Boyle, Robert (1627-1691)

Irish-born pioneer of modern day chemistry Robert Boyle, who formulated Boyle's Law. A founder member of the Royal Society, he was largely responsible for establishing chemistry as a serious discipline, through his insistence on experiment and accurate observation. His famous law stated that at a given temperature, pressure and volume are inversely proportional.

Irish chemist and physicist who published The Sceptical Chymist (1661), a groundbreaking book that became the definitive text among scientists for decades to follow. He formulated Boyle's law in 1662. He was a pioneer in the use of experiment and scientific method.

Boyle questioned the alchemical basis of the chemical theory of his day, and the attempts made to produce impossible or mythical substances. Instead he moved towards research, teaching that the proper object of chemistry was to determine the compositions of substances in order to discover the make-up of the world. The term ‘analysis’ was coined by Boyle and many of the reactions still used in qualitative work were known to him. He introduced certain plant extracts, notably litmus, for the indication of acids and bases. He was also the first chemist to collect a sample of gas.

Boyle was born in Lismore, County Waterford. He lived in Oxford, England from 1656 to 1668, and subsequently in London. As a student he joined a group whose aim was to develop and cultivate the ‘new philosophy’; this group later started the Royal Society in 1662.

He learned Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac to further his studies of the Bible, and provided money to pay for the Boyle Lectures for the defence of Christianity.

Boyle pointed out that bodies alter in weight according to the varying buoyancy of the atmosphere. These findings were published in The Spring of Air (1660), which described experiments using a vacuum pump he had invented.

In The Sceptical Chymist he advanced towards the view that matter is ultimately composed of ‘corpuscles’ of various sorts and sizes, capable of arranging themselves into groups, and that each group constitutes a chemical substance. He successfully distinguished between mixtures and compounds and showed that a compound can have very different qualities from those of its constituents.

In 1667 Boyle was the first to study the phenomenon of bioluminescence, when he showed that fungi and bacteria require air (oxygen) for luminescence, becoming dark in a vacuum and luminescing again when air is readmitted. He can also be credited with the invention of the first match in 1680.

Although his main importance is in chemistry, Boyle accomplished much important work in physics, with Boyle's law, the role of air in propagating sound, the expansive force of freezing water, the refractive powers of crystals, the density of liquids, electricity, colour, hydrostatics, and so on.