Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [133]
As it turned out, Hooke’s suspicion was entirely correct. Auzout responded in a letter to Oldenburg of 22 June. He admitted that his English was indeed poor, and that, besides, he had only had Micrographia in his possession for two days. Inevitably he had not read it all, particularly since the illustrations were so captivating, and drew his attention away from the text.18
On 1 July Auzout wrote again, expressing the hope that this letter was with Oldenburg, and announcing his eager anticipation of meeting Wren, who was expected in Paris at any moment.19
Auzout’s public accusation of premature publication was unjust. There is firm evidence that Hooke had conducted proper trials of his machine and was continuing to do so. On 3 November 1664 Oldenburg told Boyle: ‘Mr Hooke is now making his new instrument for grinding Glasses, the successe whereof you will shortly heare of.’20 By the end of November Moray was giving detailed descriptions of Hooke’s machine and the trials being conducted with it to Christiaan Huygens. On 30 January 1665 (just before he dispatched Huygens’s copy of Micrographia) Moray told him that Hooke was being prevented from conducting further trials on his lens- grinding machine by his duties as Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society:21 ‘Mr Hooke has had so many matters on his plate these past days that he has not been able to carry through to completion his new invention for the lenses for telescopes.’22
By September Huygens was reporting to Auzout that there were problems with the operation of the ‘iron circle’ Hooke proposed using.23Again Moray admitted to Huygens that the demands the Royal Society was making on Hooke’s time were hampering his ability to complete projects undertaken:
We keep Mr Hooke so fully occupied with a thousand little things that he has not yet given me the description he promised me of his machine for measuring the refraction of light in water [a machine undertaken at the same time as the lens-grinding machine, and also announced and illustrated in Micrographia]. As soon as he does so I will forward it to you.24
The repeated claims that Hooke’s machine had never been tested were, as Hooke always insisted, entirely without foundation.
In fact, Auzout knew far more about Hooke’s lens-grinding machine than he was letting on in his letters to Oldenburg, even before the publication of Micrographia. Throughout the latter half of 1664 he had been receiving copies, at least in part, of the letters being exchanged about it between Huygens and Moray. The Anglo–Dutch connection had once again prepared the way, just as it had done in the case of the pendulum clocks. A vigorous correspondence in French between Moray and Huygens, who sometimes wrote to one another several times a week, ensured that whatever Hooke was doing in London, Huygens knew all about it within days. And whereas Moray was a scientific amateur, who enjoyed participating in events at the Royal Society but had little expertise in any specialism, Huygens was well able to pick up, adopt and adapt experimental details passed to him by Moray.
Huygens and Moray had begun corresponding about lens-making machines in summer 1664.25 Huygens reported to Moray Campani’s claim to have ‘a new way of making lenses using a lathe or turning device, and without using any kind of a mould’. Moray responded with the news that Hooke had shown such a machine to the Royal Society ‘five or six months earlier’, although it had yet to be demonstrated in action.26 Two months later he gave Huygens a much fuller account of the lens-grinding machine, presumably because by November he had had sight of the diagram and description given in Micrographia (licensed by the Society that month):
I think I told you earlier that a few months ago Mr Hooke proposed a sort of lathe for making the lenses for telescopes without using any form or mould. His invention is, to place the lens on the end of a rod which turns on two