Robert Boyle, Irish Chemist

A rather slipshod article in the New York Times about alchemy manages to perpetuate a typical error: it calls Robert Boyle a “British chemist”. This is an error. He was born in 1627 in Munster, in the Kingdom of Ireland. He should properly be referred to as an Irish chemist. At that time, the political entities in the region consisted of the Kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland, and England. The “Kingdom of Great Britain” did not come into existence until 1707, and the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” did not exist until 1801. In 1627, “British” as a geographic designation referred to those people born on the Island of Great Britain within territories territories controlled by the Kingdoms of Scotland and England.

As usual with so many articles of this nature, it manages to invoke the ancient Hellenistic alchemists but then jumps 2000 years to the European, Renaissance alchemists. By doing this it avoid mentioning any of the Muslim alchemists, who carried forward the Roman and Greek science, researching chemistry and physics for over a millenia. Along the way they discovered or perfected such such things as distillation, ethanol, aqua regia, the intromissive ray theory of light optics, and a scientific method based on research, citation and peer review.