The history
From twisted-sinew catapults to silicon springs in your phone, by way of a 1676 anagram.
People used springs for thousands of years before anyone asked how they behave. A restless English experimenter, trying to build a better watch, noticed that a spring's stretch keeps exact step with the pull, and hid the rule in an anagram. Over the next two centuries it grew from a rule about springs into a science of materials, and today it runs car suspensions, weighing scales and the tiny motion sensors inside phones.
1676
Hooke's law published as an anagram
Robert Hooke, England
1678
Hooke's law explained: ut tensio, sic vis
Robert Hooke, England
1675
Spiral balance spring watch
Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Thuret, France (priority disputed by Hooke)
c. 1770
Spring balance
Richard Salter, England
1979
Modern bungee jump
Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club, England
1991
Mass-produced MEMS accelerometer
Analog Devices, United States
400 BCE – 1659
People store energy in bows, catapults and beams long before anyone writes down how springy things behave.
340 BCE
c. 340 BCE
Greek engineers switched from bow-like catapults to torsion catapults, powered by tightly twisted bundles of sinew. An Athenian arsenal list from 338–326 BCE mentions 'springs of sinews'.
Why it mattered. People were storing energy in springs for war two thousand years before anyone wrote down how springs behave.
1638
In his last book, Two New Sciences, Galileo asked how much load a beam or rod can carry before it breaks, and how that depends on its size.
Why it mattered. It began the science of the strength of materials, the other half of the story Hooke's law starts.
1660 – 1700
Robert Hooke finds the rule while building watches, hides it in an anagram, and fights Huygens over the balance spring.
1660
While working on spring-driven watches, Hooke found that a spring's stretch grows in step with the load on it. He later wrote that he had known this since 1660, but kept it to himself.
Why it mattered. The rule was found by someone trying to make a better clock, not a theory of materials.
1675
Huygens designed a watch regulated by a spiral balance spring and patented a pocket watch. Hooke, who had experimented with spring-regulated watches in the 1660s, accused him of taking the idea, and a bitter priority fight followed.
Why it mattered. A balance swinging on a spring beats at a steady rate whatever its swing, because the spring obeys Hooke's law. Pocket watches became accurate enough to be useful.
1676
At the end of his book on helioscopes, Hooke printed a string of letters, ceiiinosssttuu, to 'fill the vacancy' of the page. It was an anagram: a way to claim a discovery without yet saying what it was.
Why it mattered. Scientists of the time used anagrams to prove they had an idea first while keeping it secret.
1678
In Lectures de Potentia Restitutiva, or Of Spring, Hooke gave the answer: ut tensio, sic vis. The force of any spring is in proportion to how far it is stretched. He showed it held for coiled springs, watch springs, wires and even wood.
Why it mattered. It is the first law of elasticity, and it is still exactly how we design springs, scales and structures.
1700 – 1899
Euler, Young and Cauchy turn a rule about springs into a science of materials, while spring balances and carriage springs spread.
1770
c. 1770
Salter made one of the first spring balances: a spring, a hook and a pointer against a scale. Because stretch is proportional to load, the marks could be evenly spaced.
Why it mattered. Hooke's law became an everyday measuring tool, still used in markets and for luggage.
1782
Riccati compared how stiff steel and brass are by making bars of each vibrate and timing their notes. He found steel about twice as stiff as brass, a ratio of 2.06 that still matches modern values, twenty-five years before Thomas Young's paper.
Why it mattered. Stiffness became something you could measure and compare, material by material.
1804
Elliott patented the elliptic leaf spring: curved strips of steel stacked into an oval under a carriage. Earlier carriages had hung from leather straps.
Why it mattered. Springy steel under the body became the standard way to smooth a ride, for carriages, trains and early cars.
1807
Young's Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy, from talks at the Royal Institution in 1801–1803, described a material's stiffness as a single number: stress divided by strain. His name stuck to it.
Why it mattered. Engineers could now say steel is about 200 GPa and rubber a tiny fraction of that, and design with it.
1822
30 September 1822
In a memoir read to the French Academy of Sciences, Cauchy defined stress: the forces acting across any surface inside a solid. He built the full theory of linear elasticity on it, Hooke's law in three dimensions.
Why it mattered. It is the maths behind every bridge, building and aircraft checked by engineers today.
1838
Richard Salter's nephews, trading as George Salter & Co., patented the spring balance. They also used spring balances on steam locomotives to hold safety valves shut, in place of dead weights that bounced.
Why it mattered. A calibrated spring held back a precise force, a job springs still do in valves everywhere.
1900 – today
Coil springs and dampers carry cars, bungee cords carry people, and microscopic silicon springs sense motion in every phone.
1906
1906–1909
French engineers patented hydraulic shock absorbers, which force oil through small holes. Houdaille's lever-arm design was widely used after the First World War.
Why it mattered. A spring alone keeps bouncing; a damper turns the bounce into heat. Every car and motorbike now pairs the two.
1934
GM put independent front suspension, sold as 'Knee-Action', across its car lines. Cadillac, Buick and Oldsmobile used big coil springs; Chevrolet and Pontiac used the Dubonnet system with coils in a sealed unit.
Why it mattered. Coil springs at each front wheel became the normal way to build a comfortable car.
1979
1 April 1979
Inspired by the land divers of Vanuatu, who jump from towers with vines tied to their ankles, club members jumped from the bridge on elastic cords. A. J. Hackett opened the first permanent commercial jump at the Kawarau Bridge in New Zealand in 1988.
Why it mattered. A bungee cord is a long, soft spring: it stores the whole fall's energy as ½ k x² and gives it back.
1986
The atomic force microscope drags a sharp tip on a tiny cantilever over a surface. The forces from single atoms bend the cantilever, and Hooke's law turns the bend into a force.
Why it mattered. Hooke's law became a way to see and weigh forces between individual atoms.
1991
The ADXL50 was the first mass-produced MEMS accelerometer: a microscopic mass on silicon springs, built into a chip. When a car crashes, the mass moves against its springs and the chip fires the airbag.
Why it mattered. The same tiny spring-and-mass idea now sits in phones, watches and game controllers.
2006
February 2006
A long-lost handwritten copy of Hooke's minutes of Royal Society meetings was found in a cupboard in a house in Hampshire. Many historians read it as tipping the old balance-spring dispute towards Hooke.
Why it mattered. Three centuries on, the argument over who invented the spring-regulated watch was still alive.
2007
9 January 2007
The first iPhone used a built-in accelerometer to turn its screen when you turned the phone. Inside, a speck of silicon hangs on springs finer than a hair.
Why it mattered. Billions of people now carry Hooke's law in their pockets.
Did you know?
Hooke's anagram ceiiinosssttuu unscrambles to ut tensio sic vis, 'as the extension, so the force'. Latin printers wrote v as u.
A steel bar obeys Hooke's law only up to about a tenth of a percent of stretch: 1 mm per metre.
A tuned high-E guitar string is stretched by only about 0.7 %, about 5 mm along its length.
A spring balance measures force, not mass: on the Moon, 6 kg of onions would read about 1 kg.
No authenticated portrait of Robert Hooke survives.
The people
1635 – 1703 · Experimenter, Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society · England
Found the law of springs, coined the word 'cell' and helped rebuild London after the Great Fire. No authenticated portrait of him survives.
1629 – 1695 · Physicist and astronomer · Netherlands
Built the first working watch regulated by a spiral balance spring, and the pendulum clock before it.
1707 – 1783 · Mathematician · Switzerland
Gave the idea of a material's own stiffness, and the maths of bending beams.
1709 – 1790 · Mathematician and physicist · Italy
Compared the stiffness of steel and brass from the notes of vibrating bars in 1782, decades before Thomas Young.
1773 – 1829 · Physician and physicist · England
Described the modulus that carries his name, and showed that light behaves as a wave.
1789 – 1857 · Mathematician · France
Defined stress inside a solid and built the theory of elasticity on Hooke's law.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
↑↓ move↵ open/ or ⌘K search anywhere