Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle was born in 1627 at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, Ireland, the fourteenth child of the immensely wealthy Earl of Cork. Privately educated and widely travelled — he was in Florence studying Galileo's work the year Galileo died — Boyle settled at Oxford in the 1650s, where he assembled a laboratory and hired the young Robert Hooke as his assistant. He was a devout Christian who saw the study of nature as a religious duty, and he wrote as prolifically on theology as on science.

Boyle's lasting fame rests on the air pump he and Hooke built around 1659 and the experiments it made possible. By evacuating a sealed glass vessel he showed that sound does not travel through a vacuum, that flames and small animals need air to survive, and that air has weight and a 'spring.' In 1662, responding to a critic, he published the pressure–volume relation now called Boyle's law: at fixed temperature, the volume of a gas varies inversely with its pressure.

In The Sceptical Chymist (1661) Boyle attacked the alchemists' four elements and the three principles of the Paracelsians, arguing instead that matter is composed of 'corpuscles' — tiny particles whose arrangements explain chemical change. This corpuscular philosophy helped separate chemistry from alchemy and pointed toward the modern atom. A founding member of the Royal Society, Boyle declined its presidency and a peerage, preferring his laboratory and his books.

Boyle never married and devoted his fortune to research and to charitable and religious causes, including funding translations of the Bible. He died in London in 1691, a week after his sister Katherine, in whose house he had lived for decades and who was herself a noted intellectual.