, marked off from the main body of the text by its distinctive typography, Hooke sets down the technical details of his machine, illustrating his remarks with an engraving on the first plate of the volume alongside the well-known images of Reeves’s microscope and scotoscope.
¹³

Auzout was a man on the make, eager to make a splash scientifically – in fact, he was trying hard to get himself made a member of the new French Académie des sciences (he succeeded in 1666, although he resigned from it in 1668). He read the preface to
Micrographia
in February 1665, and hurriedly inserted a critical response to it into a letter he had composed the previous year on the subject of the Italian Campani’s improved telescopes which he was preparing for publication.
¹⁴
The expanded version of his ‘Letter to the Abbé Charles’ appeared in print in Paris in April or May 1665, and Auzout immediately sent a copy of the pamphlet to Oldenburg, with whom he was already in correspondence concerning Campani’s observations of the 1664 comet.
¹⁵
Oldenburg produced a summary in English, including the criticisms of Hooke at length, and passed it to Hooke. Hooke responded with a letter to Oldenburg rebutting all Auzout’s criticisms, and this letter – preceded by Oldenburg’s English summary of Auzout’s published letter – was published in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
of 5 June 1665 as ‘Mr Hooke’s Answer to Monsieur Auzout’s Considerations, in a Letter to the Publisher of these Transactions’.
¹⁶

So now Hooke had a scientific ‘quarrel’ of a rather fashionable kind on his hands (intellectual quarrels in print were all the rage in London and Paris). The accusation which most exercised him at this stage was that he had not conducted proper trials of his lens-grinding machine, and that to have published an account of such an untried instrument, thereby claiming its priority, was unworthy of the Royal Society, given the Society’s commitment to experimental accuracy. As official Curator of Experiments, and having been admitted as a full Fellow of the Society only a year previously, Hooke was extremely anxious to clarify his position. He was quick to point out that there was a clear disclaimer placed prominently at the beginning of
Micrographia
, entirely dissociating the Royal Society from any ‘Conjectures and Quaeries’ of his own. Perhaps, he suggested, Auzout’s English had not been good enough to follow the text.
¹⁷

As it turned out, Hooke’s suspicion was entirely correct. Auzout responded in a letter to Oldenburg of 22 June. He admitted that his English was indeed poor, and that, besides, he had only had
Micrographia
in his possession for two days. Inevitably he had not read it all, particularly since the illustrations were so captivating, and drew his attention away from the text.
¹⁸

On 1 July Auzout wrote again, expressing the hope that this letter was with Oldenburg, and announcing his eager anticipation of meeting Wren, who was expected in Paris at any moment.
¹⁹

Auzout’s public accusation of premature publication was unjust. There is firm evidence that Hooke had conducted proper trials of his machine and was continuing to do so. On 3 November 1664 Oldenburg told Boyle: ‘Mr Hooke is now making his new instrument for grinding Glasses, the successe whereof you will shortly heare of.’
²⁰
By the end of November Moray was giving detailed descriptions of Hooke’s machine and the trials being conducted with it to Christiaan Huygens. On 30 January 1665 (just before he dispatched Huygens’s copy of
Micrographia
) Moray told him that Hooke was being prevented from conducting further trials on his lens- grinding machine by his duties as Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society:
²¹
‘Mr Hooke has had so many matters on his plate these past days that he has not been able to carry through to completion his new invention for the lenses for telescopes.’
²²