Science
Which scientist coined the term 'cell' after looking at cork?
- Robert Hooke
- Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
- Carl Linnaeus
The answer is Robert Hooke. Hooke, in 1665.
Robert Hooke, in 1665, looking at a thin slice of cork through a microscope he had helped design. The little compartments reminded him of the cells monks lived in, so that is what he called them - and he was looking at empty boxes, the dead cell walls of plant tissue, rather than at anything alive.
His book Micrographia was a sensation. It contained enormous fold-out engravings of a flea, a louse and the compound eye of a fly, drawn by Hooke himself, and Samuel Pepys sat up until two in the morning reading it and called it the most ingenious book he had ever read. It is the moment the microscopic world became public rather than a curiosity in a few hands.
Hooke did an implausible amount and is remembered for very little of it. He proposed an inverse-square law of gravitation before Newton published, worked out the law of elasticity that carries his name, surveyed and rebuilt much of London after the Great Fire alongside Wren, and coined the word cell. He also quarrelled bitterly with Newton, who outlived him and became president of the Royal Society - and no portrait of Hooke survives, which some historians suspect is not entirely an accident.