Robert Hooke said he would endow the Royal Society, died without a will, and cousins he barely knew took the money

Robert Hooke was curator of experiments at the Royal Society and a professor at Gresham College. After the Great Fire of 1666 he became one of three official surveyors for rebuilding London, the best-paid work of his life. He quarrelled with Isaac Newton over credit for the inverse square law of gravitation, and neither man forgave the other. In his last years Hooke said he would leave most of his estate to give the Royal Society a proper home, with a laboratory, library, repository and endowed lectures. He kept putting it off. A draft will was found in modern times, but it was not legally valid. He died on 3 March 1703 without a valid will. In his rooms was a chest, unopened for about thirty years, holding several thousand pounds. The estate passed to Elizabeth Stephens, probably a paternal cousin, her daughter Mary and a maternal cousin, Ann Hollis. Mary and Joseph Dillon later took over the administration. Lawsuits over the estate followed, and their outcome is not known. Booksellers inventoried his library for auction. No portrait of Hooke survives. His papers scattered. His autograph copy of the Royal Society's minutes, the Hooke Folio, turned up at Moor Hall in Essex in 2005 and is now Royal Society manuscript 847. He lies in an unmarked grave at St Helen's, Bishopsgate.