Robert Boyle, judging by contemporary portraits, was a man of delicate, almost effeminate aspect, and indeed you could almost swear that he was gay. He was popular with his pals, in whom he seemed to generate considerable sympathy; one described him as "tall, slender and emaciated, brilliant in conversation, benevolent and tolerant, but excessively abstemious and often oppressed with low spirits".
In meteorology, Boyle is famous for having said: "There is a spring or an elastic power in the air in which we live." He went on to quantify this bounciness by asserting that the reduction in volume experienced by a gas is proportional to the extra pressure applied to it, provided the temperature remains unchanged.
Boyle's Law, as we now call it, became a cornerstone of physics; it was a first step in understanding the dynamics of the atmosphere, and is one of the basic formulae used today in computerised weather forecasts.
Robert was the 14th of the 15 children of Richard, Earl of Cork, and was born in 1627 at the family seat of Lismore Castle, Co Waterford. He was, as we have seen, a gentle soul and, rather than follow in the more adventurous footsteps of his siblings, he devoted his life to cerebral pursuits.
After some years on the Continent, where his appetite for scientific matters was whetted by Galileo Galilei, Boyle began his scientific career in earnest when he settled in Oxford in 1654.
In his laboratory at the university, he succeeded in constructing air pumps which were much more efficient than any existing at the time, and it was by means of these that he was able to derive the "law" which bears his name.
He also dabbled in thermometry and had this to say about the lack of a universally accepted scale of temperature:
"We are greatly at a loss for a standard whereby to measure cold. The common instruments show us no more than the relative coldness of the air, but leave us in the dark as to the positive degree thereof; whence we cannot communicate any idea there of to any other person." Indeed, during his lifetime, at least 35 different scales of temperature were proposed and came into limited use, one of them being the Celsius scale we use today.
Boyle left Oxford in 1668 and spent the remainder of his life living quietly in London. There he indulged an interest in theology which culminated in his funding of an Irish translation of the Bible.
He died 307 years ago today, on December 30th, 1691, and is buried in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London.