Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle is largely regarded as the first modern chemist — and the fourteen years he spent in Oxford between 1654 and 1668 contain almost all the work that earned him the title. He came to the city for the laboratory access and the Wilkins circle. He left it to look after his elder sister.

Lismore to Oxford

Boyle was born on 25 January 1627 at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, the seventh son and fourteenth child of the 1st Earl of Cork — at the time one of the richest men in Britain and Ireland. Tutored privately in Latin, Greek, and French, he was sent to Eton at eight and travelled with a French tutor in Italy in 1641, studying the "paradoxes of the great star-gazer" Galileo Galilei during the winter at Florence.

Returning to England in mid-1644 after his father's death, Boyle settled at the family manor of Stalbridge in Dorset between 1644 and 1652 and devoted himself to experimental science. He was already in correspondence with the loose network of natural philosophers known as the "Invisible College", many of whom met in London at Gresham College and some in Oxford. In 1652 he tried to relocate to his Irish estates but found the country impossible for chemical work — "a barbarous country", he wrote, "where chemical spirits were so misunderstood and chemical instruments so unprocurable that it was hard to have any Hermetic thoughts in it."

Cross Hall, High Street

In 1654 Boyle left Ireland for Oxford and rented rooms from the apothecary who owned Cross Hall on the High Street — on the site of what is now the Shelley Memorial at the eastern wall of University College. He stayed in those rooms for fourteen years.

Reading in 1657 of Otto von Guericke's vacuum pump, Boyle set himself, with Robert Hooke as assistant, to build something better. Hooke designed and built a desktop pump that could be operated by one person and that could be opened to insert objects of study. The "machina Boyleana" or "Pneumatical Engine" was finished in 1659. The experiments that followed produced New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (1660), and — in 1662, answering objections from the Jesuit Francis Line — Boyle stated the law that bears his name: the volume of a gas varies inversely with the pressure applied to it.

The Sceptical Chymist, published in 1661, did something different: it argued against the Aristotelian elements and the alchemical Tria Prima of salt, sulphur and mercury, insisting that chemistry is the science of the composition of substances — neither an adjunct to medicine nor a branch of alchemy.

Boyle was named to the council of the Royal Society in the 1663 royal charter. The arms of his family appear in the colonnade of the Great Quadrangle at All Souls, opposite the Hill family arms, close to a sundial designed by his friend Christopher Wren. He was elected President of the Society in 1680 but declined the honour over scruples about oaths.

London with Katherine

In 1668 Boyle left Oxford for London, where he lived with his elder sister Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, at her house in Pall Mall. The siblings, in Wikipedia's summary, "maintained a lifelong intellectual partnership, where brother and sister shared medical remedies, promoted each other's scientific ideas, and edited each other's manuscripts." Katherine ran a scientific salon there; Boyle worked in the laboratory she kept in the house. They lived together for twenty-three years. Katherine died on 23 December 1691; Boyle followed her a week later, on 31 December. He was buried in the churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

His will endowed an annual lecture series on natural theology, the Boyle Lectures, which continues today.

Sources: Wikipedia: Robert Boyle · The Royal Society — Past Fellows: Robert Boyle

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