Please send all replies to Lyn Haynes, email [log in to unmask] 

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Subject: Re: Request re Hooke folio & Royal Society

As you may be aware, the Wellcome Trust funded the major portion of the purchase of the recently rediscovered Hooke Folio (spanning Royal Society activities 1661-1691) in December 2005 and auctioned in February this year. Please see the appendix below for a summary of its contents. 
  
One of the conditions established was that this folio be used for education audiences. I have just been contracted by The Royal Society to make recommendations to develop the Hooke folio for an education audience. This is a short contract, the final report being due on 12th January 2007. Having recently left the classroom after many years as a head of science and science teacher (KS2-5) I do have a thorough understanding and appreciation of the curriculum, its demands and opportunities. 

Essentially I would like interested parties to contact me with any specific ideas or wishes for bringing aspects of the Hooke folio into their teaching curriculum.

For example: I see potential for use of some of the Hooke material in the A/S Level Perspectives on Science; How Science Works at KS3, 4 and 5 offer other exciting potential for including material from this period. Personally I see an invaluable niche at KS2 for integrated cross-curricula work.

While my remit for delivery to an educational audience concentrates on 5-19, I have been asked to include thinking that would include the general public.  My recommended emphasis will be on low cost to free access to the folio and/or materials developed.

The recommendations that I put forward will be taken up and decided upon by the Royal Society e.g. in preparations for the Royal Society's 350th anniversary in 2010.

 Yours sincerely
Lyn Haynes, 
[log in to unmask]  0790 370 1752

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Appendix - The cultural significance of the Hooke Folio 

The Hooke Folio is a unique addition to our understanding of the History of Science, and the formative role played by the Royal Society. Although its impact on the History of Science and scholarship will be immense, it is also a public-friendly object whose lively connection with the richly varied (and sometimes peculiar) activities of the early Society can be used to excite the interest and imagination of those of all ages.

Robert Hooke was an outstanding hands-on experimentalist, observational astronomer and microscopist, an engineer and instrument-maker. He was the first Curator of the newly-established Royal Society, and the indefatigable surveyor responsible for laying out the street-plan of the City of London after the Great Fire. He discovered Hooke's Law and designed the universal joint still known by his name. He was Christopher Wren's close friend and Isaac Newton's great enemy.

The Hooke Folio consists of two bodies of original manuscript materials, both in Hooke's distinctive hand. The first hundred pages comprise detailed notes taken by Hooke following the death of the first Secretary of the Society, Henry Oldenburg. Convinced that Oldenburg had actively hindered Hooke's attempts to gain international acknowledgement of his contributions to key scientific fields - notably precision timekeeper development and isochronous regulators - Hooke trawled through the Society's Journal Books (records of meetings) transcribing evidence which he believed would prove his priority in such matters as the use of a spring to regulate a pocket-watch, and his innovative experimental work in microscopy. Drawing on both Oldenburg's rough notes and the fair copies of minutes of meetings, Hooke annotated his transcriptions of large sections with his views of what he found in the records. This portion of the Hooke folio conveys the excitement of day-to-day activities at the Society, as well as the intensely personal and emotional involvement of Hooke himself. It is a vivid and dramatic rendering of the early Royal Society, and gives a brilliant picture of one distinguished Fellow's engagement with the diverse scientific interests of his age. It undoubtedly sharpens and focuses our view both of Hooke and the Society of his day.

The other four hundred or more pages are Hooke's own rough notes of meetings of the Society for the period 1678-82 when he himself was Secretary. At a number of crucial points these are fuller and more detailed than the official transcriptions into the Journal Books by the scribes whose job it was to produce a tidy account for the record. At least one long passage relating to the microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of protozoa in pepper-water is missing entirely from the 'official' records, and further discrepancies will certainly be found when the manuscript is more closely studied.

Although some of this material on the early Society could be accessed by students, schoolteachers and members of the general public through existing printed sources, the discovery of this lost, hand-written version provides an almost theatrical, vivid physical reminder of our early scientific history. It has already captured the public imagination. Email inquiries about the Folio have come from all over the world, and from all types of correspondent, to both the Royal Society and the scholars who have been helping to raise awareness of its significance. We know that the press coverage has been used by teachers at Key Stages 3 and 4 to galvanise an interest in the birth of physics and chemistry, and that students have been fired with excitement.
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