Boyle · 1661
Robert Boyle and *The Sceptical Chymist*
In the spring of 1661, in the laboratory Robert Boyle had built behind the house of his sister Lady Ranelagh at Pall Mall in central London, Boyle, thirty-four years old, the seventh son of the Great Earl of Cork (Richard Boyle, the Anglo-Irish planter who had been the wealthiest man in Ireland at his 1643 death), former resident-experimenter at Oxford 1656–58 under the Cromwell government, founding member of the Royal Society (chartered in 1662, but operative as the Invisible College since 1645), completed the dialogue treatise *The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes, touching the Experiments whereby vulgar Spagyrists are wont to endeavour to evince their salt, sulphur and mercury, to be the true Principles of Things*, a octavo of about three hundred and eighty pages, published in London by F. Crooke in November 1661. The book, written in the dialogue form of four natural-philosophers in conversation, dismantled the Aristotelian four-element theory (earth, water, air, fire) and the Paracelsian three-principle theory (salt, sulphur, mercury) that had been the twin-foundation of European alchemy for two thousand years. In their place Boyle proposed the modern operational definition of a *chemical element*: a substance that cannot, by any laboratory technique then known, be reduced to a simpler form. The Sceptical Chymist is, by every careful judgment of the history-of-science (Marie Boas Hall, Lawrence Principe), the foundational text of modern Western chemistry.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of an unrecorded Thursday in March 1661, in the upstairs laboratory of the Pall Mall house of Lady Catherine Jones Ranelagh, on the north side of Pall Mall in central London, in candlelight off the laboratory bench. He is thirty-four years old. He is the Honourable Robert Boyle, born at Lismore Castle in County Waterford on the twenty-fifth of January 1627, seventh son of the Great Earl of Cork (Richard Boyle the Anglo-Irish planter, who at the 1643 death of the Earl was the wealthiest man in Ireland and from whom Robert inherited a £3,000 a year private income for life), schooled at Eton and on a Continental Grand Tour 1639–44, settled at Stalbridge in Dorset 1645–55, resident at Oxford 1656–68 under the Cromwell government (where he had built the Cross Hall laboratory at the Christ Church Oxford with Robert Hooke as his paid-laboratory-assistant), in London at his sister Ranelagh's house since the Cromwell death.
On the laboratory bench in front of him are the finished folio sheets of the Sceptical Chymist dialogue, three hundred and eighty quarto pages in his careful clerk's hand, ready for the printer Henry Hall at the Pall Mall printers' yard. The dialogue is in the classical Platonic form of four speakers: Carneades (the Boyle-spokesman, the sceptical natural-philosopher), Themistius (the Aristotelian); Philoponus (the Paracelsian alchemist); and Eleutherius (the impartial young friend who is the reader's proxy).
He thinks: the Aristotelian four-element theory (earth, water, air, fire) and the Paracelsian three-principle theory (salt, sulphur, mercury) have been the twin-foundation of European alchemy for two thousand years. The two theories have been, by my fifteen years of laboratory experiment, unable to predict the outcomes of any careful quantitative chemical operation I have run. The theories are, in plain reading, wrong.
He thinks: the replacement theory has to be operational. The replacement has to be: a chemical element is whatever substance the current laboratory technique cannot reduce to a simpler substance. The operational definition is the empirical-progressive definition that grows with the laboratory's capacity. The 1661 list of chemical elements is, by my Sceptical Chymist enumeration, about twenty substances: gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, mercury, iron, sulphur, carbon, antimony, arsenic, bismuth, zinc, platinum (not yet identified in 1661, but I will get to it). The list will, by the progressive advance of the laboratory, grow over the next two centuries. By 2025 the list is at one hundred and eighteen elements.
He thinks: the Royal Society is going through the Charter process this autumn. The Sceptical Chymist will be the Royal Society's founding methodological-statement. The Society will, on the Boyle-and-Hooke experimental-philosophy programme, conduct the empirical-quantitative-chemistry of the next two centuries.
Robert Boyle sent the folio sheets to Henry Hall the printer in late March 1661. The Sceptical Chymist was published in London by F. Crooke in November 1661 in a first edition of about a thousand copies. The Royal Society was chartered on the fifteenth of July 1662; Boyle was a founding fellow and was on the Council of the Society for the next twenty-eight years. The Boyle Law of gases (the inverse relationship between pressure and volume of a confined gas at constant temperature) was published by Boyle in the second edition of New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air in 1662.
Boyle continued as the English experimental philosopher of the Restoration generation. He published about forty further scientific works between 1661 and his 1691 death; he funded the Boyle Lectures (a bequest annuity that founded the Boyle Lectures on the relationship of religion and natural philosophy, still annually delivered at St Mary-le-Bow in London since 1692); and he funded the Algonquin Bible translation in Massachusetts (the first Bible printed in North America, by John Eliot at Cambridge Mass., 1663). He died at his sister Ranelagh's Pall Mall house on the thirty-first of December 1691, sixty-four years old. He is buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, central London (the original eighteenth-century church demolished and replaced 1722–26; the Boyle grave is, in the current eighteenth-century church, in the crypt with a bronze marker). The Royal Society's Boyle medal (instituted 2007 in his honour) is awarded annually to the British-Irish chemist of the year. The Boyle Law is on the secondary-school physics curriculum of every country in the world.