Science WebQuests

Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was 26 years old when he took the assignment from Wren and joined the Royal Society For Scientists. A self-educated child prodigy, he showed technical aptitude by recreating the entire inner workings of a clock out of wood, then assembling it to run. Hooke also taught himself technical drawing, a skill he used to capture observations through his microscope.

​

Hooke applied his technical abilities to improve ways of controlling the height and angle of microscopes, as well as adjustments to the mechanisms of illumination. Variations in light allowed Hooke to see new detail, and he used multiple sources of illumination before producing any single drawing. Hooke's technical efforts created magnifications of 50x, enabling insight to a world not yet known in the 1600s.

​

In 1665, Hooke viewed a thin cutting of cork and discovered empty spaces contained by walls which he termed cells. When Hooke viewed a thin cutting of cork he discovered empty spaces contained by walls, and termed them pores, or cells. The term cells stuck and Hooke gained credit for discovering the building blocks of all life. Hooke calculated the number of cells in a cubic inch to be 1,259,712,000, and while he couldn't grasp the full effect of his discovery, he did at least appreciate the sheer number of these cells.