One of the most brilliant men you’ve never heard of

As author Lisa Jardine notes in this fascinating biography, “The Curious Life of Robert Hooke,” her subject’s name does not have a familiar ring. When his name does appear, it is often in conjunction with his close friend and scientific colleague, Christopher Wren, whose life Jardine detailed in the 2002 biography “On a Grander Scale.”

Hooke was instrumental in rebuilding London’s churches after the Great Fire of 1666 (he was appointed chief surveyor), but he is rarely mentioned for his many achievements.

Instead, Jardine writes, he is remembered as “a boastful, cantankerous, physically misshapen know-all, who was somehow involved with the early Royal Society and was Sir Isaac Newton’s sworn enemy.”

Newton viewed Hooke as a troublesome rival and worked actively to stifle his reputation. Despite Hooke’s considerable input into Newton’s development of the laws of gravity, Newton refused to acknowledge him, Jardine writes.

Why has this brilliant English maverick faded from the public’s imagination?

The blame lies partly with him, the biographer says. Hooke had numerous accomplishments in cartography, engineering, architecture and scientific illustration, because he couldn’t settle on just one; as a result, “no single major discovery or monument (apart from the law of elasticity) is any longer securely attributed to him,” she writes.

Born in 1635, Hooke witnessed and was involved in significant events during his lifetime. He helped Wren design the famous dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Monument to the Fire, yet he never made a singular achievement to loft him beyond the footnotes of textbooks.

Undeterred, Jardine insists Hooke is worthy of admiration and affection.

“How does one convey the genius of a man whose versatility condemned him, in each field of his interest, to miss the mark by a whisker?” she writes, calling him a founding figure in Europe’s scientific revolution.

With this compelling and empathetic portrait, she succeeds in making a convincing case for his place in history.

Hooke was an undeniably dramatic, even tragic figure who was prone to mood swings and a nasty temper. He was a polymath who had trouble finishing the projects he started. (In 1697, a few years before he died, Hooke sat down to write his autobiography but apparently never got beyond the first paragraph.)

Yet he was always ambitious, intellectually curious and engaged with the world. Even as a boy, he began making precision instruments and detailed ship models.

Once, after closely examining a brass clock, he is said to have made a working clock entirely of wood.

Jardine explores how both his quarrels and friendships with London’s scientific community fueled his obsessions and experiments.

Throughout his life, Hooke designed and built an astonishing array of astronomical and navigational precision instruments, but in negotiating so many projects and obligations, he struggled to keep up with everything.

He also suffered from paranoia, chronic anxiety, insomnia and depression, the author writes. He was a man who self-medicated and, in later years, became addicted to his remedies. A slow, terrible decline in his mental and physical health followed.

Despite his failings, Jardine’s fondness for him is apparent throughout the book. Yet she is pragmatic: “Had Hooke been, in later life, a man of geniality and charm like Wren, he might, nevertheless, have achieved the acknowledgment ... he so craved. But Hooke was not such a man.”

She writes that “we all want a happy ending” but resigns herself to the fact that “without a great discovery ... no amount of careful research can give him the stature of one of history’s winners.”

Such candor is admirable in a biographer. Although Jardine is clearly protective of Hooke, she doesn’t elevate Hooke into something he is not.

Rather than cast her subject in the facile role of lovable, eccentric loser, Jardine takes a complex view, according Hooke the respect and dignity that eluded him for so long.