In 1676 the Englishman Robert Hooke published, at the end of a book on helioscopes, instruments for observing the Sun, a list of discoveries he did not yet want to reveal. One of them read: $$\textit{ceiiinosssttuv}$$It was an anagram: the letters of a Latin sentence, shuffled and put in alphabetical order. It was a way of recording priority for a discovery without handing it to rivals. Two years later, in 1678, Hooke revealed the sentence: ut tensio, sic vis, “as the extension, so the force”. The more a spring is stretched, the harder it pulls back. Today we write it in four signs: