Robert Hooke and the Cell: When Plants Revealed Their Structure
Robert Hooke and the Cell: When Plants Revealed Their Structure In 1665, Robert Hooke sliced a piece of cork. He placed the thin section under his...
In 1665, Robert Hooke sliced a piece of cork.
He placed the thin section under his microscope, looked through the lens, and saw something no one had described before.
The cork was not solid. It was made of tiny, hollow, walled compartments — repeating structures, packed together like the cells of a honeycomb.
He used that word. Cell.
It was the first time it had been applied to biology.
Micrographia
Hooke was a polymath — an architect, physicist, astronomer, and natural philosopher working in London in the years after the English Civil War.
In 1665 he published Micrographia — a volume of observations made through the microscope, accompanied by detailed engravings drawn by Hooke himself at a scale that had never been attempted.
A flea, magnified. A louse. A needle's point. A razor's edge. A fly's eye. A plant stem. Cork.
The book was a sensation. Samuel Pepys...
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