Hooke, orbital motion, and Newton's Principia

A detailed analysis is given of a 1685 graphical construction by Robert Hooke for the polygonal path of a body moving in a periodically pulsed radial field of force. In this example the force varies linearly with the distance from the center. Hooke's method is based directly on his original idea from the mid-1660s that the orbital motion of a planet is determined by compounding its tangential velocity with a radial velocity impressed by the gravitational attraction of the sun at the center. This hypothesis corresponds to the second law of motion, as formulated two decades later by Newton, and its geometrical implementation constitutes the cornerstone of Newton's Principia. Hooke's diagram represents the first known accurate graphical evaluation of an orbit in a central field of force, and it gives evidence that he demonstrated that his resulting discrete orbit is an approximate ellipse centered at the origin of the field of force. A comparable calculation to obtain orbits for an inverse square force, which Hooke had conjectured to be the gravitational force, has not been found among his unpublished papers. Such a calculation is carried out here numerically with the Newton-Hooke geometrical construction. It is shown that for orbits of comparable or larger eccentricity than Hooke's example, a graphical approach runs into convergence difficulties due to the singularity of the gravitational force at the origin. This may help resolve the long-standing mystery why Hooke never published his controversial claim that he had demonstrated that an attractive force, which is ``...in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall...'' implies elliptic orbits.