Robert Boyle (1627 - 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor widely regarded as one of the founders of modern chemistry and of the experimental scientific method. [1] He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of a confined gas, and for his influential 1661 treatise The Sceptical Chymist.
Early life
Robert Boyle was born on 25 January 1627 at Lismore Castle in Ireland, the fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom. [2] He was educated at Eton College and afterward travelled on the Continent with a tutor, spending time in Italy where he studied the works of Galileo. [1]
Scientific career
Settling in Oxford during the 1650s, Boyle became a central figure in a circle of natural philosophers sometimes called the "Invisible College," whose activities helped lead to the founding of the Royal Society in 1660. Boyle was a founding member and Fellow of the society. With his assistant Robert Hooke he built an improved air pump and used it to conduct a celebrated series of experiments on the properties of air, published in 1660 as New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air. [3]
Major work
From these investigations came the law that bears his name, stating that at constant temperature the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to its pressure. In The Sceptical Chymist (1661) Boyle challenged the prevailing Aristotelian and Paracelsian theories of matter and argued for an approach grounded in careful experiment. [1] He advanced a corpuscular, or "mechanical," philosophy holding that matter is composed of tiny particles, helping to move the study of substances away from alchemy and toward chemistry. [4]
Legacy
Boyle was also a devout Christian who wrote extensively on theology and endowed the Boyle Lectures in defence of religion. He died in London on 31 December 1691. Remembered as a founder of modern chemistry, his insistence on measurement, repeatable experiment, and the public reporting of results profoundly shaped the development of the physical sciences. [2]
