Wren and Hooke built it hollow, with a laboratory in the basement, so they could use it as a telescope and a pendulum
The Monument pub sits near the Monument, which everybody assumes is a memorial and which is also, in its bones, an experiment.
What Wren and Hooke actually built
The column commemorates the Great Fire, and it is two hundred and two feet high, and it stands two hundred and two feet from the bakery on Pudding Lane where the fire began.
That is the famous fact and it is true and it is not the interesting one.
The interesting one is that Robert Hooke – who designed it with Wren, and who was one of the most inventive scientific minds of the century – built it hollow, with a central shaft running the full height, and a laboratory in a chamber underneath.
Because he wanted to use it.
The three experiments
A zenith telescope. With a hinged lid at the top and a lens at the bottom, the shaft becomes a very long, very stable vertical instrument – and Hooke was trying to measure stellar parallax, which would have proved that the earth moves around the sun.
He did not manage it. The vibration from the traffic on Fish Street Hill was too great, and the instrument was not stable enough, and the parallax he was chasing is far smaller than anything he could have detected.
A pendulum. The shaft is long enough to hang an enormous one, and a long pendulum is the best available way to study gravity and the earth’s rotation.
And a barometric column, for atmospheric pressure experiments at height.
The steps in the spiral staircase are six inches high, precisely, so that they could be used for barometric measurement at exact intervals.
Nobody knows this
Several hundred thousand people climb it every year. There is a plaque. There is a ticket office.
And essentially every single one of them believes they are climbing a memorial, and none of them is aware that they are inside a failed telescope, walking up a calibrated barometric scale, past a locked door at the bottom that leads to a seventeenth-century laboratory.
The Prat’s scientific desk regards this as the single most impressive piece of dual-purpose public architecture in Europe and notes that the Corporation of London got a monument and Robert Hooke got a free instrument and both parties considered it an excellent arrangement.
The pub
Ten to thirty pounds, a 4.2 across fifteen hundred people, and a perfectly good City pub that fills at six and empties by nine.
Verdict
Good pub. Go, drink, and then climb the thing – three hundred and eleven steps – and know that you are inside a telescope that did not work, built by a man who was trying to prove the earth goes round the sun.
Hooke, briefly
He deserves better than he got.
He coined the word cell, having looked at cork through a microscope. He formulated the law of elasticity that still carries his name. He was Surveyor of the City after the Fire and personally supervised an enormous amount of the rebuilding. He worked on gravitation before Newton published, and said so, and Newton never forgave him.
There is no known portrait of him. Not one. It is widely suspected that Newton, as President of the Royal Society, saw to it.
The most inventive experimental mind of his century has no face.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
