Boyle, Robert
Boyle, Robert (1627–91). Famous for his work on air pressure, Boyle was the youngest son of the 1st earl of Cork. After Eton, he went on a grand tour in 1639–44, and during the 1650s belonged to the ‘invisible college’, so called because they never all met together at once, associated with John Wilkins at Wadham College, Oxford. Crucial in the scientific revolution in England, this was a nucleus for the Royal Society, in which, though very important, Boyle would never take office. With Robert Hooke in Oxford he made and experimented with an air pump, and hit upon the law of gas pressure, discovering a new variable. A godly man who brought prestige to natural philosophy, he was a great advocate for a version of the atomic, or corpuscular, theory of matter: having been impressed by the Strasbourg clock, he sought mechanical explanations of all phenomena.
David Knight
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