Was Robert Hooke [1635 to 1703] our English Leonardo?

Like Da Vinci he was a fine artist, an accomplished architect and engineer; he even designed a prototype flying machine. Moreover for over twenty years as Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, he poured out a stream of brilliant concepts on [amongst others] universal gravity, evolution of species and atomic theory . he even anticipated the modern wave theory. Robert Hooke was one of the fathers of modern science and yet after his death, he was quite comprehensively written out of history; most scientists today only know of him for Hooke's Law and the rest of us - not at all!!

I came across this shadowy energetic genius quite accidentally and in the autumn of 2005, I decided - with trepidation - to write this play. Then serendipity, or was it Fate, struck: in January 2006: a man from Bonhams had been called to a Hampshire country house to make a valuation of various artefacts. Business completed, he was literally putting on his coat at the door when the owner of the residence casually handed him a bound copy of five hundred fragile papers that had apparently lain in a cupboard for some time. The manuscript was soon recognised to be the long lost notes of Robert Hooke. The owner of that house - to this day - remains anonymnous!

The auction took place on March 28th 2006. I was there. At least three overseas collectors were represented that day and Bonhams expected bids to go well over four million. Many feared that Robert Hooke's Folio would disappear from English history again.

So yes, when the news finally came, I was amongst those who cheered out loud and clapped.

Siobhán Nicholas.