Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [124]
Sure enough, we learn that Lord Brouncker (President of the Royal Society) and Robert Hooke (Curator of Experiments) had both taken part in those trials ‘at sea, going as far as the Dunes’ on ‘one of his Majesties Pleasure-Boats’.57 And according to Hooke, they ‘experimentally found [the method of suspension] useless to that effect’, though Hooke claimed he could see ways to correct the deficiencies of Bruce’s ball-and-socket suspension arrangement.58 Both Hooke and Brouncker had experience working with precision timekeepers, and both had an interest in perfecting their use to determine longitude at sea.59 Both were now collaborating with Bruce (who, we recall, had impeccable connections on both sides of the Narrow Sea, in London and The Hague) in the hope of achieving a clock-based solution to the longitude problem.60
So by early 1663, Robert Hooke has joined the team of Dutch, Scottish and English clock experts collaborating in the development of precision longitude timekeepers. As he later insisted, he had been conducting experiments with clock design for several years; now that experience is funnelled into the Bruce–Huygens project.
As far as Huygens was concerned, Hooke was a background figure in the activities of the Royal Society, an experimentalist and instrument- maker, who was inclined to make exaggerated claims about his technical competence. Both Moray and Brouncker were well-informed amateurs, with a private and a professional interest in precision timekeepers (both owned state-of-the-art clocks and watches themselves, and knew how to look after them).61 For the purposes of the longitude-timekeeper developments and trials, Hooke was their expert technician, acting as adviser and consultant at the English end of design and testing, who fed his results into Moray and Brouncker’s dealings on this topic with the Royal Society (including Bruce and Huygens). Everything Hooke told Moray was directly communicated to Huygens; all Huygens’s comments were relayed back to the Royal Society. The fact that England and Holland were at war for much of this period was apparently irrelevant.62
This two-way investigative traffic between London and The Hague provides a context for the collection of scattered papers belonging to Hooke which are now in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. These are undated, but the first section seems to correspond to a period of ongoing discussions between Hooke, Brouncker and Moray (with some interventions by Wilkins and Boyle), preparatory to Hooke’s lodging a patent claim for a longitude clock of his own design on behalf of the Royal Society, during the period 1663–65.63 After Hooke’s death, his friend and executor Richard Waller claims to have seen the draft patent document in Moray’s hand among Hooke’s papers.64 We are now in a position to note that Moray was also the person who had drafted a competing patent on behalf of Bruce and Huygens for their longitude timekeepers, which was being negotiated at exactly the same time.
On 13 January 1664, ten months after Hooke had assisted at the trials of the Bruce–Huygens clocks and pronounced them unsatisfactory, Brouncker reported to the Royal Society that Hooke had ‘discovered’ to himself, Sir Robert Moray and Bishop John Wilkins (Hooke’s mentor, and a founder of the Society) in confidence ‘an invention which might prove very beneficial to England, and to the world’.65 The Society agreed to pay up to £10 for trials. Moray later described it as ‘an invention of his for measuring time at sea better than pendulum clocks can, and indeed as well as they do on land’, and told Huygens that Hooke had been working on it for some time. He had ‘given a proof [preuve] of it to the President, on a watch which I lent him’. However, Moray added that ‘having compared it to his own pendulum clock [the President]