Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [132]
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