An Ocean of Air Read Online Free Page A

measure of political sta
bility. Boyle was comfortably off. He could indulge in gentlemanly pursuits, ride, shoot, and fish.
    But there was still something missing in his life. He was full of ideas, but there were no obvious routes for gentlemen to express them. Boyle dabbled with religious writings. He wrote a series of "Occasional Reflections" addressed to his favorite sister, Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, drawing what were admittedly often mawkish morals from events such as "Upon the sighting of a fair milk-maid singing to her cow" and "Upon my spaniel's carefulness not to lose me in a strange place." This led to some mockery, which was not really fair. Boyle was pious, but never sanctimonious. He was pleasant, approachable, and almost pathologically fair-minded, and though his religious sentiments were naïve, he was still in his early twenties.
    One of the most famous parodies of Boyle's Reflections was penned by satirist Jonathan Swift, several decades later. Swift at the time was private chaplain to a lady who was smitten by Boyle's writings and wanted them read to her constantly. Swift became so exasperated that he slipped in an extra, unauthorized and very funny piece titled "A pious meditation on a Broom Staff": "But a broomstick, perhaps you will say, is an emblem of a tree standing on its head; and pray what is man, but a topsy-turvy creature..." (In spite of his mockery, Swift may well have used Boyle's vivid imagination as inspiration for his most famous book:
Gulliver's Travels.
)
    Boyle even wrote a romantic, yet highly moralistic, novel, and for a while it seemed he might try expending his intellectual energies on a literary career. But his curiosity about the workings of the world tugged at him. He wanted to understand the world in a new way, the way that Galileo had shown him. He wanted, above all, to
experiment.
    So in 1649, Boyle installed a laboratory at Stalbridge. He commissioned furnaces from the Continent, and he dabbled with alchemical efforts to find a way to turn lead into gold. But his attempts to experiment seemed aimless. He needed to be among people who shared his urge to understand the natural world through experiment and not through reason alone. During his visits to his sister Katherine's house in London, he had
met many such men, who were already discussing the best new ways to probe nature. They met in each other's homes and called themselves the "Invisible College," though Boyle always referred to them as the "Invisibles." (This was the first glimmering of what would become London's famous "Royal Society" when the monarchy was eventually restored after the death of Cromwell.) From these men and their discussions with his thoughtful, intelligent sister, Boyle had learned much. But London had begun to seem politically too unstable for these men, and many of them had moved to take up positions behind the safe walls of Oxford's rather less invisible university. And so, in the mid-1650s, Boyle decided that he would join them. He left his stately manor house and moved into lodgings that his sister found for him in the house of an apothecary.
    Boyle was at last in his element. He had never been particularly interested in the social status to which he was entitled by birth. (Nor was he particularly interested in fame or money. Throughout his life he was to turn down many offers of honors and appointments. He said with typical cleverness that he preferred to work on things that were "luciferous rather than lucriferous," that is, he preferred work that was enlightening rather than money-making.) Instead, at last, he was surrounded by people who shared his passion. There were chemists and mathematicians, physicists and physicians. Here were Richard Lower and Tom Willis, who together would soon perform the world's first blood transfusion experiment; there was Sir Christopher Wren, architect, polymath, renaissance man. Oxford seemed full of people who were itching to experiment, to discover for