Hooke was the "techie" who could actually engineer and build many of the experiments in the Royal Society. As founding member, he was made "chief curator", responsible for producing the empirical demonstrations.
"Hooke who, as Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, was supposed "to furnish the Society every day [they met once a week] with three or four considerable experiments"
"The registers of the Royal Society testify to the eagerness with which Hooke hurried from one inquiry to another with brilliant but inconclusive results. Among those which early engaged his attention were the nature of the air, its function in respiration and combustion, specific weights, the law of falling bodies, the improvement of land-carriage and diving bells, methods of telegraphy and the relations of barometrical readings to changes in the weather. He measured the vibrations of a pendulum two hundred feet long attached to the steeple of St. Paul; invented a useful machine for cutting the teeth of watch-wheels; fixed the thermometer zero at freezing-point of water; and ascertained (in July I664) the number of vibrations corresponding to musical notes"
kind of like 2020.