Robert Boyle

Boyle is frequently described at the first modern chemist, but his work encompassed much more than that. Among other things, he was a founding member of the Royal Society.

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• 1:44Holly Frey?

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• 2:17Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:27Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:33Holly Frey?

  Robert Boyle came up in our recent episode on modern inventions that are actually old, because I mentioned an old thing and said, "Robert Boyle didn't start messing around with that for a while." That made me want to do an episode on him. But then I ended up doing the heart lib episode first because that gives extra context to the kind of situation that was going on in England at the time regarding science and science cliques. And now here we are at last. We are ready for the Robert Boyle of it all. Boyle is sometimes called the father of modern chemistry. There are other scientists that get called that, though, like Antoine Lavoisier that we've talked about before. Boyle is more frequently

• 3:16Holly Frey?

  described as the first modern chemist, which is closer to accurate, but his work encompassed a lot more than that, including being a founding member of the Royal Society. He also wrote a lot of religious tracts, and he was a product of his time. So get ready, because that means some of his ideas were just flat out super yucky.

• 3:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert Boyle was born January 25, 1627, in County Waterford, Ireland. He was born in the family home, which was Listmore Castle. His father was Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, who purchased that home, again, being a castle, from Sir Walter Raleigh in the first years of the 1600s. Richard is credited with repairing, renovating, and revitalizing the 12th century property that had fallen into disrepair. Robert was the 14th of Richard Boyle's 15 children, which he had over the course of two marriages. Robert's mother was Catherine Fenton, daughter of Ireland's Secretary of State. "When Robert was born,"

• 4:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  his father wrote in his diary, "my wife, God ever be praised, was about three of the clock in the afternoon of this day, and the sign in Gemini Libra, safely delivered of her seventh son at Listmore. God bless him, for his name is Robert Boyle."

• 4:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert was christened a week later at Listmore's Chapel, and there was a huge party to celebrate.

• 4:45Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I didn't include it in these notes, but I did read a very kind of charming and illustrative note in some of Robert's writing about his family dynamic and how his brothers were treated versus him because he was the last son. And he was saying, you know, even though the oldest son might inherit all of the property, the youngest son gets all of the love. And that certainly seemed to play out for them.

• 5:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Holly Frey?

  That huge party that they had to celebrate his christening was one of many large social events that happened at the castle when Robert was young. The Boyle family, due to their status, was constantly busy with guests arranging marriages for their many children, et cetera. But Robert, who was called Robin by his family and his siblings, also got a lot of time outdoors and they ate what he described as a, quote, "coarse but cleanly diet." The luxuries that they experienced were not a constant, but they were saved for special occasions. And this kind of approach to their upbringing was all intended to make sure that the children were hearty and resilient. Robert's mother died of tuberculosis when he was three or four.

• 5:56Holly Frey?

  Different sources report both of those ages, but basically when he was still very young. His father, the Earl, was present in his children's lives, but it seems as though most of the time that they had was spent with tutors and nannies and other staff. At the age of five, Robert was assigned his own personal valet. But though there had been a very big focus on this idea of like country living that would ensure that Robert and the other kids in the family grew up to be healthy and strong, as Robert matured into adulthood, he actually had a lot of health issues and he's often described as having been pretty frail. Among other things, he developed kidney stones at a very young age. Usually that's something that would onset later in life,

• 6:39Holly Frey?

  but he got them when he was still a child. He also had very bad vision from the time he was quite young. And so a lot of time was spent trying to preserve what vision he had.

• 6:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert started attending Eaton College at the age of eight, and he was a good student, so dedicated to learning that teachers had to stop him from reading so much in the hopes of not further damaging his eyesight. He was at Eden for three years and then was taught privately at the family's Stalbridge Estate in Dorset, England, first with the Reverend William Douche and then with a French tutor named Isaac Markham. When Robert was 12, he and his older brother Francis, who was 16, began a tour of Europe that was customary for adolescent boys of wealth. This was a multi-year affair and the boys were accompanied by Markham, so their education continued during their travels.

• 7:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  They were mostly based in Switzerland. They stayed at a home in Geneva and then they would make trips out to other places from there. Robert was abroad for almost six years for this tour, but his brother Francis had to return home earlier in 1642 as the ongoing conflict between Catholics and Protestants escalated in Ireland. Richard Boyle was English by birth. This was really an English family that had moved to Ireland. The family were Protestants and by that point Francis would have been 19, so he would have needed to defend the family's holdings in the event of an attack. There's a whole context here of like the English colonization of Ireland.

• 8:18Holly Frey?

  Yes, which we have talked about before. So I was like, I don't know that we need to re-shred all that.

• 8:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  We don't need to re-explain the whole thing again.

• 8:27Holly Frey?

  Uh, my understanding too is that even though his brother Francis went back, they, their home was never attacked. Like he, he never actually had to, to do any of that defense that they were worried about. But in addition to furthering his education, including the acquisition of a very high degree of French language proficiency, uh, you'll read a lot of accounts that basically say that Robert Boyle was so fluent in French that French people thought he was French. Um, there was also a very significant event that happened during this time in Boyle's life where he was taking his years abroad. He wrote about it later when he was 21. Uh, at that point, he penned a third-person autobiography titled An Account of Philoradus During His Minority.

• 9:08Holly Frey?

  Uh, we're going to talk a little bit more about this third-person conceit of this biography on Friday. But in it Boyle described a stormy night in Geneva that happened when he was 13 and how it changed his life. He wrote, quote, and Philoradus is his stand-in name, like the name he gives to the character who is obviously him. But during Philoratus's residence at Geneva, there happened to him an accident, which he always used to mention as the considerable list of his whole life. To frame a right apprehension of this, you must understand that though his inclinations were ever virtuous and his life free from scandal and inoffensive,

• 9:49Holly Frey?

  yet had the piety he was master of already so diverted him from aspiring unto more, that Christ, who long had lain asleep in his conscience, as he once did in the ship, must now as then be waked by a storm. For at a time which, being the very heat of summer, promised nothing less about the dead of night that adds most terror to such accidents, Philoratus was suddenly waked in a fright with such loud claps of thunder, which are oftentimes very terrible in those hot climes and seasons, that he thought the earth would owe an ague to the air. The long continuance of that dismal tempest, where the winds were

• 10:29Holly Frey?

  so loud as almost drowned the noise of the very thunder, and the showers so hideous as almost quenched the lightning ere it could reach his eyes, confirmed Philoratus in his apprehensions of the day of judgments being at hand. Whereupon the consideration of his unpreparedness to welcome it, and the hideousness of being surprised by it in an unfit condition, made him resolve and vow that if his fears were that night disappointed, all his further additions to his life should be more religiously and watchfully employed. The morning came, and a serenier, cloudless sky returned, when he ratified his determination

• 11:12Holly Frey?

  so solemnly, that from that day he dated his conversion, renewing, now he was past danger, the vow he had made.

• 11:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  So the storm scared him so badly that he pledged to become an ardent Christian. A lot of people have moments like this in their lives. Something happens, you feel like you're committing yourself to something.

• 11:34Holly Frey?

  Please God, get me through this.

• 11:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether it's religion or something else, like for a lot of folks, though, that kind of fades away. But Boyle stuck to that promise for the rest of his life. While he was already interested in science before this event, his newfound religiousness shifted his approach to science. As he grew up, he pursued science always as a means to show the marvels of the natural world as the work of God. One of the ideas that Boyle wrote about over the years was this concept that the universe is a huge machine. Everything in it functions as a component of it, down to minute particles that are differentiated by shape and motion.

• 12:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  In his religious worldview, this was a mechanism that had been carefully designed by a higher power. Coming up, we will talk about Boyle's life after his tour of Europe. But first, we will hear from the sponsors to keep the show going.

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• 14:43Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:24Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:42Speaker 07

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• 16:43Holly Frey?

  At the age of 17, Robert Boyle finished his travels, but he did not return to Ireland. Instead, he went to London and he stayed with his sister Catherine for four and a half months. From there, he moved on to Dorset, England, where he had a family estate, that was the manor of Stalbridge, that he had inherited upon his father's death in 1643. While there was a great deal of turmoil in play at this time that impacted the aristocracy in regards to their land holdings, Boyle's property was safe. Other people in similar situations were having their estates seized by the parliamentarians, but Boyle's sister Catherine, who had become Viscountess Ranlaw when she married Arthur Jones,

• 17:27Holly Frey?

  had good relationships with members of the parliamentarians, which had helped ensure that Robert would get and keep his inherited land. Boyle wrote of this advantageous relationship this way, quote, "He reaped also a collateral advantage by it, which was that a sister-in-law of Lady Ranlaw, who was with them in the house and was wife of one of the principal members of the then House of Commons, brought him into the acquaintance and friendship of some great men of that party, which was then growing and soon after victorious, by whose means he got early protection for his English and Irish estates."

• 18:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  At Stalbridge, Boyle started his life's work in earnest, studying science and theology in parallel. In his autobiography, he wrote that, quote, "He applied himself with great vigor to his studies of various kinds, particularly those of natural philosophy and chemistry." He had already spent a lot of time studying ancient languages so that he could study religious texts in their original languages. This is also when he started writing seriously about religion and ethics, and he wrote the autobiography that we've already mentioned. He also started a series of scientific experiments.

• 18:42Holly Frey?

  And when Boyle first got to Stalbridge, he wrote his sister a very long letter. He includes it in that autobiography. And that letter concluded, quote, "My stay here, God willing, shall not be long. This country, being generally infected with three epidemical diseases, besides that old liger sickness, the troupe-flux, namely the plague, which now begins to revive again at Bristol and Yeovil, six miles off, fits of the committee, and consumption of the purse, to which so violent expulsives, if so potent and attractive as a letter from you were but added, it would both extremely sweeten the stay and accelerate

• 19:23Holly Frey?

  the departure of your most affectionate brother and humble servant." So he basically thought England was not cool. But his time at Stalbridge was not short, as he had hoped. He ended up living there more than a decade.

• 19:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1647, Robert Boyle became acquainted with the Hartlibb Circle, which we covered just recently. And it was through the chemists in the group that Boyle started to think about doing his own chemistry experiments. He wrote of this, quote, "His acquaintance with Mr. Samuel Hartlibb began very early." And he included several letters that he wrote Hartlibb in this autobiography to illustrate their ongoing relationship. The two men bonded over both science and religion, and Boyle referenced writing of Hartlibb's friend and collaborator, John Dury, on that subject. In May of 1647, Boyle wrote a letter to Dury, encouraging his efforts to bring Lutherans and Calvinists together, stating, quote, "It

• 20:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  is strange that men should rather be quarreling for a few trifling opinions wherein they dissent, than to embrace one another for those many fundamental truths wherein they agree." And it is in this letter to Hartlib that Boyle mentioned that the information he had received from Hartlib gave him something to do at Stalbridge, where he was kind of lonely and bored. Quote, "As for me, during my confinement to this melancholy solitude, I often divert myself at leisure moments in trying such experiments as the unfurnishedness of the place and the present distractedness of my mind will permit me, which, when once my vacant

• 21:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  intervals of time will give me leave to blot paper with and make some short discourses and reflections upon, you may, with all the services you shall be pleased to command their author, confidently expect from your most affectionate friend and humble servant."

• 21:18Holly Frey?

  Yeah, so just in case that's unclear, he's like, "Thank you so much for those materials you sent me that's going to help me in the experiments I want to try and whatever I find out, I'm going to send back to you for circulation in the circle."

• 21:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  So yeah, he was like, "This is very convenient with my big, empty house. I have lots of space for doing experiments."

• 21:35Holly Frey?

  "I'm bored and I can do activities."

• 21:40Holly Frey?

  Another person that became highly influential in Boyle's intellectual life also entered it during the Stalbridge years. That was physician Nathaniel Highmore. Highmore was educated at Oxford and at one point he had cared for members of the royal family. He wasn't the regular royal surgeon. It was like an instance where at least one member of the family had gotten quite ill when they were traveling and he happened to be the nearby doctor. By the time Boyle met him, Highmore had set up a private practice in Sherburne, a little more than seven miles west of Stalbridge. Highmore was a leader in the medical field, in anatomy in particular. He is often described as an anatomy pioneer. He is credited with

• 22:23Holly Frey?

  being the first person to describe in writing the maxillary sinus and the part of testicular anatomy that separates the testicles. Highmore and Boyle became very fast friends, so much so that when Highmore published his book, The History of Generation in 1651, he dedicated it to Robert Boyle. Writing quote, "To the honorable Mr. Robert Boyle, son to the right honorable, the Earl of Cork, my much honored friend, noble sir, where virtue shall be found in conjunction with nobility in such black, the last and worst times, it no less invites and amazes the eyes and hearers of beholders than some new star or blazing comet. But

• 23:04Holly Frey?

  with the difference, the one is cause of their fear, the other gives life to their hopes and joy. You have, sir, so enriched your tender years with such choice principles of the best sort, and even to admiration manage them to the greatest advantage, that you stand both a pattern and a wonder to our nobility and gentry."

• 23:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Along with the land he had inherited in England, Boyle also had land in Ireland. During the two years that ran from 1652 to 1654, he was frequently in Ireland, but that didn't slow down his scientific work. He had also begun years earlier to attend get togethers of the group of men who would come to be known as the Invisible College. That's a name Boyle is credited with coining. Through these meetings and the relationships he developed, it became well known that Boyle was working in a number of areas, but especially chemistry, and that he was recording a lot of information in his home lab.

• 24:05Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he definitely garnered a lot of respect through this. And you'll often even see him described as the center of the Invisible College. In 1654, Boyle had just returned from Ireland to Stalbridge, and he was at that point invited to join the University of Oxford. Dr. John Wilkins, who was an Anglican clergyman, a natural philosopher, and the warden of Waddam College at Oxford, had offered him a position there. And for Boyle, who had been working on his own out in the country, London had started to look really quite appealing. So in 1655, he left Dorset. The move to Oxford put Boyle in close proximity to many intellectuals, and he soon fell in with a group of them that

• 24:50Holly Frey?

  includes very familiar names. Among them were John Locke and Christopher Wren. The men started meeting at Boyle's home and dubbed themselves the Experimental Philosophy Club. And Boyle's scientific work also got a huge boost in this move because he was able to set up a laboratory in High Street and fill it with a full staff. This enabled Boyle to do more experiments and to publish a lot of information. And his lab became a hub of new discoveries that propelled the entire European scientific community forward. One of the members of Boyle's staff was his assistant, Robert Hooke. Boyle had shared information with Hooke about an air pump that had been developed in Germany

• 25:32Holly Frey?

  in 1654 for creating a vacuum for scientific experimentation. But the German design wasn't ideal and it had performance issues. Hooke solved these problems with his own version of the pump which he developed in 1659. The Hooke model worked consistently and opened the door for an array of experiments. He worked on projects that examined the functions of vacuums, air pressure, and combustion, as well as others. In 1660, Boyle published his new writing based on this work, "New Experiments: Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects." A second edition was published in 1662 with additional notes.

• 26:16Holly Frey?

  And in this work, Boyle described the inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas at a constant temperature. He described this only as a hypothesis that was based on data that he collected from an experiment, but that idea would eventually be recognized as Boyle's Law. Today Boyle's original description is a little difficult to recognize as that law of inverse relationship that students are taught about today. This kind of interesting way that he described it was discussed at length in this 1999 paper by John B. West, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. West writes this of Boyle's work, quote, "The original presentation of what we know

• 27:01Holly Frey?

  as Boyle's Law has several interesting features. And then West outlines these interesting features. The first being that Boyle was using a very long J shaped tube with two and a half meters long, which made the whole experiment of trying to like measure gas and and volume a little bit tricky. Additionally, the numbers that Boyle recorded look really nutty to modernize because his calculations led to some wild fractions. Like you'll see things listed as a number with 10 13ths of something and 18 20 thirds. Because while the concept of decimals to represent fractions less than the number one had been used in Europe already during the 17th century, they weren't common and

• 27:46Holly Frey?

  they weren't standard practice. Fractions were really the style of the day when it came to notation. And the other odd thing that West notes is that the two numbers that needed to be compared to see that relationship between pressure and volume were included in Boyle's writing in two different tables. So a reader trying to understand and grasp the concept have to look back and forth between them, which is just not very efficient. And again, it was a hypothesis. It wasn't like he was saying this was a for sure thing. But this concept was described by Boyle as an experiment and his observations. As we said a moment ago, it only later came to be known as Boyle's Law. And we have to note too, that Boyle and Hook get credit for this, but they were not

• 28:30Holly Frey?

  the only scientists trying to understand the property of air and gases. Several other scientists arrived at similar conclusions around the same time, including English physician Henry Power, English mathematician Richard Townley, and French physicist Edmé Mariotte. So while Boyle is often called the first modern chemist, his most significant and enduring contribution to science is also something that is a physics concept. I feel like I learned Boyle's Law in physics before it ever came up in chemistry.

• 29:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  I think I did too. We'll talk about the founding of the Royal Society and beyond, but first we'll take a quick sponsor break.

• 29:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 30:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:14Speaker 07

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• 30:56Speaker 07

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 31:10Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 32:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  The same year that the first edition of New Experiments Physico-Mechanical was published, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was founded on November 28 at Gresham College when Boyle and 11 other men in his circle met after a lecture given by Christopher Wren. Wren was also one of the founders.

• 33:16Holly Frey?

  This official founding brought together a few separate but overlapping kind of casual circles of natural philosophers. By the way, the word natural philosopher just means scientist. They just didn't have the word scientist yet. And all of these men had started meeting as far back as the 1640s. Because a big part of what brought them together was the writing of Sir Francis Bacon, who had put forth the idea of the scientific method and this concept of establishing a set of rules for conducting experiments and collating data and, you know, making things all work in a way that everyone in the field could understand. So with the founding of this formal group, it was possible to then set scheduled meetings and also to seek a royal charter.

• 34:01Holly Frey?

  And that meant that they would have a right to publish. Robert Hooke's book Micrographia was one of the group's earliest publications. In 1665, the periodical Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was launched. That, of course, continues today. I have used it a lot in research. It is the world's first scientific journal, and that means it is also the longest running.

• 34:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Boyle's next book was The Skeptical Chemist, which was published in 1661. The full title of that is The Skeptical Chemist: Or Chemical Physical Doubts and Paradoxes, Touching the Spagirists' Principles Commonly Called Hypostatical as They Are Want to Be Proposed and Defended by the Generality of Alchemists, Whereon Two Is Premised Part of Another Discourse Relating to the Same Subject. This is a scientific work, but it is presented as a fictional discussion among five characters. The whole thing takes place in a garden, and the characters all debate various matters that were being debated throughout the scientific community, including alchemy.

• 35:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  He wrote it in this unusual style to help people who were not scientists understand these ideas. In the preface, he states this, quote, "I have endeavored to deliver matters of fact so faithfully that I may as well assist the less skillful readers to examine the chemical hypothesis, as provoked the spagyrical philosophers to illustrate it, which if they do, and that either the chemical opinion, or the peripatetic, or any other theory of the elements differing from that I am most inclined to, shall be intelligibly explicated and duly proved to me."

• 35:49Holly Frey?

  Yeah, in case anybody didn't know, we're not getting into it a whole lot here. Robert Boyle believed in alchemy and thought you could transmute metals.

• 36:02Holly Frey?

  Which we'll talk about a little more towards the end of the episode. Throughout all of this scientific work, Boyle continued to write religious works as well, and he published numerous Christian essays. He also bankrolled projects that published the Bible in multiple languages, so he paid for the translation and the publication. And this work in the promotion of Christianity led him to a leadership position with the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. This organization, which still exists today as the New England Company, which is a grant-giving charity, was founded in 1649, originally to send missionaries to the New England colonies to evangelize the indigenous population there.

• 36:45Holly Frey?

  Boyle was made that company's governor in 1662.

• 36:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1668, Boyle, who was then in his early 40s, concluded his time at Oxford and moved to London. He lived there with his sister Catherine Jones by Countess Ranla.

• 37:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was in part so that he would not be living alone, as Boyle's health was not especially good. His sister had separated from her husband, so he also provided her with companionship, and the two of them were well-known and popular in London society. In his new home, Boyle was able to assemble an ideal setup for his work with a full laboratory and staff, but his popularity caused some problems. He had so many visitors dropping in to chat that it interrupted his work. He had to make a sign to put on the door when he was busy with his experiments to let callers know that it was not a good time.

• 37:41Holly Frey?

  Yeah, between him and his sister, their house was like a social hub in London. Everybody wanted to just pop by, and it was like, oh, no, I'm in the middle of moving air around. That move to London also enabled Boyle to regularly meet up with many of the most influential thinkers of the day. Once he was living in London, he was then at the Royal Society's epicenter, and he could be more fully involved in the organization and attend those regular meetings. He was asked to be the group's president in 1680, but he declined.

• 38:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Both Robert and his sister Catherine were ill in the autumn of 1691. Catherine died on December 23 of that year. This death devastated Boyle, and he became even sicker immediately after the loss. He died eight days later on December 31. The brief time between their deaths meant that Robert did not have time to update his will, which listed Catherine as one of the executors and the principal beneficiary. This was very clearly a matter of him entrusting Catherine to use her judgment regarding his life's work. In one section of it, he wrote, quote, "I give to the said Lady Ranelagh all my manuscripts

• 38:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  and collections of receipts, beseeching her to have a care that they or any of them come not into the hands or perusal to any to whom she thinks that if I were alive, I should be unwilling to have them communicated."

• 39:12Holly Frey?

  I sort of love that. Don't give these to people I don't like. You know, you know who they are.

• 39:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  You know who they are.

• 39:19Holly Frey?

  You know who's on the list. He also left his collaborator and former assistant Hook meaningful tools of their shared trade. Quote, "I give to Mr. Robert Hook, author of Micrographia, now professor of mathematics in Gresham College, my best microscope and my best lodestone."

• 39:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the bequeathments that is still in play today was a sum of money to set up a lecture series to examine the relationship between science and religion. The Boyle lectures started out with what would today be a very narrow and problematic focus. It was about proving Christianity to atheists and people who practiced religions other than Christianity. Over time, the lectures have taken on a more progressive worldview.

• 40:09Holly Frey?

  Yeah, if you look at a list of these lectures from early on, they're not cool.

• 40:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yikes.

• 40:15Holly Frey?

  It's, yeah, it's yikes on bikes. And there was actually a little gap from the 60s to, I think, 2004, when they started back up again. But they are still ongoing. In addition to that lecture series bequest, there were also directions for missionary efforts in North America. Boyle wrote, quote, "I had set apart, among other things, the sum of 400, one for certain pious uses. And whereas His Late Majesty, King Charles II, having by His special grace and favor, without my seeking or knowledge, been pleased to constitute me governor of the corporation for propagating of the gospel amongst the heathen natives of New England and other parts of America,

• 40:58Holly Frey?

  hath thereby given me opportunity to discern that work to be unquestionably pious and charitable. And whereas I have given and paid the sum of 300 pounds toward that piety, I do hereby give and devise the sum of 100 pounds more to the said corporation, though by reason of sickness and infirmity I have resigned the office of governor, to be set aside and employed as a stock for the relief of poor Indian converts, which I hope will prove of good effect for the advancement of the pious work for which they are constituted and which I heartily pray him, whose glory of the work itself tends unto, and I hope the persons entrusted with it aim at, to give them a prosperous success."

• 41:42Holly Frey?

  Yuck. So he was one of the earliest Europeans to really throw their support behind this idea of converting the indigenous peoples of North America to Christianity and assimilating them into white communities, which, as we have discussed many times on this show before, created so many problems for indigenous people that are still being felt and sorted out today.

• 42:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the most touching passages in the will, which also leaves some mysteries, is about a ring. Quote, "I give and bequeath unto my dear sister, Lady Catherine, Viscountess Ranula, a small ring, usually worn by me on my left hand, having in it two small diamonds with an emerald in the middle, which ring being held by me ever since my youth in great esteem and worn for many years for a particular reason not unknown to my said sister, the Lady Ranula. I do earnestly beseech her, my said sister, to wear it in remembrance of a brother that truly honored and most dearly loved her."

• 42:44Holly Frey?

  We don't know that meaning that they shared about that ring. We have no idea. We also don't know where that ring is.

• 42:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh.

• 42:53Holly Frey?

  She had passed at that point, so she couldn't take possession of it. And no one has ever found it. It hasn't ever appeared on like any kind of inventory of, you know, somebody's holdings or a museum. I think the prevailing opinion is probably that he was buried with it.

• 43:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  I was gonna ask if he buried it with her.

• 43:13Holly Frey?

  No, he willed it to her. He wore it until he died.

• 43:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 43:17Holly Frey?

  Eight days later, so.

• 43:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  I was thinking, but since he didn't have time to update his will, when she died, did he bury it with her?

• 43:25Holly Frey?

  I doubt it, but I could be wrong. Nobody knows. It's possible.

• 43:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Holly Frey?

  We don't know. But both Catherine and Robert were buried close together in the Chancel of St. Martin's in the Fields. Robert had specified that he wanted a simple funeral, quote, "without the least pomp." The sermon for that service was given by the Bishop of Salisbury.

• 43:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the most interesting legacies of Boyle is his scientific wish list. This list was drafted in the early years of the Royal Society, and it features two dozen concepts that in some instances seem wildly outlandish, but in others, sort of prescient. It's a good illustration of how long we've been chasing certain dreams and ideas and how far we've come in fulfilling those ideas. Some of the things that we have managed to do include the prolongation of life. We have made some progress here since Boyle's time, although there's a whole separate discussion about life expectancy versus lifespan and how long people actually lived in the past.

• 44:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Like, how much of this is about deaths in childhood, all of that? All of that's outside the scope of this episode, though. There's also the recovery of youth, or at least some of the marks of it, as new teeth, new hair colored as in youth, the art of flying, the practicable and certain way of finding longitudes, potent drugs to alter or exalt imagination, waking, memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, et cetera. Cure of diseases at a distance, or at least by transplantation, and the making armor light and extremely hard.

• 45:11Holly Frey?

  Yeah, that's stuff we figured out, for the most part. I mean, there's lots of things we could still do, but...

• 45:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I'm wondering what he meant by cure of diseases at a distance.

• 45:21Holly Frey?

  I don't know, but we did get the transplantation thing mostly figured out there.

• 45:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  We did get transplantation. I know there are various kind of new agey things that are about sort of healing other people at a distance with your mind, and is that what he was about?

• 45:34Holly Frey?

  I don't think so, but I don't know. Some of these don't have any notations. If you look at the list, it's just a list. There's not... Like, the things that he writes, some of his thing, items on the list are longer than others, but it's just the list. There's no additional notes. There are some things we have not yet managed to achieve, right? The art of continuing long underwater and exercising functions freely there. This ties into the next one, which is the emulating a fish without engines by custom and education only. So the idea that you could just learn

• 46:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Holly Frey?

  how to hang out underwater, if we could just, you know, crack the code. A ship to sail with all winds and a ship not to be sunk. We have certainly managed to create ships that operate without need of wind, but... Not that are unsinkable.

• 46:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Holly Frey?

  Less easy to sink than they used to be, but not unsinkable.

• 46:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, we, uh, we do have things like scuba gear now, but you gotta have the gear. You just can't think your way into staying underwater indefinitely.

• 46:41Holly Frey?

  I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna go to living underwater school. I'm gonna learn all the, all the ways.

• 46:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are also some things on this wish list that are kind of debatable in their achievement, or they're just problematic. There's the transmutation of metals. For example, that's certainly part of Boyle's interest in alchemy and this desire to create precious metals from non-precious ones. We can sort of do it today with particle accelerators or nuclear reactions, but the expense of doing that is way more than the amount of gold you can produce that way. Uh, there's freedom from necessity of much sleeping exemplified by the operations of tea and what happens in Mad Men.

• 47:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  That has some issues as well. We do have stimulants that they can stave off sleepiness, but the idea of figuring out what makes people with mental illness unable to sleep and then harnessing that to make you able to stay awake, that's tricky and troubling, really. Uh, also, no matter what stimulant you might use, short-term, your body ultimately needs to sleep. We know there are a lot of problems that come from not getting sleep. Similarly, Boyle also wanted to study the, quote, "strength and agility of the body" that people with epilepsy, end quote, hysteria appeared to exhibit. So there are some interesting goals and ideas in this list. It's overall kind of a mixed bag.

• 48:12Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting when you read a lot of, um... Biographical sketches of him. It's a lot about the cool ones.

• 48:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 48:25Holly Frey?

  Not much mention of the like, whoa, he wanted to do what with what? I'm not saying any of that is okay, but I will give him the modicum of grace that comes with writing this in the 1660s. When we did not really understand various diseases, mental illnesses, et cetera, the way we do now. Just the idea that you could harness the things that like, I'm air quoting this so hard, the beneficial parts of having any of those is really creepy to me, but Robert Boyle. I really want to know what the deal was with that rank. What did it mean between the two of them?

• 49:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Holly Frey?

  It could be a scandal.

• 49:05Holly Frey?

  But he's really interesting. The thing that is funny is that of all of the experimenting he did, none of his stuff really like remains in play, except for Boyle's Law, which was kind of just like a footnote. I think it appears in the appendix of that second edition.

• 49:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:20Holly Frey?

  And the rest of it was a lot of work and he did bring people together, which is important, but it's kind of fascinating to me that he is this very important person in science history, but like what he achieved in science is not all that much in terms

• 49:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Holly Frey?

  It's more like he helped people with the concept that we could keep moving forward and keep trying new things. Also, again, do not go looking for that list of lectures if you are not ready to be grossed out by the titles of those lectures saying very disparaging things about other religions.

• 49:53Holly Frey?

  They are yucky.

• 49:55Holly Frey?

  But that is Robert Boyle.

• 49:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Do you have some listener mail for us also?

• 50:00Holly Frey?

  I surely do. Let me pull it up here. Listen, this listener mail is not about history at all.

• 50:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 50:11Holly Frey?

  But I love it. I just want to talk about it. We have, I have other history ones I'll talk about, but this is from our listener Tiffany. The title was Demon Cats at the Vet.

• 50:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, yeah, I read this. I liked this email a lot.

• 50:26Holly Frey?

  Listen, I had some kinship feelings with this email, which is why I wanted to read it. Tiffany writes, your behind the scenes discussion about cats at the vet had me giggling. I had a cat named Kitty who was infamous for terrorizing any medical professional. We would warn the techs and vets that they had approximately 15 seconds from the opening of the crate until bloodshed, so they needed to come prepared. Bless our vet for always being so willing to treat her despite this. Her file received the designation of having a comically large red stop sign on the front of it, along with several bright red tabs running down the side indicating that she was not to be handled. One time, my husband took her to the vet and a new tech looked at the repeated warnings and said, I'm a cat whisperer, it'll be fine.

• 51:10Holly Frey?

  My husband pleaded with the tech to get the gauntlets and wait until everybody was ready, but to no avail. She opened the crate and the inevitable happened. As the tech was heading to urgent care, my husband was falling all over himself to apologize for our demon cat. I have had this exact moment. The vet, who was now in the room trying to defuse our angry cat, held up the giant, and I mean giant, stop sign on the chart and shrugged, saying, we can't make the stop sign any bigger. I miss that evil cat dearly. For as much as she was a terror to everybody else, she was my special cuddle bug. For pet tax, I've attached a picture of her cuddled up with our retired greyhound in one of their many shared naps. This was the picture that made me realize that we somehow had ended up with the pets from The Simpsons.

• 51:56Holly Frey?

  Thank you for all you do, Tiffany. They do, they have Snowball and Santa's little helper right there. I love it. You could have written this about Mr. Burns. Same exact thing, sent a tech to the ER, destroyed some drywall in the vet's office. I felt so bad, but my vet was the same. Although my vet got to the point where I had some training on how to handle some things at home, rather than endanger her staff.

• 52:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Because Mr. Burns would also fight with one of our other cats sometimes. It never got crazy, crazy, but there were sometimes some scrapes and cuts. Although Mr. Burns also had the best injury that made him look super street tough, but he did it to himself, which is he had a split in one of his ears. But it was because he was scratching one day and his claw got hooked in it. And I swear, he just looked at me and shrugged and yanked it the rest of the way and was like, I guess my ear's split now.

• 52:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Holly Frey?

  He's also my baby. I love this kitty is amazing. I understand. I understand the bad cat that is your barnacle special baby. I just wanted to honor that today. So cute. Listen, cats, animals. I feel like both of our cats have probably gone down in history and those texts are probably telling their friends right now about the horrible animals they had to deal with. But they make for good stories. So thank you, Tiffany, for writing to us. If you would like to write to us about your poorly behaved animals in solidarity, or anything else, really, you can write about history stuff. You can do that at [email protected]. If you want to see the show notes from the episode, they are available at missedinhistory.com for any

• 53:39Holly Frey?

  of the episodes we have done. If you have yet to subscribe to the podcast and you want to do that, that is easy as pie. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

• 53:55Holly Frey?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 54:09Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 54:47Speaker 06

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• 55:15Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:46Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 56:16Speaker 00

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