Robert Hooke wasn’t the only person experimenting on springs. He wanted to be the first to find the law which governed their behavior, but he didn’t want to tell everyone else what he had discovered before he was ready to do so. His solution to this quandary? He published an anagram: ceiiinosssttuv then, when he finally went public, he rearranged these letters to make the Latin phrase: Ut tensio, sic vis which means: “As the extension increases, so does the force.” In this way, he was able to establish the priority of his claim to the discovery. This relationship is what we know today as Hooke’s law. Smart move, Robert Hooke!