Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry, also hoped to turn metals into gold
Robert Boyle is remembered as the first modern chemist and the man behind the law linking gas pressure and volume. He was also a committed alchemist who believed metals could be transmuted, and he helped repeal a 1403 statute that banned multiplying gold and silver.
Boyle was born on 25 January 1627 at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, the fourteenth child of the enormously rich Earl of Cork. After his mother died he was sent, aged eight, to Eton, and later toured the Continent with a French tutor, wintering in Florence in 1641 to study the ideas of the elderly Galileo. Returning in 1644, he inherited Stalbridge in Dorset and set up a laboratory there, joining the circle of experimenters known as the Invisible College.
In 1654 he moved to Oxford, having complained that Ireland was a country where chemical instruments could hardly be obtained. Reading of Otto von Guericke's vacuum pump, which needed two strong men working for hours and gave no way to put objects inside, Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke built an improved air pump, finished in 1659. While answering objections from the Jesuit Francis Line, Boyle first stated the rule that a gas's volume falls as its pressure rises at constant temperature.
His chemistry leaned toward the modern. He treated elements as the undecomposable ingredients of matter, separated mixtures from compounds, and named the method of finding a substance's components analysis. Around 1670, having produced what we now know was hydrogen, he spoke of factitious, meaning artificial, airs. He also showed that air carries sound and studied freezing water, crystals, colour and electricity. The Sceptical Chymist is regarded as a cornerstone of the field.
Boyle followed Francis Bacon's experimental principles while refusing to call himself anyone's disciple. When the Invisible College became the Royal Society in 1663 he joined its council, but in 1680 he turned down its presidency over scruples about taking oaths. His wish list of 24 future inventions included flight, prolonging life and a reliable way to find longitude. From 1668 he lived in London with his sister Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, sharing her laboratory, and he died on 31 December 1691.
Source: Robert Boyle
