Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [125]
On 18 January 1665, it was announced at the Royal Society meeting that Hooke was ready to apply for a patent for his longitude timekeeper.67 At the meeting in question doubts had been expressed as to how satisfactorily the Bruce–Huygens clocks had performed during lengthy trials to Guinea and back (I will return to these trials shortly). The Society had backed the Guinea trials heavily, and staked a lot on their success; now Hooke offered them an alternative timekeeper.
Hooke’s first biographer, Richard Waller, has preserved a fragment of a memoir by Hooke himself, describing what happened next:
I shew’d a Pocket-watch, accommodated by a Spring, apply’d to the Arbor of the Ballance to regulate the motion thereof; concealing the way I had for finding the Longitude; this was so well approv’d of, that Sir Robert Moray drew me up the form of a Patent, the principal part whereof, viz. the description of the Watch, so regulated, is his own hand Writing, which I have yet by me.68
Waller goes on to confirm Hooke’s statement on the strength of original documents then in his possession, shortly after Hooke’s death:
In confirmation of what is abovesaid, I met with a Draught of an Agreement between the Lord Brouncker, Mr. Boyle, and Sir Robert Moray, with Robert Hooke Master of Arts to this purpose, that Robert Hooke should discover to them the whole of his Invention to measure the parts of Time at Sea as exactly and truly as they are at Land by the Pendulum Clocks invented by Monsieur Huygens […] as also of a Warrant to be granted by the King to Robert Hooke, M.A. &c. for a Patent for the sole use of the said Invention for fourteen Years, and sign’d by his Majesty’s Command, William Morrice.69
This last document surfaced briefly at auction some years ago, only to disappear again to a private buyer.70 It clearly confirms all the key points from Waller’s account: it describes (in Hooke’s hand, inserted into a document largely in Morrice’s) a spring-regulated longitude timekeeper, ‘different from all other watches or clockes by hauing instead of a Ballance a Spring of mettall/wood/quill/bone/glass or other fit matter so aplied to the Arbor of the Ballance that it makes it moue alwise equally’; it is signed by William Morrice in his capacity as Secretary of State, a position he held until September 1668; and it also invokes the names of Sir Geoffrey Palmer ‘Attorney Generall’ and Sir Heneage Finch ‘Solicitor Generall’ (both men left these posts before 1670). It allows us to say with reasonable confidence therefore, though sadly without the evidence before us, that Hooke had indeed come close to applying for such a patent, in direct response to the Bruce–Huygens pendulum-clock-based attempts at a longitude timekeeper, during the first half of 1665.
There is no doubt that Hooke’s idea of using springs as isochronous regulators in place of pendulums was transmitted to Huygens by both Moray and Oldenburg. On 30 September 1665, for example, the very day on which Moray told Huygens in a letter that Hooke had demonstrated a spring-regulated clock or watch to himself and Lord Brouncker two years earlier, Moray wrote to Oldenburg, in a letter, now lost, that Waller saw:
You will be the first that knows when his [Huygens’s] Watches will be ready, and I will therefore expect from you an account of them, and if he imparts to you what he does, let me know it; to that purpose you may ask him if he doth not apply a Spring to the Arbor of the Ballance, and that will give occasion to say somewhat to you; if it be that, you may tell him what Hooke has done in that matter, and what he intends more.71
Hooke’s not-so-confidential negotiations with Brouncker, Moray and Wilkins to obtain a patent on behalf of the Royal Society for Hooke’s longitude