Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [40]
There was real critical bite to those remarks, because Newton was, in an important sense, right. As a participant in the experimental philosophy he was bound to continue engaging with others. The conventions upheld by the Royal Societyplaced high value on integrating experiments into an endless sequence of conversations, readings, and writings. To that end the experiments themselves should be evident, witnessed, and repeated. Newton had come to disagree fundamentally with this. What mattered, he insisted, was "not number of Experiments, but weight." "Where one will do, what need of many?"25 By 1678-79 he had therefore arrived at a position that departed markedly from the Royal Society's conventions of experimental philosophy and from the practices of collective reading that they included. And when he retreated back to his Cambridge rooms, he devoted himself to other kinds ofreading. Alchemy and scriptural exegesis commanded his attention for the next years. As late as 1724, Newton remembered the moment well, and still defended it as a correct decision.26
But in fact what happened was, in the short term at least, a double withdrawal. For Hooke recoiled too. And it was his retreat, not Newton's, that carried the greater immediate peril for the experimental philosophy. The clash had helped precipitate the final erosion of Hooke's faith in the mechanism of the register and Oldenburg's Philosophical Transactions. He had found himself fighting on two fronts, as he sought to uphold his reputation against Newton while at the same time struggling to confirm his claim to a patent for a spring-watch design that might, if it worked, win him a fortune by solving the longitude. It was now that Hooke persuaded the Society's printer to circumvent the Society's licensing procedure in order to append an intemperate attack on Oldenburg to a Hooke lecture entitled Lamp as. He privately resolved never again to trust his discoveries to the secretary's "snares." Essentially, Hooke had convinced himself that Oldenburg was intent on expropriating for foreigners the designs of English inventors, particularly Hooke himself-and that the register and Transactions were really tools to this end. When Oldenburg suddenly died, he moved fast to confirm these suspicions. Hooke rifled his rooms searching for evidence of duplicity, and scoured the journal books in search of "omissions of things and names," drawing lines through empty spaces so that "there may be no new thing written therein." (That is, he wanted to ensure that in future nobody could interpolate reports of later discoveries into the minutes of earlier meetings so as to usurp his authorship.) The traces of this assiduity are still visible in the books today. He and his allies also had the secretary's role redefined, and the Philosophical Transactions rethought.27 All this was in aid of an authorship system that he thought had been profoundly corrupted. Even more than Newton, then, it was Hooke-with the possible exception of Oldenburg, the Society's one irreplaceable participant-who cast the perusal-registration-circulation system into doubt. It is a remarkable fact that the only member to be present week in and week out at the Society for decades distrusted so fiercely what is today our principal source of knowledge of what experimental philosophy was.
Yet in the end Hooke, unlike Newton, could not retreat for long. He remained the Society's curator of experiments, and had to return every week with new contributions. As he did so, he repeatedly reminded fellows of his priority in the discoveries claimed by correspondents. Hooke sometimes maintained that a lecture amounted to a publication for proving this point. His reputation became ever more that of the prickly, defensive claimant, liable to accuse anyone of usurping his originality, and to appeal to some long-forgotten