Boyle

Robert Boyle

Born: 25 Jan 1627 in Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland
Died: 30 Dec 1691 in London, England

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Boyle studied at Eton College from 1835 to 1639. He read Galileo's works while on a five year European tour, with a private tutor, begun in 1639 when he was 12 years old. After the tour, spent mostly in Switzerland, he returned to Dorset in England where he began his experimental scientific work and wrote moral essays.

From 1656 he lived in Oxford where he collaborated with Hooke. He made important contributions to physics and chemistry and is best known for Boyle's law (sometimes called Mariotte's Law) describing an ideal gas. Boyle's law appears in an appendix written in 1661 to his work New Experiments Physio-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects (1660).

In The Sceptical Chymist (1661) Boyle argued against Aristotle's view of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. He argued that matter was composed of corpuscles which themselves were differently built up of different configurations of primary particles.

Boyle was a founding fellow of the Royal Society. He published results on the physical properties of air through this Society. His work in chemistry was aimed at establishing it as a mathematical science based on a mechanistic theory of matter. Boyle influenced Newton and many later scientists.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. M B Hall, Robert Boyle on Natural Philosophy (Bloomington, Ind., 1965).
  4. M Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1994).
  5. J F Fulton, A Bibliography of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Fellow of the Royal Society, 2nd ed. (1961).
  6. R E W Maddison, The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1969).
  7. J R Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution: A Study in Social and Intellectual Change (1977).
  8. R Pilkington, Robert Boyle: Father of Chemistry (1959).
  9. M B Hall, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth- Century Chemistry (1976). 
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