Robert Boyle(1627–1691)

Robert Boyle was born at Lismore Castle on the river Blackwater in County Waterford on the twenty-fifth of January 1627, the seventh son and fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, the great Anglo-Irish magnate of the early Stuart period, and his second wife Catherine Fenton. He was sent away to Eton in 1635 at the age of eight, and from Eton in 1639 with his elder brother Francis on the long European tour that the children of the family undertook in their teens, under the care of the Genevan tutor Isaac Marcombes. He was at Florence in January 1642 when Galileo died, and read by candlelight in the months that followed Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in Marcombes's house; the encounter set the direction of the rest of his life.

He returned to England in 1644 to find his father dead and the Civil War on. He inherited the manor of Stalbridge in Dorset, his father's English estate, and lived there quietly through the late 1640s reading and writing. By 1649 he had built a small chemical laboratory in the house at Stalbridge. From 1654 he settled at Oxford, drawn by the circle of natural philosophers gathered round John Wilkins at Wadham College, the group that contemporaries called the Invisible College and that would become in 1660 the nucleus of the Royal Society. At Oxford he took on as his curator of experiments the young Robert Hooke, and the two of them, between 1657 and 1659, built and rebuilt the improved version of Otto von Guericke's air pump that became the central instrument of seventeenth-century experimental physics.

Boyle's first great book, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects, Made for the Most Part in a New Pneumatical Engine, appeared at Oxford in 1660. The second edition of 1662 contains in an appendix the experimental statement of the law now called Boyle's Law, that at a fixed temperature the volume of a quantity of gas varies inversely with the pressure on it, the first quantitative gas law in the history of chemistry. The same year, 1661, he published The Sceptical Chymist, the book that broke with the four-element theory of Aristotle and the three-principle theory of Paracelsus, and proposed in their place the modern operational definition of a chemical element as a substance that cannot be further decomposed by chemical analysis. Modern chemistry begins with that book.

He was a founding fellow of the Royal Society at its incorporation in July 1662, and through the 1660s and 1670s carried out an extraordinarily wide-ranging programme of experimental work on the calcination of metals, the colours of dyes, the freezing of liquids, the propagation of sound in vacuo, the medical properties of compounds, the chemistry of phosphorus and the early chemistry of combustion that pointed forward to Lavoisier's revolution a century later. He published in 1664 the Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, which set the experimental basis on which Newton would build the optics of 1672, and in 1666 the Hydrostatical Paradoxes, the founding text of experimental hydrostatics.

He moved in 1668 to London, to the house of his elder sister Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, in Pall Mall, and spent the last twenty-three years of his life there, much of it in poor health but at constant work; the laboratory adjoined the house and was visited by every philosopher of the new science who came to London. He declined the presidency of the Royal Society in 1680 on grounds of his refusal to take the required oath. He died at Pall Mall on the thirty-first of December 1691, a week after his sister, and was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields. He left in his will the endowment for the Boyle Lectures, the long-running London lecture series on the relation of natural philosophy and Christian faith that ran from 1692 and was revived in 2004. The Boyle name in modern science carries the weight of the two books of 1660 and 1661 from which the experimental method of chemistry descends.