Robert Boyle
| Robert Boyle was a British-Irish Christian alchemist, who played a role in development of modern chemistry. He was educated at Eton College. He visited Florence, ruled by the Medici's. In Geneva Switzerland he met with Protestant pastor François Perreaud, who wrote a book about demons. He was a member of the Invisible College, associated with Gresham College of Thomas Gresham (City of London, Royal Exchange), the circle of Samuel Hartlib and Oxford Philosophical Club of John Wilkins, which later all merged into the Royal Society of the Stuarts. It served as intermediary between the Rosicrucianism of John Dee and modern freemasonry and gave rise to the first Scientific Revolution (ideals of the Enlightenment). |  |
At Christ Church Oxford, he was the teacher of Robert Hooke (Gresham College, Royal Society), who played a role in rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. With Robert Hooke he introduced Boyle's Law (inverse relationship between pressure and volume of a confined gas). He first formulated the law in defense of criticism of jesuit Francis Line. The law was also discovered by Edme Mariotte (French Academy of Sciences).
He was a director of the British East India Company.
He was one of the first to theorize upon the existence and structure of the atom.
Other members of the Hartlib circle were his sister Katherine Jones (friend of John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost), Ezechiel Foxcroft (translator of Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz), John French (book on distillation and translator of HC Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy), John Amos Comenius (universal education, influenced by jesuit William Bathe)..
Other members of the Royal Society were Robert Moray, Elias Ashmole, John Wilkins,..
His sister was married to John Dury, friend of Johann Valentin Andrea.
In 1661 he published the Skeptical Chymist, in which he introduced the more modern (erroneous) concept of a chemical element. He made the distinction between mixtures and compounds.
8 years later Hennig Brand isolated white phosphorus. Boyle's assistant Ambrose Godfrey started producing phosphorus industrially from bone ash.
In The Christian Virtuoso he explained the universe as a clockwork created by God. It was reviewed by John Locke (Oxford, Royal Society), who visited locations in South France related to the Cathars. His theological work was ridiculed by Jonathan Swift.
In 1687 Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica, in which he formulated the laws of motion (law of inertia, F=ma, equal and opposite) and universal gravitation. The book was seen as mathematical proof of Boyle's mechanical philosophy (the universe seen as mechanical device) and gave rise to classical mechanics and the modern materialistic worldview.
He and Newton were used in Pierre Plantard's Priory of Sion hoax with Ludovico Gonzoga, Nicolas Flamel, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Victor Hugo, Jean Cocteau,..
born 1/25/1627.
died 12/31/1691.
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