Episode Details

He coined the word "cell," helped rebuild London after the Great Fire, deduced fundamental gravitational principles before Newton, and has been called England's Leonardo da Vinci. Yet we do not know what Robert Hooke looked like: when his bitter rival Isaac Newton took over the Royal Society, Hooke's only portrait mysteriously vanished, leaving the centerpiece of the scientific revolution a faceless ghost.

This episode rescues him from the shadows: the sickly Isle of Wight boy who built a working wooden clock from memory, the servitor who cleaned rich students' rooms to attend Oxford, and the hands that built Boyle's air pump and possibly Boyle's law. It covers his brutal contract to invent a new experiment every week, the Micrographia drawings that stunned Europe, the opium-and-chronic-pain diary behind his curmudgeon reputation, and fossil insights that anticipated geology and extinction by two centuries.

• The wooden clock and the 40-pound inheritance: a genius nobody expected to survive infancy
• Boyle's law, Hooke's pump: how the patronage system assigned credit to the man paying the salary
• A new experiment every week: the curator job that kept the Royal Society alive
• The diary versus the myth: chronic pain, opium, and the human being behind the villain caricature
• The vanished portrait: Newton's takeover, the fossil heresy, and the faceless man holding the lens