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Robert Boyle Research Paper

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Robert Boyle was born on January 27,1967 at Lismore Castle in Ireland. Boyle was the youngest son of the Great Earl of Cork and Catherine Fenton. He was born into a very large family and had 13 siblings. He was the youngest son and was considered the favorite. Boyle was born into an extremely wealthy family. They lived out the beliefs in their home of the Protestant lifestyle. When he was only 8 years old, his mother died which led to him being sent off to a very prestigious private school called Eton College. At the age of 11, he was taken out of this school and privately tutored by Isaac Marcombes in Geneva. It was quite common during this time period in wealthy families to send their children abroad to study. While Boyle was …show more content…

These areas also included medicine, hydrostatics, and earth science. In 1654, the vacuum pump was invented by Otto von Guericke. During this time, Boyle had met a highly intelligent student at Oxford named Robert Hooke. Together they took the concept of the vacuum pump and devised the famous piece of experimental equipment called the vacuum chamber. Their first great discovery while experimenting with air is now called Boyle’s Law. Boyle’s Law states that if the volume of a gas is decreased, the pressure will increase proportionally. They used a glass tube placing mercury inside to vary the pressure. The air was a fixed weight. He learned that when you increase the pressure on a gas, the volume would shrink. This gas law was the first to be discovered and it took over a hundred years before another one was discovered. With the vacuum chamber, Boyle also figured out that the sound cannot travel through a vacuum. He used a glass jar and a bell for this experiment. He would ring the bell inside the jar using a magnet outside the jar. When he pumped the air out of the jar, the ability to hear the sound of the bell was less and less. At this point, the full implication of the magnetic forces was not realized but it was a very important moment for science. He published his findings in 1660 in a book titled, New Experiments Physico-Mechancall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects. In the book the first controlled experiments were described as well as what happens to reducing the pressure of the air. This book was the result of over three years of experimenting with the air

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