Robert Boyle Chemistry
Robert Boyle was born on 25 of Jan 1627 in Lismore, County
Waterford, Ireland. He died 30 of Dec 1691 in London, England.
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, then 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 worked 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.
He is probably best known for summarizing the properties of
gases by the law that is given his name, Boyle's Law. This law
suggests that at constant temperature the pressure and volume are
inversely related, and results from the observation that gases
have elastic properties. He also showed that air had weight.
Return to South Hamilton Biology
Home Page