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THE ROYAL SOCIETY (1)

EVER SINCE HE ARRIVED IN LONDON, NEWTON HAD KEPT HIS DISTANCE from the Royal Society, the scientific institution through which he gained lasting fame. When asked why he did not become more involved, he claimed that his duties at the mint demanded all his
time. There were those who knew better, however. The real reason
Newton did not attend the meetings was an old grudge he had nursed ever since his reflecting telescope was carried to London
by his friend Isaac Barrow.

It was then that Robert Hooke, the curator of experiments for the Royal Society, had argued that he had developed a smaller and more accurate instrument. Hooke had also criticized Newton’s theory of light and claimed gravity as another of his mental inventions, causing a skeptical Edmond Halley to take the coach to Cambridge in hopes of settling the matter once and for all. And though they had engaged in an outwardly civil correspondence over the years, Newton hated Hooke, while Hooke wrote in his diary that he dreamed Newton had died.

At age sixty-eight, Robert Hooke, who was largely responsible for the breathtaking reconstruction of London after the Great
Fire, had been reduced to a shriveled, pain-racked husk. He no longer attended meetings of the Royal Society and was living what
one biographer termed “a dying life.” Nearly blind and bedridden, the man of a thousand ideas—some brilliant and some crackpot— died on March 3, 1703. Hooke left no will and his money, which he liked to keep handy, was found locked in an iron chest.

Six months later, the Fellows of the Royal Society assembled for the annual election of its twenty-one-member council and officers. When the ballots were counted, Isaac Newton, who had suddenly taken a renewed interest in the society’s affairs, was chosen president.

Taken From : Isaac Newton