Robert Boyle

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Crazy v Wilson. Robert Boyle came up
in our recent episode on modern Inventions that are actually

(00:21):
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 clicks. And now here we are,

(00:44):
at last, 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 frequently described
as the first modern chemist, which is closer to accurate.

(01:04):
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 you're ready because that means
some of his ideas were just flat out super yucky.
Robert Boyle was born January twenty fifth, sixteen twenty seven,

(01:25):
in County Waterford, Ireland. He was born in the family home,
which was Lismore 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
sixteen hundreds. Richard is credited with repairing, renovating, and revitalizing

(01:46):
the twelfth century property that had fallen into disrepair. Robert
was the fourteenth of Richard Boyle's fifteen children, which he
had over the course of two marriages. Robert's mother was Catherine,
daughter of Ireland's Secretary of State. When Robert was born,
his father wrote in his diary quote, my wife, God

(02:08):
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 Lismore. God
bless him for his name is Robert Boyle. Robert was
christened a week later at Lismore's Chapel, and there was
a huge party to celebrate. Yeah, I didn't include it

(02:30):
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

(02:51):
of the love. And that certainly seemed to play out
for them. Yeah, that huge party that they had to
celebrate his christening was one of men 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 men and children, etc. But Robert,

(03:13):
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

(03:34):
that the children were hearty and resilient. Robert's mother died
of tuberculosis when he was three or four. 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

(03:57):
was assigned his own personal valet. But though there had
been a very big focus on this idea of 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

(04:19):
a very young age. Usually that's something that would onset
later in life, 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.
Robert started attending Eton College at the age of eight,
and he was a good student, so dedicated to learning

(04:41):
that teachers had to stop him from reading so much
in the hopes of not further damaging his eyesight. He
was at Eton for three years and then was taught
privately at the family's Stawbridge estate in Dorset, England, first
with the Reverend William Douche and then with a French
tutor named Isaac Marcom. When Robert was twelve, he and

(05:03):
his older brother Francis, who was sixteen, 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 Marcom, so their education continued during their travels.
They were mostly based in Switzerland. They stayed at a
home in Geneva, and then they would make trips out

(05:25):
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 sixteen forty two, as the
ongoing conflict between Catholics and Protestants escalated in Ireland. Richard
Boyle was English by birth. This was really an English

(05:46):
family that had moved to Ireland. The family were Protestants
and by that point Francis would have been nineteen, 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, yes, which we
have talked about before. So I was like, I don't

(06:06):
know that we need to retread all that. We don't
need to re explain the whole thing again. My understanding
too is that even though his brother Francis went back,
they their home was never attacked, he never actually had
to do any of that defense that they were worried about.
But in addition to furthering his education, including the acquisition

(06:26):
of a very high degree of French language proficiency, 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. 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 twenty one. At that point he penned

(06:47):
a third person autobiography titled An Account of Filleratus during
his minority. We're going to talk a little bit more
about this third person conceit of this biography on Friday.
In it, Boyle described a stormy night in Geneva that
happened when he was thirteen and how it changed his life.
He wrote, quote and Phileridus is his stand in name,

(07:11):
like the name he gives to the character who is
obviously him quote. But during Philaridus's residence at Geneva, there
happened to him an accident which he always used to
mention as the considerablest 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

(07:32):
scandal and inoffensive, 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

(07:54):
dead of night that adds most terror to such accidents,
Philardus was suddenly waked in affright with such loud claps
of thunder, which are oftentimes very terrible in those hot
climbs 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 so loud as almost

(08:15):
drowned the noise of the very thunder, and the shower
so hideous as almost quenched the lightning ere it could
reach his eyes, confirmed feloratus 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

(08:39):
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 serener,
cloudless sky returned when he ratified his determination so solemnly
that from that day he dated his converse renewing. Now

(09:02):
he was past changer the vow he had made, 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 up for a lot of
get me through this, yeah, whether it's whether it's religion

(09:24):
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 it grew up. He
pursued science always as a means to show the marvels
of the natural world as the work of God. One

(09:47):
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 different perentiated by shape and motion.
In his religious worldview, this was a mechanism that had
been carefully designed by a higher power. Coming up, we

(10:10):
will talk about Boyle's life after his tour of Europe,
but first we will hear from the sponsors that keep
the show going. At the age of seventeen, Robert Boyle
finished his travels, but he did not return to Ireland. Instead,

(10:33):
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 manner of Stalbridge that he had
inherited upon his father's death in sixteen forty three. While
there was a great deal of turmoil in play at
this time that impacted the aristocracy in regards to their landholdings.

(10:56):
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 Randlaw when she married Arthur Jones,
had good relationships with members of the parliamentarians, which had
helped ensure that Robert would get and keep his inherited land.

(11:19):
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 Randlaw, 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,

(11:42):
by whose means he got early protection for his English
and Irish estates. 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 figures
to his studies of various kinds, particularly those of natural

(12:04):
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, and when Boyle first got to Stalbridge,

(12:28):
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 troop flux, namely the plague which now

(12:49):
begins to revive again at Bristol and Jovel six miles off,
fits of the committee, and consumption of the purse to
which so violent expulsives. I is so potent and a
attractive as a letter from you were, but added it
would both extremely sweeten this day and accelerate the departure
of your most affectionate brother and humble servant. So he

(13:11):
basically thought England was not cool. But his time at
Stallbridge was not short as he had hoped. He ended
up living there more than a decade. In sixteen forty seven,
Robert Boyle became acquainted with the Heartlibs 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

(13:35):
with mister Samuel Hartlib began very early, and he included
several letters that he wrote Heartlib in this autobiography to
illustrate their ongoing relationship. The two men bonded over both
science and religion, and Boyle referenced writing of Heartlib's friend
and collaborator John Durry on that subject. In May of
sixteen forty seven, Boyle wrote a letter to Dorry encouraging

(13:59):
his efforts to bring Lutherans and Calvinists together, stating quote,
it 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 Heartlib that Boyle
mentioned that the information he had received from Heartlib gave

(14:22):
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 intervals of time,

(14:45):
will give me leave to block 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. 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

(15:06):
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. So yeah, he was like,
this is very convenient. With my big empty house, I
have lots of space for doing experiments. I'm bored and
I can do activities. Another person that became highly influential
in Boyle's intellectual life also entered it during the Stalbridge years.

(15:31):
That was physician Nathaniel Highmore. Hi Moore 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, Himore had set up a private

(15:52):
practice in Sherburne, a little more than seven miles west
of Stallbridge. Him Moore was a leader in the medical
field in a now me In particular, he is often
described as an anatomy pioneer. He is credited with being
the first person to describe in writing the maxillary sinus
and the part of testicular anatomy that separates the testicles.

(16:14):
Highmore and Boyle became very fast friends, so much so
that when Highmore published his book The History of Generation
in sixteen fifty one, he dedicated it to Robert Boyle,
writing to the Honorable Mister 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

(16:36):
nobility and 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 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

(16:58):
the best sort and even, and to admiration, manage them
to the greatest advantage, that you stand both a pattern
and a wonder to our nobility and gentry. Along with
the land he had inherited in England, Boyle also had
land in Ireland. During the two years that ran from
sixteen fifty two to sixteen fifty four, he was frequently

(17:19):
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 wo had 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

(17:39):
in a number of areas, but especially chemistry, and that
he was recording a lot of information in his home lab. 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 sixteen fifty four, Boyle had rush

(18:00):
returned from Ireland to Stallbridge, and he was at that
point invited to join the University of Oxford. Doctor John Wilkins,
who was an Anglican clergyman, a natural philosopher and the
warden of Wadham 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

(18:20):
look really quite appealing, so in sixteen fifty five 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 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.

(18:43):
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 came a
hub of new discoveries that propelled the entire European scientific

(19:04):
community forward. One of the members of Boyle's staff was
his assistant Robert Hook. Boyle had shared information with Hook
about an air pump that had been developed in Germany
in sixteen fifty four for creating a vacuum for scientific experimentation,
but the German design wasn't ideal and it had performance issues.

(19:25):
Hook solved these problems with his own version of the pump,
which he developed in sixteen fifty nine. The Hook 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 sixteen
sixty Boyle published his new writing based on this work,

(19:48):
New Experiments Physico Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air
and its Effects. A second edition was published in sixteen
sixty two with additional notes, 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

(20:09):
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

(20:30):
way that he described it was discussed at length in
this nineteen ninety nine 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 as Boyle's law has several interesting features, and
then West outlines these interesting features, the first being that

(20:52):
Boyle was using a very long J shaped tube was
two and a half meters long, which made the whole
experiment of trying to measure gas 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.

(21:13):
You'll see things listed as a number with ten thirteenths
of something and eighteen twenty thirds. Because while the concept
of decimals to represent fractions less than the number one
had been used in Europe already during the seventeenth century,
they weren't common and they weren't standard practice. Fractions were
really the style of the day when it came to notation.

(21:35):
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

(21:57):
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 the only scientists trying to understand the
property of air and gases. Several other scientists arrived at

(22:22):
similar conclusions around the same time, including English physician Henry Power,
English mathematician Richard Townley, and French physicist Edme Mariott. 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

(22:42):
Boyle's law in physics before it ever came up in chemistry.
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. The same year that the first

(23:05):
edition of New Experiments Physico Mechanical was published, the Royal
Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was founded on
November twenty eighth at Gresham College when Boyle and eleven
other men in his circle met after a lecture given
by Christopher Wren. Ren was also one of the founders.
This official founding brought together a few separate but overlapping

(23:27):
kind of casual circles of natural philosophers. By the way,
the word natural philosopher just means scientists. They just didn't
have the word scientists yet. And all of these men
had started meeting as far back as the sixteen forties,
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

(23:49):
establishing a set of rules for conducting experiments and collating
data and 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, and
that meant that they would have a right to publish.

(24:12):
Robert Hook's book Micrographia was one of the group's earliest publications.
In sixteen sixty five, the periodical Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society was launched that, of course, continues to date.
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. Boyle's next book was The Skeptical Chemist,

(24:36):
which was published in sixteen sixty one. The full title
of that is The Skeptical Chemist or Chemico Physical Doubts
and Paradoxes touching the Spagyrists' principles, commonly called hypostatical as
they are wont to be proposed and defended by the
generality of alchemists. Whereuntio is premised part of another dis

(25:00):
course 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. He wrote it in this
unusual style to help people who were not scientists understand

(25:23):
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

(25:44):
chemical opinion or the parapatetic or any other theory of
the elements differing from that I am most inclined to,
shall be intelligibly explicated and duly proved to me. Yeah,
in case anybody didn't know, we're not getting into it all,
holl whole lot here. Robert Boyle believed in alchemy and

(26:04):
thought you could transmute metals, 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

(26:25):
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 sixteen forty nine, originally to send missionaries

(26:48):
to the New England colonies to evangelize the indigenous population there.
Boyle was made that company's governor in sixteen sixty two.
In sixteen sixty eight, Boyle, who was then in his
early forties, concluded his time at Oxford and moved to London.
He lived there with his sister, Catherine Jones, Viscountess Renla.

(27:09):
This was in part so that he would not be
living alone as is 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 set up for
his work, with a full laboratory and staff, but his

(27:33):
popularity caused some problems. He had so many visitors dropping
into 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. Yeah. Between him and
his sister, their house was like a social hub in London.

(27:54):
Everybody wanted to just pop by and it was like,
oh no, I'm in the middle of moving air around
that moved 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

(28:18):
was asked to be the group's president in sixteen eighty,
but he declined. Both Robert and his sister Catherine were
ill in the autumn of sixteen ninety one. Catherine died
on December twenty third of that year. This death devastated Boyle,
and he became even sicker immediately after the loss. He
died eight days later on December thirty first. The brief

(28:41):
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 in trusting Catherine to use
her judgment regarding his life's work. In one second of it,
he wrote, quote, I give to the said lady Randala

(29:04):
all my manuscripts 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. I sort of love that.
Don't give these people I don't like. You know, you
know who they are, You know who they you know

(29:27):
who's on the list. He also left his collaborator and
former assistant, Hook, meaningful tools of their shared trade quote,
I give to mister Robert Hook, author of micrographia, now
professor of Mathematics in Gresham College, my best microscope and
my best loadstone. One of the book queathments that is

(29:48):
still in play today, was a sum of money to
set up a lecture series to examine the relationship between
science and religion. The Boil 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

(30:08):
religions other than Christianity. Over time, the lectures have taken
on a more progressive worldview. Yeah, if you look at
a list of these lectures from early on, they're not
cool yikes. It's yeah, there's it's yikes on bikes. And
there was actually a little gap from the sixties to

(30:28):
I think two thousand and four 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 four hundred one for
certain pious uses. And whereas his late Majesty King Charles

(30:51):
the Second, having, by his special grace in 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,
hath thereby given me opportunity to discern that work to
be unquestionably pious and charitable. And whereas I have given

(31:14):
and paid the sum of three hundred pounds toward that piety,
I do hereby give and devise the sum of one
hundred 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

(31:35):
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. Yuck. So he was
one of the earliest Europeans to really throw their support
behind this idea of converting the indigenous peoples of North

(31:57):
America to Christianity and as immolating them into white communities,
which is 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. One of the most
touching passages in the Will, which also leaves some mysteries,
is about a ring quote I given bequeath unto my

(32:20):
dear sister Lady Catherine, Viscountess Randla, 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 Randla.

(32:42):
I do earnestly beseech her, my, said sister, to wear
it in remembrance of a brother that truly honored and
most dearly loved her. 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 ow She had
passed at that point, so she couldn't take possession of it,

(33:04):
and no one has ever found it. It has never
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. I was
gonna ask if if he buried it with her. No,
he willed it to her. He wore it until he
died right days later, so I was thinking. But since

(33:27):
he didn't have time to update his will when she died,
did he bury it with her? I doubt it, but
I could be wrong. Nobody knows. It's possible. I don't know,
but both Catherine and Robert were buried close together in
the chancel of Saint Martin's in the Fields. Robert had
specified that he wanted a simple funeral quote without the

(33:48):
least pomp. The sermon for that service was given by
the Bishop of Salisbury. What if The most interesting legacies
of Boyle is his scientific wish list. This list was
draft did in the early years the Royal Society, and
it features two dozen concepts that in some instances seem
wildly outlandish but in other sort of prescient. It's a

(34:11):
good illustration of how long we've been chasing certain dreams
and ideas and how far we've come and 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 Boil's time, although there's a whole separate discussion
about life expectancy versus life span and how long people

(34:33):
actually lived in the past, 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

(34:55):
way of finding longitudes. Potent drugs to alter or exalt imagination,
waking memory and other functions, and appease pain for cure
innocent sleep, harmless dreams, et cetera. Cure of diseases at
a distance or at least by transplantation, and the making

(35:15):
armor light and extremely hard. Yeah, that's stuff we figured
out for the most part. I mean, there's lots of
things we could still do. But yeah, I'm wondering what
he meant by cure of diseases at a distance. I
don't know. But we did get the transplantation thing mostly
figured out there. We did get transplantation. I know. There
are various kind of new agy things that are about

(35:37):
sort of healing other people at a distance with your mind,
And is that what he was about. 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 the List'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 intentional notes, there are some

(36:00):
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
of fish without engines by custom and education only. So
the idea that you could just learn, yeah, how to
hang out underwater. If we could just you know, crack

(36:21):
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. Yeah, less easy to sink than
they used to be, but not unsinkable. Yeah. We we
do have things like scuba gear now, but you gotta

(36:43):
have the gear. You just can't think your way into
staying under the water indefinitely. I'm learn I'm gonna go
to living underwater school and I'm going to learn all
the ways. 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.

(37:04):
That's certainly part of Boyle's interests 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,

(37:25):
there's freedom from necessity of much sleeping, exemplified by the
operations of Tea and what happens in mad Men. 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,

(37:49):
that's tricky and troubling. Really. 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 get sleep. Similarly, Boyle also wanted to study
the quote strength and agility of the body that people
with epilepsy and quote hysteria appeared to exhibit. So there

(38:12):
are some interesting goals and ideas in this list. It's
overall kind of a mixed bag. Yeah, it's interesting when
you read a lot of biographical sketches of him. It's
a lot about the cool ones. Sure, sure, not much

(38:33):
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 sixteen sixties when we
did not really understand various diseases, mental illnesses, etc. The
way we do now. Just the idea that you could

(38:55):
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. Yeah, it could
be a scandalo, but he's really interesting. The thing that
is funny is that of all of the experimenting he did,

(39:17):
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.
Oh yeah, 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

(39:37):
he achieved in science is not all that much in
terms of Yeah, 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. They are yucky, but

(40:02):
that is uh. Robert Boyle, do you have some listener
mail for us? Also, I surely do. Let me pull
it up here. Listen, this listener mail is not about
history at all, Okay, but I love it. If I
just want to talk about it, I have other history

(40:24):
ones I will talk about, but this is from our
listener Tiffany. The title was demon Cats at the Vet. Oh, yeah,
I read this. I liked this email a lot. Listen.
I had some kinship feelings with this email, which is
why I wanted to read it. Tiffany writes, You're behind
the scenes discussion about cats at the vet had me giggling.
I had a cat named Kitty who was infamous for

(40:44):
terrorizing any medical professional. We would warn the tex and
Vets that they had approximately fifteen 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,

(41:07):
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. 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.

(41:28):
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 diffuse our
angry cat, held up the giant and I mean giants
stop sign on the chart and shrugged, saying, we can't
make the stop sign any bigger. I missed that evil
cat dearly. For as much as she was a terror

(41:49):
to everybody else, she was my special cuddlebug 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 for the Simpsons.
Thank you for all you do, Tiffany. You do. They
have snowball in Santa's little helper right there. I love it.

(42:09):
You could have written this about mister 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 in danger her staff. Yeah. Yeah,

(42:35):
because mister Burns would also fight with one of our
other cats sometimes. It never got crazy crazy, but there
were some times some scrapes and cuts. Although mister 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

(42:57):
looked at me and shrugged and yanked it the rest
of the way and was like, I guess my ear
split now, Like, yeah, 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

(43:18):
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 down. If you would like to write to
us about your poorly behaved animals and solidarity or anything else, really,
you can write about history stuff. You can do that
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you want

(43:42):
to see the show notes from the episode, they are
available at mystinhistory dot com for any of the episodes
we have done. If you have yet to subscribe to
the podcast and you want to do that, that is
easiest pie You can do it on the iHeartRadio app
or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you

(44:03):
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