ROBERT BOYLE 1627 – 1691

Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle put chemistry on a firm scientific footing, transforming it from a field bogged down in alchemy and mysticism into one based on measurement. He defined elements, compounds, and mixtures, and he coined the new term chemical analysis in a field which he made several powerful contributions. He discovered Boyle's law, the first of the gas laws, relating the pressure of a gas and its volume. He established that electrical forces are transmitted through a vacuum, but sound is not, and he also stated that the movement of particles is responsible for heat. He was the first person to write specific experimental guidance for other scientists, telling them the importance of achieving reliable, repeatable results. Robert Boyle was born into an aristocratic family on January 25th, 1627 in Lismore Castle, in the small town of Lismore, Ireland. His father was Richard Boyle, who had arrived from England in 1588 with a modest sum of money. Through a good marriage and a high level of business acumen, he had grown immensely wealthy and became the large-scale land owner. With land ownership came the aristocratic title of Earl of Cork. The land he bought had been confiscated from rebellious Irish noblemen and commoners by the army of Queen Elizabeth I of England, who was also the Queen of Ireland. Robert's mother was Catherine Fenton, born in Ireland to a wealthy English family. Her father became Secretary of State in Ireland. Robert was his parents' fourteenth child, and in his infancy, he was sent to live with a poor Irish family. His father preferred his children to spend their early years this way, believing it toughened them up. Robert developed a stutter in this time. Robert's mother died when he was just two years old, and he never knew her. Sometime after his mother's death, he returned to the family home, where he was tutored in French and Latin. He particularly enjoyed learning French. At the age of eight, Robert was sent to England's most prestigious private school, Eton College. He spent three years there. At age twelve, he embarked on a lengthy tour to Europe with his older brother Francis and a tutor. This grand tour was a traditional part of many wealthy people's education, often including visits to the great classical sites of Italy and Greece. In fact, Robert spent much of his time in the Swiss city of Geneva. At age fourteen, he traveled to Italy, where he learned how Galileo Galilei had used mathematics to explain motion. Robert was thrilled by this and began studying Galileo's work, presumably smuggled in from Switzerland because it had been banned in Italy. Galileo was in the final year of his life when Robert arrived in the Italian city of Florence, where Galileo lived under house arrest. The great man died while Robert was in Florence. Robert decided he agreed with the idea, promoted by Galileo and Nicholas Copernicus, that the Earth and other planets orbit the sun. The young Robert Boyle was fascinated by Galileo's belief that mathematics has the language of the world around us. The behavior of planets and pendulums and the fundamentals of music and mechanics could all be understood using mathematics. While Robert was on his grand tour, his father died, living in a sizable country house near the English town of Stalbridge and large estates in Iran. In 1644, aged seventeen, Robert returned to England, staying for some months with his older sister Catherine in London. He then moved to his Stalbridge country house. All was not plain sailing because England was in the middle of a civil war caused by a power struggle between Parliament and the king. Robert Boyle had no intention of getting involved in the war. He took a cautious approach so that neither of the warring sides could see him as an enemy. He did not approve of the behavior of soldiers. A deeply religious young man, he was worried that involvement in military activities could corrupt him. In fact, while war raged in England, Boyle spent time writing his first book. It concerned morality and was entitled Aritology. He became increasingly interested in carrying out scientific experiments and studying scientific literature. He equipped a laboratory in 1646 and also began traveling to London for meetings with the Philosophical College, a group dedicated to experimental science and the exchange of scientific ideas. Like many budding scientists of his time, Robert Boyle tried his hand at alchemy. Not surprisingly, he was unsuccessful in his attempts to discover the philosopher's stone. They described his attempts as chemistry. Boyle lived in an extraordinary superstitious age. The Enlightenment and triumph of reason over superstition that transformed much of Europe in the 1700s was still a long way off. In Boyle's time, people lived in terror of non-existent witches and all too real witch finders. Between 1644 and 1647, over 300 women in eastern England were killed for supposedly being witches after their discovery by the notorious self-appointed witchfinder general, Matthew Hopkins. England was also becoming increasingly puritanical. Parliament banned the celebration of Christmas in 1647, the ban remaining in place until 1660. In 1652, aged 25, Boyle returned to his estate in Ireland. He stayed there for two years but grew increasingly unhappy in an involvement he saw as unfavorable to his development as a scientist. He also suffered a serious illness permanently affecting his eyesight. For the rest of his life, he could read only very slowly and he had to employ people to do his writing for him. In 1654, at age 27, Boyle moved to the university town of Oxford, England. There, he hoped to find a scientifically productive environment. He rented rooms and set up a laboratory. He never officially joined the university. He was so wealthy that he needed neither salary nor funding for his experimental work. In 1655, he had the good fortune to meet Robert Hooke, a young university student. Hooke's extraordinary abilities were the mechanical equipment impressed Boyle, who began paying him to work as his laboratory assistant. In 1654, Otto von Guericke had invented the vacuum pump. Boyle learned of these in 1657 and was intrigued. He discussed the concept of a vacuum pump with Hooke, who improved von Guericke's design. Using Hooke's pump, Boyle and Hooke carried out experiments to investigate the properties of air and the vacuum, making their first great discovery, Boyle's Law. They made their discovery using a glass tube. Inside the tube, they used different volumes of mercury liquid to vary the pressure on a fixed weight of air. Boyle discovered that pressure multiplied by volume is a constant. In other words, when you increase the pressure on a gas, the gas volume shrinks in a predictable way. This was the first gas law to be discovered. Over a hundred years were to pass before the next gas law. Chow's Law was discovered in 1787. Boyle published this result in 1662. With his publication, he emulated his hero, Galileo, for the first time. Galileo firmly believed that the world could be explained using mathematics, as indeed Pythagoras had in a much earlier age. Boyle had now shown by experiment that air follows mathematical laws. Boyle discovered sound cannot travel through a vacuum. He did this by ringing a bell housed inside a 28-liter glass jar. The bell was rung with the help of a magnet outside the jar. As he pumped air out of the jar, the sound of the bell grew fainter and fainter.