Robert Boyle, Earl of Cork
Where would we be without the pneumatic tyre?
Bumping about on rails or horseshoes.
And that particular item was invented in Dublin by Dunlop.
So much for the tyre. What about the air pump that fills it? That was invented in England, it is true, but by an Irishman, the son of a planter, Robert Boyle, the discover of the principle of elasticity in gases known as Boyle’s law.
And a queer fellow indeed he was.
His father was one of the biggest scoundrels in history, none other than the so-called “great” Earl of Cork.
That one was undoubtedly born in Canterbury. And the Boyles were said to come from Hereford. At the same time it is an Irish name also. Whatever about ancestry, when he was broke in 1588 he went off to Ireland to make his fortune, and what better than to marry a local heiress. And when she died marry another.
When Sir Walter Raleigh, having fallen foul of Queen Elizabeth, was getting ready for the block, the Earl of Cork offered to buy his estates off him. And he got them good and cheap, 12,000 acres.
Then he got to business, set up an iron works and employed 4,000 workers on his agricultural and industrial projects. Not bad for those days. He liked women, but he didn’t like “papists”.
But enough of him. It’s his son we’re talking about.
Robert was the seventh. He was born at Lismore Castle in the Co. Cork. The date? January 25th1627.
He was a sickly but very precocious child. He learned both Latin and French and spoke them fluently in his early childhood. Perhaps French was still spoken in the part of Munster he lived in. The Cork “lilt” is supposed to come from French.
He was sent to Eton, but not kept there the full time. After a spell at an estate in Dorset his father had “acquired”, he went for a tour of the continent, picking up more languages and getting a touch of religious mania during a violent thunderstorm in Florence.
Then the rising took place in Ireland. His father’s ill-gotten gains were swept into the melting pot. After two years struggling to pay his way on the continent he reached London to find his father dead, but himself the possessor of the Dorset estate.
He went back to Ireland when things were quieter. But in the meantime he had got interested in chemistry. He thought Ireland a somewhat barbarous country. Do you know why? Because he couldn’t buy chemicals. So he came back to England and was active in the “Philosophical College”, which later became the world-famous “Royal Society”. Boyle was its first president.
It was now that he set to work experimenting. And he did some remarkable things. He attempted to weigh light. This was thought impossible. It was not done for nearly three centuries after he was dead.
He actually prepared hydrogen, but didn’t recognise it. In this he was also a century before his time. He was lucky not to blow himself up.
He discovered the uniform temperature of human blood, a thing we take for granted now. He was the first scientist to use ice and salt in order to get a freezing mixture – a method not superseded until another Irishman, Lord Kelvin from Belfast, made possible the refrigerator.
The law of gaseous elasticity – Boyle’s Law, which relates the pressure, volume and temperature of gases and is the very foundation of chemistry – he discovered in 1660.
And a couple of centuries before Dalton he adopted the hypothesis that matter was composed of atoms.
He believed that other metals could be converted into gold and as one time he thought he had done it. Which brings us to the other side of his character. Not such an attractive one.
In Henry IV’s time alchemists were always getting busy mixing things with gold and pretending that they’d made goal. In order to protect the currency, “multiplying gold” was made illegal.
Believing he was in possession of the “get-rich-quick” secret Boyle persuaded the English Parliament to repeal the law of Henry IV. But he looked for a chance to make gold some other way.
This way was through the robbery of India. When the East India Company was founded Boyle got it its first charter.
And this links with a third side of his character. His researches into religion led him to learn Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and other eastern languages.
He financed the translation of the Protestant Bible into Hindustani and Malayan. One suspects that he felt this would make the “natives” more tractable to the designs of the East India Company. He also helped the translation of the Bible into Welsh. And finally, he financed entirely from his own pocket the translation of the Bible into Gaelic.
Why? Presumably for the same reason. He wanted to proselytise and thus make his tenants more tractable.
Still, he is long dead now. We can look at him as the product of his age. It was an age where English capitalism was robbing other countries right and left in order to get together the money necessary to start manufacturing industries and businesses. Robbery at home, robbery in Ireland, robbery across the far seas – and the development of science – were all ingredients in the process. Perhaps some of the good he did as a scientist came back to Ireland to repay the harm his people did there. At least let us hope so.