Lecture 4: "The Greatest Mechanick of this Present Age": Dr Robert Hooke and the Origins of Engineering Science in Oxford

"When his Oxford friend, John Aubrey, described Hooke as the "Greatest Mechanick" of the Age, he acknowledged Hooke's genius as an Experimentalist. For Hooke the whole of nature was a great machine or engine in motion, the deepest truths of which could be uncovered by means of ingeniously-contrived instruments. For in the 1650s, Oxford's "Ingeniosi" of the future Royal Society were beginning to revolutionise our sense of "natural knowledge" and coming to envisage ways of applying it to "the Relief of Man's Estate."