Robert Hooke’s papers now online

The innovative “digital folio” provides unprecedented public access to hundreds of pages of manuscript notes and minutes kept by Robert Hooke. The remarkable collection contains Hooke’s minutes of early meetings of the Royal Society, taken while he was curator of experiments and then secretary of the national academy of science, between 1661 and 1692.

They record many of the scientist’s own experiments and others conducted by figures such as Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, as well as the disputes and rivalries that arose among the founding fathers of British science.

While most other Royal Society minutes from the period have been preserved in its archives, Hooke’s notes were thought to have been lost, most likely stolen. They were the only part of its records to be missing since it was established in 1660. Early last year, it emerged that the documents had been rediscovered in a cupboard at a house in Hampshire, and put up for auction. Though the Royal Society initially sought to have them returned as stolen, it eventually raised almost £1 million to buy them with a grant from the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s biggest biomedical science charity.

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Hooke’s papers