Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist and theologian, the fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork. Educated at Eton and by travel on the Continent, he settled at Oxford in the 1650s, where with his assistant Robert Hooke he built an air pump and established the law relating the pressure and volume of a gas that bears his name. The Sceptical Chymist of 1661 attacked the Aristotelian elements and the alchemists' principles and helped make chemistry an experimental science. A founding fellow of the Royal Society, he wrote extensively on natural theology and endowed the Boyle Lectures in defense of Christianity.