Micrographia: The Complete Facsimile of the First Printing of 1665

"Yes, this is a fascinating book. Robert Hooke was a really interesting bloke. He was born on the Isle of Wight. He had no money. His dad died and left him a little bit and then he went and got himself educated at Westminster School in London. Then he was hired by Robert Boyle as a sort of assistant. He was working with him mainly in Oxford. Then Boyle went to London and when the Royal Society was founded in 1660 Hooke was around and he was absolutely brilliant with his hands and very clever at the same time. He became curator of experiments. “When Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time he says that his publisher told him that every equation he left in would halve the number of readers, which is a bit of an exaggeration, but not far off.” He was a sociable bloke but a little bit irascible and he had a terrible row with Newton. But he remained a great friend of Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley and they used to go together to coffee shops every day. In 1665 he produced this extraordinary book. I have a facsimile edition here, not an original. It is big, about a foot high and nine inches wide. It is beautifully printed – there is all this old-fashioned type with the long S and so on and it contains lovely pictures. He was, luckily for us, a very good draftsman. And some of the drawings are just the same as the pages and some of them pull out to make a picture about two foot square. The most famous of all is this picture of a flea. He was almost the first person to use a microscope as a scientific instrument and he looked at things like fleas and drew wonderful pictures of them – and showed people a new world. Yes, and it is beautifully written and written in English. People before him had all written in Latin. Harvey had written about the circulation of the blood in Latin and Gilbert had written about magnetism in Latin, so to write in English was a big step forward. And Pepys said he sat up all night reading it, so that was lovely."

"This book is an oldie but goldie. It was the first scientific bestseller, as near as I can tell. There’s a quote from Samuel Pepys—who was an original fellow of the Royal Society—that he stayed up until two ‘o’ clock in the morning reading Hooke’s book. Incredibly, the book is still in print. There are, I believe, 54 illustrations in it. It was the first book that really showed the public what the world they could not see with their naked eye looked like. It was really amazing. “About 3000 minerals came to exist because of microbes, not just because of geology” The writing of the book is obviously stilted in modern English — it goes on in many digressions, as was the style in the seventeenth century. But the illustrations in the book were done by Hooke himself and are breathtaking for their incredible accuracy, even today. Hooke obviously could not anticipate the extent of the influence the book would have later. One of the things he did was cut a little, skinny piece of cork with a penknife. He put this under his microscope, which only magnified somewhere around maybe 20 times. He saw these tiny little chambers in the piece of cork and they reminded him of the types of rooms in which monks lived. So he called them “cells”. It was the first description of biological structure that is a cell. He did many other things. There were images of the eyes of fleas and the wings of flies. The book influenced a lot of thought about the microbial world in 1665. It was published very shortly after the Royal Society was established by charter by King Charles II — and was one of the first books that was ever published by the Royal Society. I never saw the original, I only saw a very good reproduction of it when I was working on my book at Harvard. I subsequently bought a paperback version of it. The illustrations aren’t quite as good, but you still get a good flavour of it. People started to realize — not just with Hooke, but also with Leeuwenhoek, who never wrote a book (he only wrote papers for the Royal Society, and essays) that there were these microscopic organisms, that Leeuwenhoek called at the time, ‘animalcules.’ These were organisms that were envisioned to have little mouths and little stomachs and look like miniature animals. They were very, very, small and many of them could swim. In fact, that’s how they were detected. People started to puzzle about the origins of life this way, because they wondered if you could spontaneously make these organisms without anything else? Leeuwenhoek put some peppercorns in water, and put them on a shelf. A few weeks later, the water was cloudy. He realized that there were these animalcules, which were bacteria, in the water. “People started to realize that there were these microscopic organisms, that Leeuwenhoek called at the time, ‘animalcules’” So people started to take on this concept of ‘spontaneous generation’ of life. That was obviously a misconception, but it at least led to testable hypotheses about what it is that allowed these organisms to reproduce, and to reproduce very quickly. They were discovered in our mouths and all over us and also in the soil and in all natural waters. It became very clear these microscopic organisms are just about everywhere on our planet, in our bodies and in our faeces. Their importance wasn’t really understood — and still is not completely understood — until the middle of the 19th century, when it was discovered by Koch and others that these organisms could cause disease, very bad diseases — like anthrax, for example. That’s really where the connection was to human mortality. Then the Dutch, in the late 19th/early 20th century, realized that some of these organisms could convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia and that they were also essential for the growth of plants. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"