Rough Trade
Steven Shapin: Robert Hooke, 6 March 2003
The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke 1635-1703
by Stephen Inwood.
Macmillan, 497 pp., £18.99, September 2002,0 333 78286 0 Show More
by Stephen Inwood.
Macmillan, 497 pp., £18.99, September 2002,
“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ... ”