Boyle, Robert 1627-91
Irish physicist and chemist

The seventh son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, he was born at Lismore Castle, Munster. He studied at Eton and travelled in Europe for six years. On his return, he settled on the family estates at Stalbridge, Dorset, and devoted himself to science. He was one of the first members of the anti-scholastic 'invisible college', an association of Oxford intellectuals opposed to the prevalent doctrines of scholasticism, which became the Royal Society in 1645. Settling at Oxford in 1654, with Robert Hooke as his assistant, he carried out experiments on air, vacuum, combustion and respiration. In 1661 he published his Sceptical Chymist, in which he criticized the current theories of matter and defined the chemical element as the practical limit of chemical analysis. In 1662 he arrived at Boyle's law, which states that the pressure and volume of gas are inversely proportional. He also researched the calcination of metals, properties of acids and alkalis, specific gravity, crystallography and refraction, and first prepared phosphorus. As a director of the East India Company (for which he had procured the Charter) he worked for the propagation of Christianity in the East, circulated at his own expense translations of the Scriptures, and by bequest founded the 'Boyle Lectures' in defence of Christianity. In 1668 he took up residence in London with his sister, Lady Ranelagh, and gave much of his time to the Royal Society. He was, surprisingly, an alchemist, but his alchemy was a logical outcome of his atomism. If every substance is merely a rearrangement of the same basic elements, transmutations should be possible. Modern atomic physics has proved him right.

Bibliography: Marie Boas, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (1968)