Description

HOOKE, Robert. Lampas: or, Descriptions of some Mechanical Improvements of Lamps & Waterpoises. Together with some other Physical and Mechanical Discoveries. London: Printed for J. Martyn, 1677.

FIRST EDITION OF HOOKE’S FOURTH CUTLER LECTURE. Hooke (1635-1703) made important contributions to a remarkable variety of fields. He was appointed curator of experiments to the Royal Society of London in 1662 and elected a fellow the following year. In 1664 John Cutler, a city merchant, founded the Cutlerian lectures for Hooke, who used them to announce many of his most important discoveries and inventions. 

“In his Cutlerian Lecture Lampas, delivered to the Royal Society in 1677, Hooke developed his ideas on combustion when he analysed the parts of a lamp or candle flame. He noticed that the point of combustion appeared to be at the bottom part of the conical flame, where the oil rising up the wick became excited by the heat above it. At a critical point, it was devoured by the aerial nitre, and produced the tulip-shaped inner flame, where the rising sulphurous particles or atoms made contact with the aerial nitre to produce a glowing combustive interface. He also realized that the interior of the flame did not emit light, but only the tulip-shaped, combustive interface around it. The interior consisted of heated but non-luminous sooty particles that had failed to go off, as it were, and simply rose as greasy smoke. It was within this dark, sooty interior that the non-light-emitting part of the wick lay, and Hooke noticed that when this spent wick fell over, and broke through the combustive interface, it glowed red, as it entered the aerial nitre that surrounded the flame” (Chapman, ‘England’s Leonardo,’ Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 67 (1996), 239-75).

“At least four men in England were actively engaged at this time in investigating combustion and exploring its analogy with respiration. It is impossible to distinguish satisfactorily the independent roles of Hooke, Boyle, Richard Lower, and John Mayow; and it is difficult to assess adequately their total work. Individuals in the group, and Hooke among them, have been hailed as precursors—virtually forestallers—of Lavoisier and the discovery of oxygen” (DSB).

“The latter part of the lecture [i.e., Lampas] is devoted to a refutation of Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and the ‘Hylarchick spirit’ which More invoked to account for various puzzling physical; phenomena. With satiric pleasantry Hooke contends that these phenomena are all ‘plainly and clearly performed by the common and known rules of Mechanicks’, and that ‘the learned Doctor’ ought to improve his physics” (Espinasse, Robert Hooke (1956), pp. 78-9). Lampas concludes with a postscript accusing Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, of being a “trafficker in intelligence.” For several years the two men had been mortal enemies. Hooke was convinced that Oldenburg had betrayed the secret of his spring-driven watch to Huygens. Hooke had revealed his invention in his third Cutler lecture ‘A Description of Helioscopes’ (1676), but it was couched in John Wilkin’s’ ‘Universal Character’, the new ‘international language’ which few understood. Hooke included a short account of the balance-spring watch (in ordinary language) in the present work as ‘A New Principle for Watches’ (pp. 43-4). Oldenberg died soon after the publication of Lampas, and Hooke replaced him as secretary of the Royal Society.

Small 4to, pp. [ii], 54 with 3 engraved plates on 2 folded sheets (dampstained throughout, heavily on the first few leaves, closed tear in first plate, no loss). Disbound. A fourth plate was added later to some copies, but our copy collates exactly as those digitized on Early English Books Online and Hathitrust, as well as the copies at Senate House (University of London), Wellcome, Trinity College Dublin, UC Berkeley, etc. The Norman copy of the Lectiones Cutlerianae (Norman 1099) lacked the fourth plate of Lampas.