Lawrence Rooke

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Lawrence Rooke , also Laurence Rooke ( March 13, 1622 in Deptford - June 26, 1662 in London ) was an English astronomer and mathematician . He is counted among the co-founders of the Royal Society .

Rooke was born in Deptford and was the maternal great-nephew of Lancelot Andrewes . Later Rooke inherited an estate in Kent in his father's line.

academic career

Rooke's education began at Eton College and continued at King's College (Cambridge) , where he graduated with an MA in 1647. After he had to interrupt his academic career for a while due to illness, he became a fellow commoner at Wadham College in Oxford in 1650 . There he worked with John Wilkins , one of the later secretaries of the Royal Society, and Seth Ward , who at that time was already a member of the Oxford Philosophical Society (a predecessor organization of the Royal Society) and who would later be one of its founding members. Ward became a close friend of Rookes and arranged for a memorial to be erected after his death.

During his time at Oxford, Rooke assisted Boyle several times in his experiments. With Goddard , also from Deptford , he carried out experiments on the influence of heat radiation on a simple thermometer.

In 1652 Rooke was appointed professor of astronomy at Gresham College in London and in 1657 professor of geometry there.

Scientific contribution

Rooke's scientific interest is closely linked to one of the first major questions that the later Royal Society should also deal with: the question of a reliable method of determining the geographical longitude of a position (especially at sea) (see: Longitude problem ). He pursued the approach of determining astronomical constellations that could be predicted well over time, which would enable an exact determination of the time and thus also the geographical longitude. He therefore closely observed the fashion of Jupiter , discovered by Galileo in 1610 , which, due to its large number and rapid rotation around the planet, could have made a good "time standard". Due to technical inadequacies and the difficulty of precisely observing Jupiter's moons from ships, however, Rooke recognized this approach as impractical. However, he was of the opinion that the method of observing Jupiter's moons would be well suited to determine the length of cities and ports.

As an alternative, Rooke suggested using various eclipses or the distance of the moon as events for the precise determination of the time and thus also the length at sea.

His works remained unpublished during his lifetime, but his posthumous writings on the length problem and Jupiter's moons appeared posthumously. He also wrote a handout for seafarers on the implementation and documentation of measurements Meteorological and oceanographic observations in Volume 1 of the Philosophical Essays (Philosophical Transactions) entitled Directions for Sea-men, bound for far Voyages appeared.

Rooke and the Royal Society

View of Gresham Colleges before 1666 in its original location (now 25 Old Broad Street, London)

Around the middle of the 17th century there were at least two groups of "virtuosi" at Gresham College , who may have contributed directly or indirectly to the establishment of the Royal Society: The first was the so-called 1645 group, which was primarily concerned with experimental science busy. The second was the so-called Committee of the 12 , which conceived the establishment of the Royal Society from 1660 to 1662, implemented it and was finally given the three royal "charters" (1662, 1663 and 1669).

The Committee of the 12 met several times at Rooke's home in Gersham College. In particular, a meeting documented in written notes after a lecture by Christopher Wren at Gersham College on November 28, 1660 plays an essential role in the founding stories of the Royal Society, since it was there that the proposal for a "new college" was made for the first time which later developed into the Royal Society.

Since Rooke died in 1662 a month before the first royal charter was granted to the Royal Society, he is not counted among the "Original Fellows" (FRS) of the Royal Society.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b C. A. Ronan: Laurence Rooke (1622–1662). In: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. Volume 15, July 1960, pp. 113-118.
  2. ↑ Rooke, Lawrence . In: John Venn , John Archibald Venn (eds.): Alumni Cantabrigienses . A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part 1: From the earliest times to 1751 , volume 3 : Kaile-Ryves . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1924, pp. 485 ( venn.lib.cam.ac.uk Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  3. ^ A b Concise Dictionary of National Biography
  4. ↑ Andrew Pyle (Ed.): Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers . Thoemmes Continuum, Bristol, England 2000, ISBN 1-85506-704-8 , pp. 691 .
  5. ^ Robert Lomas: Mr Laurence Rooke . In: Freemasonry and the birth of modern science . Fair Winds Press, Gloucester, Mass. 2003, ISBN 1-59233-064-9 , pp. 42 ( books.google.de - reading sample).
  6. ↑ Christopher Hill , God's Englishman. (1972 edition), pp. 250-251.
  7. ↑ Lawrence Rooke: Directions for Sea-Men, Bound for Far Voyages . In: Royal Society of London (ed.): Phil. Trans. 1665–1666 . tape 1 . London January 1, 1666, p. 140–143 (English, rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org [PDF; accessed April 13, 2016]).
  8. ↑ gresham.ac.uk (PDF, p. 38).
  9. ^ Robert Moray: Letters of Sir Robert Moray to the Earl of Kincardine, 1657-73. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007, ISBN 978-0-7546-5497-1 , p. 36 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
personal data
SURNAME Rooke, Lawrence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rooke, Laurence
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English astronomer and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH March 13, 1622
PLACE OF BIRTH Deptford
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1662
Place of death London