1. ROBERT BOYLE
‘THE FATHER OF CHEMISTRY’
Robert Boyle , ‘The Father of Chemistry’, was the most influential scientist ever born in
Ireland.Boyle was born on 25th January 1627 in Lismore Castle , in County Waterford, Ireland, the seventh
son and fourteenth child of Richard Boyle and Catherine Fenton.
After early education at home, Robert was sent to Eton College in England,when he was eight
years old. Then at the age of 11 he was sent on a grand tour of Europe, with a French tutor,which lasted for
6 years. During this they visited Italy in 1641 and stayed in Florence during the winter of that year
studying the "paradoxes of the great star-gazer" Galileo Galilei.

2. Boyle returned to Dorset in England in 1644 from Europe with a keen interest for scientific
research. From that time, Robert devoted his life to scientific research. Made several visits to his Irish
estates, that began in 1647. Boyle moved to Ireland in 1652 but became frustrated at his inability to make
any progress in his work and described Ireland as "a barbarous country where chemical spirits were so
misunderstood and chemical instruments so unprocurable ”
In 1654, Boyle left Ireland for Oxford to pursue his work more successfully, where he joined a
group of natural philosophers .Robert Hooke entered as Boyle’s assistant at this time and helped him in his
experiments. They built the air-pump (Given below) used to create vacuums with which Boyle carried out
many trials to elucidate the nature and importance of air.
Boyle's work with the air pump was published in 1660 under the title New Experiments Physico-
Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects. In this book Boyle made his first mention that
‘the volume of a gas varies inversely to the pressure of the gas’, which is usually called Boyle's Law. Boyle
demonstrated the necessity of air for combustion, for animal breathing, and for the transmission of sound.
Medieval science was dominated by the ideas of Aristotle (384-322 BC). Aristotle proposed that
matter was composed of 4 elements – earth, air, fire, and water - which in varying proportions constituted
all things. Paracelsus (1493-1531), an adept in alchemy, proposed that various combinations of three
controlling elements (mercury, sulphur, salt) accounted for the various properties of matter.

3. Modern chemistry is developed out of medieval alchemy. Alchemy was a pseudoscientific practice
that sought a method (by varying the proportions of the 3 controlling elements) of changing base metals
into gold, an elixir to prolong life indefinitely, a panacea to cure all ills, and a solvent capable of dissolving
anything. Alchemy was still practiced in Boyle’s time and he himself studied the art.However, he sharply
differentiated his scientific experimentation and theorising from his alchemical work.
Boyle used his experiments to demonstrate that mechanical explanations of the world are better
than the traditional qualitative explanations associated with the ideas of Aristotle.In his book ‘The
Sceptical Chymist’, Boyle attacked Aristotle’s and Paracelsus’s theories. He proposed that elements are
basically composed of ‘corpuscles’ of various sorts and sizes capable of organising themselves into groups
and that each group constitutes a chemical substance. He clearly distinguished between mixtures and
compounds and showed that a compound can have very different properties from those of its
constituents. This prefigured the atomic theory of matter
.

4. Spagyric is a name given to the production of herbal medicines using alchemy which involve
fermentation , distillation and the extraction of mineral components from the ashes of the plants . These
processes were in use in medieval alchemy for the separation and purification of metals from ores, and
salts from brines and other aqueous solutions
Boyle stated that the proper object of chemistry was analysis of composition and he coined the
term ‘analysis’ . He was also the first chemist to collect a sample of gas. Apart from chemistry Boyle made
many other contributions to science.
Boyle died on 31st December 1691 in London, England. In his will, Boyle endowed a series of
lectures which came to be known as the Boyle Lectures.