Discover Robert Hooke's Lost Manuscripts: The Hooke Folio Online

[Moridin]

British Royal Society has made The Hooke Folio available online.

The pages of the 17th century Hooke folio which were lost for centuries have been brought into the 21st century and will be available to everyone using state of the art digital page turning' technology.

The notes and minutes written by the world's first professional scientist - Robert Hooke are being launched online today at the Royal Society(1) the UK national academy of science (Monday 8 October). The papers were dramatically saved from auction last year, following payment of around £1 Million, and returned to their original home.

[...]

Professor Jardine commented: "Hooke's manuscripts give us an insight into the intellectual wonder and excitement during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Scientific knowledge and understanding was on the cusp of discovery and Science' in the modern sense was about to be born.

"The chance discovery of the Hooke folio completed the missing piece in the historical jigsaw puzzle - empty stubs were even left waiting in the binder of secretarial minutes in case the missing records were found."

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/news.asp?id=7178

You can actually flip through an interactive copy online

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/library/HookeTTP/hooke_broadband.htm

or read the entire thing, both from the scanned pages or regular HTML text.

http://webapps.qmul.ac.uk/cell/Hooke/Hooke.html

It happened almost 3 weeks ago, but it isn't exactly hot news for most people. I think making it available for the general public is great. It is an insight into the history of science that most people though where lost forever.

 

[Astronuc]

The notes and minutes written by the world's first professional scientist - Robert Hooke

Hold on there! There were professional scientists in China well before Marco Polo and Europeans showed up there.

For example - Shen Kuo (1031–1095) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Kuo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China

 

[Moridin]

Agree. Western science is so full of itself =).