In the 17th century, microscopes were custom creations, and Robert Hooke’s gave him a view into a world that few people had seen. A scientific polymath, Hooke had worked on the wave theory of light ...

In 1665, English scientist Robert Hooke published Micrographia, a book full of drawings depicting views through what was then a novel invention: the microscope. Peering at a slice of cork through a ...

Robert Hooke (1635-1703) is best known for his depiction of a flea as seen through his microscope, made scary through magnification: almost all body and little head, a giant apparatus for storing ...

Chroniclers of his time called him ‘despicable’, ‘mistrustful’ and ‘jealous’, and a rivalrous Isaac Newton might have had the only surviving portrait of him burnt, but, three centuries on, Robert ...